【Psychology】Chapter 13— Section Review/Main Points
* All the following abstractions are excerpted from <Psychology>, Peter O. Gray, 5th edition
Chapter 13 — Social Perception and Attitudes.
Section 1 — Forming Impressions of Other People
We are constantly forming impressions of others and judging the causes of their behavior.
— Basing Attributions on Observed Behavior
Logically, we might attribute a person's behavior primarily to characteristics of the person or the situation.
The person bias is the tendency to give undue weight to personality and not enough to the situation in making attributions.
The person bias may disappear or even be reversed when we make attributions about our own behavior, a phenomenon known as the actor-observer discrepancy.
The person bias appears not to hold true for Asian cultures.
— Effects of Prior Information and Physical Appearance
We use schemas (organized sets of beliefs) about people to interpret their actions, even when the information in our schema is inaccurate or irrelevant.
A common bias is that we tend to see physically attractive people as more intelligent, social, competent, and moral than less attractive people.
We also tend to see baby-faced individuals as more honest, naive, helpless, warm, and kind than otherwise comparable people with mature faces. This may partly account for our d/iffering perceptions of men's and women's personalities.
— Forming Impressions on the Internet
In experiments, people who met initially on the Internet like each other more than people who initially met face-to-face.
This tendency may result from people on the Internet being less anxious, more intimate, and freed from the biasing effects of physical features.
Section 2 — Perceiving and Evaluating the Self
The social world around us profoundly affects our understanding of ourselves.
— Seeing Ourselves Through Others' Eyes
Classroom experiments have demonstrated Pygmalion effects, in which adults' expectations about children's behavior created the expected behavior. Such effects occur at least partly by altering the children's self-concepts.
A variety of evidence supports the sociometer theory, which states that self-esteem reflects the level of acceptance or rejection we believe we can expect from others.
— Active Construction of Self-Perceptions
We understand ourselves largely through social comparison — comparing ourselves to others. Our judgments and feelings about ourselves depend on the reference group to which we compare our selves, as illustrated by the big-fish-in-little-pond effect.
At least in North America and Western Europe, people tend to enhance their views of themselves through such means as making self-serving attributions (attributing success to the self and failure to the situation), accepting praise at face value, and defining their own criteria for success.
— East-West Differences in Self-Perception
In the collectivist cultures of East Asia, people tend to describe themselves more in terms of their social groups and roles than in terms of individual personality traits.
East Asians are less likely than Westerners to self-enhance; the Japanese may even show a self-effacing bias. However, East Asians may still self-enhance on traits that they value highly, such as modesty itself.
Section 3 — Perceiving Ourselves and Others as Members of Groups
Social identity can be a major determinant of how we perceive ourselves and others.
— Personal and Social Self-Identities
We view ourselves in terms of both personal identity and social identity (the social categories or groups to which we belong). Individualist cultures emphasize personal identity, and collectivist cultures emphasize social identity.
When social identity is uppermost in our minds, the success of others in our group boosts our self-esteem. When personal identity is uppermost, members of our group become our reference group, and their success can lower our self-esteem.
Just as we have a self-enhancing bias, we have a group-enhancing bias, especially when our social identity predominates.
— Implicit and Explicit Stereotypes
Stereotypes — the schemas that we have about groups of people — can be explicit (available to consciousness) or implicit (unconscious but able to affect our thoughts, feelings, and actions). Implicit stereotypes are measured through priming and implicit association tests.
Studies reveal that negative implicit stereotypes can promote prejudiced behavior even without conscious prejudice.
Implicit prejudices are based on primitive emotional processes, modifiable by classical conditioning. Positive associations with members of the stereotyped group can help to reduce implicit prejudice.
Section 4 — Attitudes: Their Origins and Their Effects on Behavior
An attitude is a belief or opinion that includes an evaluative component.
— Sources of Attitudes
Attitudes can be created or altered through classical conditioning, with no thought required and even without awareness.
By using heuristics (e.g., "If most people believe this, it is probably true"), people can arrive at attitudes through superficial thought.
When a message is highly relevant to us, we tend to base our attitudes on logical analysis of the content.
People may adopt attitudes that form the social norms of their group. It feels uncomfortable to hold attitudes that are different from those of others in one's group.
— Attitudes and Cognitive Dissonance
We are motivated to reduce cognitive dissonance — a discomforting lack of accord among our beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge.
The desire to prevent or reduce cognitive dissonance often leads people to avoid dissonant information and to set aside doubts about a decision once it has been made.
When we freely and with little incentive do something contrary to an attitude, we may alter the attitude to better fit the action; this is called the insufficient-justification effect.
— Attitudes and Behavior
Early research suggested that attitudes do not affect behavior; more recently, we see that attitudes affect behavior under some conditions and not others.
Implicit attitudes — those formed through direct experience or repeated associations — influence behavior automatically.
Explicit attitudes must be brought to mind somehow before they can affect behavior.