Introduction to Social Psychology Attribution-Lecture Notes-Psychology, Study notes of Social Psychology

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Social Perception

Lecture Overview

 Communication: More than meets the

eye

 Effects of Expectations on First

Impressions

 Attribution Theory

Presidential Candidates’ Nonverbal

Cues

 Rudy Giuliani: The Republican and former New York City mayor tends to talk with one side of his mouth in an upward curl – which may convey disgust.  John Edwards: The 2004 Democratic vice presidential candidate has traded his dazzlingly optimistic smile for a more purposeful, even grim look

• perhaps in an effort to convey gravitas.  John McCain: The Republican senator from Arizona has a “puffer fish” look – an upside- down smile, lips pressed together, cheeks blown out – revealing exasperation, presumably with the status quo.

Communication: More than

meets the eye

 Instructor Evaluations and First

Impressions

 Predicting Divorce (Gottman)

 Defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism,

contempt

Communication: More than

meets the eye

 Secrets of the Bedroom (Gosling)

 Obtained ratings from friends of the participants on the Big Five.  Recruited a group of strangers to tour the bedrooms of the 80 subjects who completed the MMPI.  Strangers rated on a scale of 1-5 the personality of the inhabitant of the room based on the artifacts within it.  Friends better than strangers at predicting extraversion and agreeableness.  Strangers better than friends at predicting conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to new experience.

Communication: More than

meets the eye

 Suing Your Family Doctor (Levinson)

 Recorded the conversations of doctors and

patients

 Half of the doctors had never been sued, Half sued at least twice

 Never sued doctors:

 Spent 3 minutes longer with patients  More likely to make orienting comments  More likely to engage in active listening

 No differences in quality of care or the detail that

they went into about the patients condition or

medication.

Expectations and First

Impressions

 What process do we use to organize

traits to produce a unified impression?

(Asch, 1946)

Group A: intelligent, skillful, industrious,

warm, determined, practical, cautious

Group B: intelligent, skillful, industrious,

cold, determined, practical, cautious

Making a good impression

Group A (warm): A person who believes certain things to be right, wants others to see his point, would be sincere in an argument, and would like to see his own point won.

Group B (cold): A rather snobbish person who feels that his success and intelligence set him apart from the run-of- the-mill individual. Calculating and unsympathetic.

Making a good impression

Generous

Wise Happy Good-Natured Humorous

Warm (n=90) Cold (n=76)

Making a good impression

Generous

Wise Happy Good-Natured Humorous

Polite (n=20) Blunt (n=26)

Causal Attribution: Answering the

“Why” Question

 Internal, dispositional attribution:  The inference that a person is behaving in a certain way because of something about the person, such as attitude, character, or personality.  External, situational attribution:  The inference that a person is behaving a certain way because of something about the situation he or she is in.  The assumption is that most people would respond the same way in that situation.

Kelley’s Covariation Model:

Internal versus External Attributions

 The covariation model focuses on observations of

behavior across time, place, actors, and targets.

 It examines how the perceiver chooses either an

internal or an external attribution.

 We make such choices by using information on:

 Consensus

 Information about the extent to which other people

behave the same way toward the same stimulus as the

actor does.

 Distinctiveness

 Information about the extent to which one particular actor behaves in the same way to different stimuli.

 Consistency

 Information about the extent to which the behavior between one actor and one stimulus is the same across time and circumstances.

Why did Claire laugh at her date’s

jokes?

CONSENSUS CONSISTENCY DISTINCTIVENESS

INTERNAL

(Claire)

Low Claire is the only one who laughs at her date’s jokes

High Claire always laughs at her date’s jokes

Low Claire laughs at everyone’s jokes

EXTERNAL

(her date)

High Everyone laughs at her date’s jokes

High Claire always laughs at her date’s jokes

High Claire doesn’t laugh at everyone’s jokes

PECULIAR High or Low Low High or Low

The Correspondence Bias

 The tendency to believe that people’s behavior

matches (corresponds to) their dispositions.

 People do what they do because of the kind of

people they are, not because of the situation they

are in.

 The correspondence bias is so pervasive that

many social psychologists call it the fundamental

attribution error.