Understanding Social Perception and Attribution
Guide Session N° 2
Unit No. 2: Social Perception and Attributions
Components
- Definition
- Psychological Processes
- Social Responsibilities
- Practical Applications
West at a party, an attractive person looks at you and smiles. Is this an invitation to come and start a conversation? Or is smiling because he or she just heard something funny?
You are buying a second-hand car. You ask the owner if anything is broken. He looks into your eyes and says, “This car is in perfect condition.” Would you believe it?
Imagine that you are a teacher. The day after passing your class a midterm exam, one student comes to see you and, with the most innocent look, says, “Sorry, I missed the exam because I was on a tour of another of my classes, and returned much later than I expected. Can I make a review?” Would you accept this story?
At first glance, these seem to be totally unrelated situations. But if we reflect on them, we will soon see that there is a common trait that unites them: in all of them, we face the task of understanding other people (in deciding whether to believe what they say, and at a more basic level, trying to figure out their intentions and motivations). As we know from our own experience, this is a complex task. Despite all our experience with others, they often remain one of the mysteries of life. People say and do things we do not expect, intend not to know, and seem to see the world through very different eyes than ours. However, because people play an important role in our lives, we cannot afford to not solve these mysteries. This is a basic process that we often engage in, and it is what social psychologists call social perception.
What is Social Perception?
It is an active process, or set of processes, by which we intend to know and understand others.
Social perception is one of the most basic and important aspects of social life. The effort to understand people around us is part of our daily lives and takes many different forms. Among this variety of forms, two seem to stand out from the rest.
1. We try to understand the feelings, emotions, and moods of others (how they are feeling at the time). This information is often provided by nonverbal cues, including facial expressions, eye contact, body posture, and movements.
2. We strive to know the ultimate causes of the behavior of others (why they act a certain way). This usually includes efforts to understand their motivations, intentions, and traits or tendencies. The information on this second task is acquired through attribution.
What is Attribution?
It is a complex process of observing the behavior of others that tries to infer the causes behind this basic information.
This session will discuss attribution, leaving nonverbal communication for the third session.
Social perception includes efforts to form unified impressions of others. Common sense suggests that these first impressions are very important, as demonstrated by research conducted in this regard. Such investigations have also focused on the other side of the coin in impression formation: how we ourselves try to impress others.
This impression formation is called impression management or self-presentation.
Attribution: Understanding the Causes of the Behavior of Others
Knowing the exact mood or feelings experienced by others can be useful in many ways. However, in areas with which social psychology is concerned, this knowledge is only the first step. In addition, we usually want to know more, understand the latest features of others, and know the reasons behind their behavior. Social psychologists believe that our interest in these areas is due in large measure to our basic desire to know the cause-effect relationships in society. That is, we do not want simply to know how others have acted; we want to understand why they have done so. The process by which we seek this information is known as attribution.
In a more formal sense, attribution refers to our efforts to understand the causes underlying the behavior of others and, sometimes, also underlying our behavior.
Attribution Theory: Frameworks for Understanding
Due to the complexity of attributions, many theories have been proposed to explain their operation. This time, we will focus on two of them that were particularly influential.
Acts Trends: Conduct as Indicative of Stable Trends
The first of these theories, the theory of correspondent inference by Jones & Davis (1965), questioned how we use information about the behavior of others as a basis for inferring that they have different tendencies or traits. In other words, the theory is about how we decide, based on the observable actions of others, that they have trends or specific provisions to extrapolate from one situation to another and remain fairly stable over time.
At first glance, this seems to be a simple task. The conduct of others is an important source of information to draw on, so if we look carefully, we will be able to learn much about them. This is true to some extent. However, the task is complicated by the following fact: often, people act a certain way not because they want to express their preferences or traits, but because external factors have led them to have few choices. For example, suppose we see a woman clashing with everyone, rushing through an airport and pushing people out of her way. Does this mean that this person is impatient and rude, always in a hurry and willing to trample anyone who crosses her? Not necessarily. This person could simply be responding to the fact that their plane was about to leave without them! In fact, the traveler may be slower and more educated on a regular basis, and their behavior would be the exception, not the rule. Such situations are very common, and when we use the present behavior of others to guide sustainable features or their motivations, we may come to very erroneous conclusions.
