Social Perception
• Social perception refers to organise, identify and utilize
social cues to make judgments about social roles, rules,
relationships, context, or the characteristics of others.
Components of Social perception:
• Observation: It serves as the raw data of social perception—an
interplay of three sources: persons, situations, and behavior.
• Attribution: Attribution is a term used in psychology which deals with
how individuals perceive the causes of everyday experience, as being
either external or internal.
• Integration
• Confirmation
Perceptual Defense
• It is the process by which an individual gets difficulty to perceive
stimuli due to their offensive, unpleasant, or threatening nature.
• perceptual defense refers to people getting a barrier to screen out
stimuli they find threatening or unpleasant or taboo. For example a
smoker might filter out a photo of a diseased lung.
Perceptual Vigilance
• Perceptual vigilance takes place when we pay more attention to
those stimuli that meet our current needs and wants quickly.
• Characteristics of the perceiver:
• Mental health
• Familiarity with the person perceived
• Familiarity of the culture/context (in which the person perceived)
• Attitudes
• Emotional state (Mood)
• Self-concept
• Thinking pattern
Person Perception
• It refers to the mental processes that we use to form impressions of
other people.
• This includes not just how we form these impressions, but the
different conclusions we make about other people based upon our
impressions.
Impression formation
• Impression formation refers to the processes by which different pieces
of knowledge about another person are combined into impression.
•
• Asch’s theory (1946): The way in which individuals
form impressions of one another involved a primacy
effect, derived from early or initial information.
• First impression is established as more important
(Halo effect) than subsequent impressions in forming
an overall impression formation.
Impression formation based on some cognitive
process:
• Primacy effect
• Recency effect
• Halo effect
• Horn effect
Factors of Impression formation:
• Appearance
• Physical
• Psychological
• Context of the situation
• Cognitive bias
• Perceiver's traits
• Past experiences of perceiver
Nonverbal communication cues:
• The way of listening
• Appearance
• Moving/Walking
• Reaction/ response
• Facial expressions
• Body posture
When your nonverbal signals match up with the words you're
saying, they increase trust, clarity, and rapport
Attribution
• Attribution is a process to explain the causes of any
behaviour or result.
• Attributions are inferences generated by people when they
try to explain reasons for events, the behavior of others, and
their own behavior.
• Attributions may be internal (dispositional), based
on something within a person, or external
(situational), based on something outside a
person.
• The Fundamental Attribution Error
It is the tendency people have to overemphasize
personal characteristics and ignore situational factors
in judging others' behavior. Because of the
fundamental attribution error, we tend to believe that
others do bad things because they are bad people.
Weiner's Attribution Theory
• The theory states that a person's attributions for success or failure
determine the amount of effort the individual will expend on the task.
• If people believe they are responsible for bad outcomes, they are less
motivated to repeat their behaviors.
Kelley's Covariation Model
• The theory in which people make causal inferences to explain why
other people and ourselves behave in a certain way.
• How we use social perception to attribute behaviour to internal or
external factors.
• Attributions are made based on three criteria:
• Consensus
• Consistency
• Distinctiveness
• Kelley proposed two factors:
•Predispostional /Internal factors
•Situational/external factor
Predispostional /Internal factors:
When we perceive an event to be caused by an internal
factor.
Situational/external factor:
When we perceive an event as caused by an external
factors.
Attitude
• An attitude refers to a predisposition/tendency either positive or
negative toward a particular object or person or thing, or event.
It has 3 components:
(Rosenberg & Hovland, 1960)
➢Cognitive component (belief and
knowledge)
➢Affective component (feelings),
➢Behavioral component
• It is an evaluative statement
• Attitudes are predispositions
• It is always related to some events/person/thing
• It has motivational proporties
• It has intensity
• It has certain direction
Formation:
• Need for satisfaction & personal interest
• Given information
• Parents/ friends/teachers/siblings/neighbours
/media/social media etc.
• Social learning
• Imitation
• Vicarious learning
• Live/symbolic modelling
•Classical conditioning
•Instrumental conditioning
•Group affiliation
•Cultural factors
•Personal factors (based on traits)
Attitude change
Congruent change Incongruent change
A change taking place in the same when a change is opposite of the
direction already held attitude
Festinger (1957)
Cognitive Dissonance Theory
• Whenever two beliefs are inconsistent, individuals
experience negatively arousing cognitive conflict (called
dissonance).
• Cognitive dissonance theory postulates that an underlying
psychological tension is created when an individual’s
behavior is inconsistent with his or her thoughts and
beliefs.
• This underlying tension then motivates an individual to
make an attitude change that would produce consistency
between thoughts and behaviors.
• When an individual engages in behaviors that are
inconsistent with their attitude or belief (e.g., arguing a
counter-attitudinal position on a topic), a change in
attitude is produced that is consistent in the direction of
his or her behavior.
• This mechanism of thought or attitude change is the same
mechanism used to produce changes in negative,
irrational thoughts that are involved in the maintenance of
depression and related disorders.
Factors:
• Attractiveness of communicator
• Knowledge of communicator
• Credibility of communicator
• Effective communication style
• Primacy / recency effect
• Influence of mass media/social media
• Propaganda
• Changing in reference group
• Change in group affiliation
• New information from different sources
• Group decision
Measurement
• Thurston scale
• Likert scale
• Bogardus social distance method
• Guttman cummulative scale
• Sementic differential method
• Survey method
• Interview method
Prejudice and Discrimination
• Prejudice is an unjustified or incorrect attitude (usually negative)
towards any member/ social group.
( A person may hold prejudiced views towards a certain race or gender etc.)
• Discrimination is the behavior or actions, usually negative, towards
an individual or group of people, especially on the basis of
sex/race/social class, etc.
Characteristics :
• It is acquired
• It is irrational
• It has emotional dimension
• It is inflexible generalization
• It has rigidity
• It is unrealistic
• It involves anger/hostility
Sources and Dynamics:
• Historical approach
• Socio-cultural aspect
• Education
• Socio-economic status
• Castism
• Rural-urban classification
• Religious affiliation
• Mass media/ social media
• Situational aspect
• Social learning
• Job competition
• Cognitive aspects
• Attribution
• Cognitive biased for ingroup
• Conflict/frustration
Techniques of overcoming prejudice
• Intergroup interaction
• Education
• Anti-prejudice environment
• Legislative method
• Cognitive development technique
• Traits change method
