Part 4
Social Psychology
Chapter 22
Social Perception
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Perceiving objects & perceiving
people
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Perceiving objects & perceiving
people continued
• Gahagan (1984) defines interpersonal perception as
‘the study of how the layperson uses theory and data
in understanding people’. This involves the study of
how we perceive others as physical objects,
psychological entities, and the lay person as
psychologist.
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The person as thinker
According to Fiske & Taylor (1991), there are four guises that the
cognitive tradition has assumed. They see the person as:
1. Consistency seeker: e.g. cognitive dissonance theory
(Festinger, 1957).
2. Naive scientist: Heider’s (1958) common-sense psychology
and all subsequent attribution theories.
3. Cognitive miser: study of error/bias in the attribution process
(e.g. Nisbett & Ross, 1980) and heuristics (such as availability
and representativeness: Tversky & Kahneman, 1974).
4. Motivated tactician: the ‘cognitive-affective human being’
(Leyens & Codol, 1988).
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Social representations (SRs)
• Moscovici (1981) defined SRs as: ‘a set of concepts,
statements and explanations originating in daily life in the
course of inter-individual communications ... they might ... be
said to be the contemporary version of common sense’.
• Personification: new and complex ideas are linked with a
person.
• Figuration: complex ideas are concerted into visual images.
• Both of these are examples of objectification: the need to
make the abstract concrete.
• Related to this is the need to anchor new and unfamiliar ideas
into some pre-existing (i.e. familiar) system (e.g. Jodelet,
1980).
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Forming global impressions of
people
Central vs peripheral traits
•
Asch (1946): principle of coherence; Kelley (1950); Zebrowitz
(1990); Anderson’s (1974) averaging/algebraic model; Bruner
& Tagiuri’s (1954): both general impressions and inferences
about additional traits reflect implicit personality theories
(IPTs).
The primacy-recency effect
•
Initial support for the primacy effect (‘first impressions count’)
came from Asch (1946); Luchins (1957). But Jones et al.’s
(1968) unexpected findings support the recency effect.
Negative first impressions are especially resistant to change
than positive ones.
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Inferring what people are like
• The halo effect (positive/negative) is a very general form of
implicit personality theory (IPT); this enables us to infer what
people are like when we have only very limited information
about them (e.g. names, physical appearance (Allport,
1954)).
• Stereotypes (Lippmann (1922): ‘pictures in our heads’) can
be thought of as a special kind of IPT that relate to an entire
social group. The Princeton studies (Katz & Braly, 1933;
Gilbert, 1951; Karlins et al., 1969) were conducted in relation
to prejudice. American researchers saw stereotypes as false
overgeneralisations, but from a cognitive perspective,
stereotyping is a normal mental shortcut based on the normal
process of categorisation.
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