How We Face These Complications
According to the theory of Jones & Davis, we carry out this task by focusing our attention on certain types of actions, those most likely to give us information.
1. Only consider conduct that has been chosen freely, while largely ignoring those enforced in some way by the person observed.
2. Pay special attention to actions that show what Jones & Davis called unusual effects, effects that may be caused by a specific factor but not by others (which does not refer to those that are rare). Why are these informative activities? Consider the following example: Imagine that one of our friends just got engaged. Her husband is regal, has a great personality, is professionally successful, is madly in love with her, and is very rich. What can we learn from this friend from their decision to marry this man? Obviously, not much. There are many good reasons they could have chosen each other. By contrast, imagine that our friend’s boyfriend treats her with indifference and is known to be extremely boring. Besides, the boy has no means to maintain himself and intends to live off our friend’s salary. Does the fact that she will marry him tell us something about their personal characteristics? Now, yes. In fact, we can probably conclude that she has been based more on the physical attractiveness of her husband than on his personality, consideration, or economic level. Therefore, as we see, we normally learn more about each other from actions that produce unusual effects than those that do not.
3. Pay greater attention to the actions of others that carry a low social desirability than on those that are high in this dimension. That is, we learn more about the trends of others from their actions that somehow represent something unusual than those that are much more similar to those carried out by most people.
Attentional Resources and Allocation of Traits
: What we learn – not learn – of covert behavior: The theory of Jonas & David offers a useful framework for understanding how to use the behavior of others to identify their key features. In any research that followed this theory, the theory spread in different directions. Perhaps the most important of these extensions is that strives to understand the role of conscious care resources in the attribution of traits. Modern conceptions of social thought that we join limited cognitive resources, limited capacity to process social information. Therefore, if we devote attention to a cognitive task, we will have less remaining for other tasks.
What is the point of this principle in the theory of Jonas & David?
The answer includes the fact that when someone infer traits from his conduct in fact carried out three different tasks:
1.Categorizamos individual behavior, we decided that this is all
2.Caracterizamos behavior, the specific traits we use to infer
3.Corregimos our inference in light of the information on the situation in which it has occurred. For example, suppose we see a driver talking to a traffic policeman who is standing beside him. We recognize this as a specific type of interaction: one between an officer and a driver who had just been stopped. Suppose you also saw that the person is still very humbled, practically being dragged to the foot of the policeman. At first glance, we could use this information to infer that the driver is a person my submissive (characterization). However, from the moment we realize that the driver is trying to avoid a penalty quickly correct this inference and avoid hastily jump to this conclusion.
Under normal circumstances, we have enough cognitive resources available to dedicate ourselves completely to the three tasks. But in some cases: the behavior of others can be disguised, so it is difficult to say they are doing, or simply do not have enough time to make necessary corrections. In these situations, exhaust our limited resources on the first of the two tasks – categorization and characterization – and do not have enough remaining resources to correct our initial inferences.
Kelley’s theory of causal attributions: How we answer the question why?: Consider the following examples:
At a party know an attractive person, and he or she promises to call the next day, but it does not.
In an examination receives a grade much lower than you expected.
Stay with one of your friends at five. You are there at the time, but fifteen minutes later, your friend has not arrived yet.
What question would arise in our mind in each of these situations? The answer is clear: why? I was wondering why that person called you, why did you get a lower one than you expected, and why your friend is late. In many situations, we face the central task of attribution. We want to know why others have acted as they have ax or why events have occurred in a specific way. This event is crucial, because only if we understand the causes behind the actions of others can we hope to give meaning to the social world. Obviously, the number of specific causes underlying the behavior of others is very great. Therefore, to make the task more manageable, often begin with a preliminary issue: Is the behavior of others is mainly due to internal causes (their traits, motives, intentions), or causesexternal (some aspects of physical or social world), or a combination of both? For example, you might wonder if you received a lower one than I expected because there are insufficient studies (an internal cause), because the questions were too difficult (an external cause), or perhaps because of both factors. These results showed how we conduct this initial task allocation are provided by the theory proposed by Kelley.
From acurdo with Kelley, in our attempts to answer the question why the behavior of others, we focus on information for three main dimensions:
1.Consenso: The degree to which others react to some stimuli or events in the same way that the person we are considering. The more people react the same way, greater consensus.
2.Consistencia: The extent to which the person in question reacts to stimuli or events the same way as in the past, that is, over time.
3.Diferenciación: We examined the extent to which that person reacts the same way that other stimuli or events to differ.
How do we use this information?
According to Kelley’s theory is more likely to attribute the behavior of others to internal causes in conditions that consensus and differentiation are available, but the consistency is high. On the contrary, are more likely to attribute the behavior of others to external causes under conditions in which both consensus and consistency and differentiation are high. In short, usually attribute the behavior of other people to a combination of internal and external factors in conditions in which the consensus is low, but the consistency and differentiation are high.
For example, suppose a student in a classroom suddenly rises, Shouting angrily at the teacher, and then throws a large ripe tomato. Why the student acted that way? “Due to internal causes or external causes? Is the student a rare person with a violent temper? Or this person was responding to an external cause (something the teacher did or said)? According to Kelley’s theory, our decision (as an observer of this scene) depends on the information on the three factors mentioned above.
Suppose:
1.Ningún another student yells or throws tomatoes (the consensus is low)
2.Has seen this student angry at other times in the same class (the consistency is high)
3.Has seen this angry student outside class, for example, in response to slow waiters and traffic blocks (the differentiation is low).
In this case, the theory suggests that the student Kelley exploded due to internal causes: It is a violent person!
Now in contrast, imagine that the following conditions:
1.Some other students also cry to the teacher (the consensus is high)
2.Has seen this angry student in the same class at different times (the consistency is high)
3.No’ve seen this angry student out of class (the differentiation is high).
Under such conditions, probably attributed the student’s behavior to external causes, perhaps an arrogant and unreasonable behavior by the teacher.
But this theory suggests to make some modifications:
When we make a causal attribution? The path of least resistance: The type of causal analysis proposed by Kelley requires considerable effort: it requires that we pay careful attention to the behavior of others to acquire information about the consensus, consistency and differentiation. Given this fact is not surprising that people tend to avoid if they can this cognitive effort. Often attribute certain behaviors, according to our previous experience, internal or external factors, according as we have experienced these behaviors sometimes earlier.
So when exactly, there is the kind of careful analysis described by Kelley? Primarily under two conditions:
1.When people cope with unexpected events that can not be easily explained in terms of what they know about a person or situation.
2.When is facing unpleasant situations or events
In summary, Kelley’s theory seems to be an accurate description of causal attribution when it happens this facility. However, you can not describe the behavior of people on many occasions, because they do not want to bother thinking.
Increasing and Decreasing: How to handle multiple potential causes: Important principles of attribution:
ü Top of Decline (sometimes known as the rule of subtraction): In short, this statement shows that we reduce (deduct) the importance of any given behavior may cause a person to the extent that there are other causes.
ü Increase Principle: This principle states that when one factor could provide a certain behavior and other factors which could inhibit are both present and behavior still occurs, we assign a weight factor increased enabler. We do this because this factor has been successful in producing behavior even in the presence of a significant barrier (inhibitory factor).
Affirmative action: active efforts to recruit and promote women and minorities, sometimes tend to diminish the contribution of their skills to these results.
Attribution: Some basic sources of error: The allocation is also subject to various forms of errors, trends that can lead us to fall into serious errors regarding the underlying causes d the behavior of others.
ü The fundamental error of attribution: overestimation of the role of dispositional causes: It occurs when considering the less likely external factors in the causes of behaviors of others. That is, our strong tendency to explain behavior in terms of causes other dispositional (internal) rather than situational (external). In short, we tend to perceive that others act as they do because they are such a person, rather than causes of the many factors that can influence their behavior.
This tendency to overemphasize dispositional causes while underestimating the impact of situational seems to derive from the fact that when we observe the behavior of another person, we tend to focus on its behavior, the context in which they occur often vanish in the background.
ü The effect of the actor – observer: You you you fell, pushing me: Another type of attributional bias closely related to the former is constituted by our tendency to attribute our own behavior to situational factors, but other people to causes dispositional(internal). So when we see someone trip and fall, we tend to contribute this success to his clumsiness. Conversely, if we who fall are more likely to attribute situational causes such as water on the pavement or slippery shoes. This bias in our allocation is known as the actor-observer effect. Why is the actor-observer effect? In part this is because quite aware somas Delos many situational factors that affect our actions, but we are less aware of these when we focus on the actions of others. Therefore, we tend to perceive our behavior as caused more by situational causes, but that of the other derived chiefly from its features or provisions.
ü The bias of self-fulfillment (Self-serving): I can not be wrong, but you can not guess: Suppose you’re a quarterly work for a subject. When you return, you find the following commentary on the first page: An outstanding job, one of the best I’ve seen in years. Outstanding. What attribute this success? If you’re like most people, explain it in terms of external factors: your great talent, the effort they spent writing the work, etc..
Now, however, imagine that when you return the work, are these comments: A terrible job, one of the worst I’ve seen in many years. Very Poor How do you interpret this result? The opportunities are ripe for entado to focus mainly on external factors (situational), the difficulty of the task, your teacher’s inability to understand what you were trying to say, the fact that your teacher is prejudiced against members of your gender, etc..
This tendency to contribute to our positive results but negative internal causes to external factors is known as the bias of self-fulfillment. Why is this bias? Rods possibilities have been suggested, but most of these fall into two categories:
1.Explicaciones cognitive: It suggests that this bias is mainly a result of certain trends in the way in which we process social information.
2.Explicaciones motivational: It suggests that this bias stems from our need to protect and improve our self-esteem or the desire to look good to others.
Practical Applications of attribution theory: Insights and Interventions: This theory has served as a useful framework for understanding such diverse topics as marital dissatisfaction, the reactions of women to abortion, and causes of interpersonal conflict. But the most famous contributions have been in depression and guilt of rape victims.
Attribution and Depression: Depression is the most common psychological disorder. Although many factors play a role in depression, in recent years one has received increasing attention, is what might be called a pattern of self-deception of authority. Unlike most people, which shows the self-fulfilling bias described above, depressed people tend to adopt an opposite pattern: negative outcomes attributed to internal factors durable as their own features or lack of skillBut they attribute positive outcomes to external causes such as temporary or a stroke of good luck or special favors from others. Fortunately, we have developed and implemented in an effective way many forms of therapy that seek to change these powers, to acquire self-confidence to achieve positive results, and stop blaming himself for the negatives, and at least consider some failures as a result external factors.
Attribution and rape: the blaming of innocent victims: There is a strong tendency for many people to blame the rape victims of this crime. What explanations are there for this trend? One possibility is what is called belief in a just world, our desire to assume the world is a fundamentally fair. In another sense, to believe that completely innocent people can suffer such degradation is very threatening, so some people find comfort in these thoughts drawing the conclusion that the rape victimis not innocent and somehow must have searched the attack. One study found that most research participants attributed culpability of women in higher grade when it knew the rapist that when this person was unknown. Furthermore, while men attributed more blame to women, both sexes seemed to blame, to some degree for the attack.
These findings and those of many other studies, have important implications regarding the prevention of violations. First, suggest that victims of date rape, an alarmingly common event, are especially prone to being blamed by others. Secondly, the fact that men tend to blame the victims to a greater degree than women is consistent with results indicating that men, especially those who engage in sexual violence, often misinterpret women’s communication . Specifically, suspicion and mistrust of the communication on women’s sexual interest, so do not believe it when a woman says no. The programs focused on improving communication between men and women about sexual matters may be quite effective.
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