What is social perception?

Introduction

Social perception deals with two general classes of cognitive-perceptual processes through which people process, organize, and recall information about others. Those that deal with how people form impressions of other people’s personalities (called person perception) form the first class. The second class includes those processes that deal with how people use this information to draw conclusions about other people’s motivations, intentions, and emotions to explain and predict their behavior (called attribution processes). This importance of social perception in social psychology is revealed in the fact that people’s impressions and judgments about others, whether accurate or not, can have profound effects on their own and others’ behavior.

People are naturally motivated to understand and predict the behavior of those around them. Being able to predict and understand the social world gives people a sense of mastery and control over their environment. Psychologists who study social perception have shown that people try to make sense of their social worlds by determining whether other people’s behavior is produced by a disposition—some internal quality or trait unique to a person—or by something in the situation or environment. The process of making such determinations, which is called causal attribution, was developed by social psychologists Fritz Heider, Edward Jones, Keith Davis, and Harold Kelley in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

According to these attribution theorists, when people decide that a person’s behavior reflects a disposition (when, for example, someone decides that a person is friendly because he acted friendly), people have made an internal or dispositional attribution. In contrast, when people decide that a person’s behavior was caused by something in the situation—he acted in a friendly way to make someone like him—they have made an external or situational attribution. The attributions people make for others’ behaviors carry considerable influence in the impressions they form of them and in how they will behave toward them in the future.

Inaccuracies and Biases

People’s impressions and attributions are not always accurate. For example, in many situations, people seem to be inclined to believe that other people’s behavior is caused by dispositional factors. At the same time, they believe that their own behavior is the product of situational causes. This tendency has been called the actor-observer bias.
Moreover, when people try to explain the causes of other people’s behavior, especially behavior that is clearly and obviously caused by situational factors (factors such as a coin flip, a dice roll, or some other situational inducement), they tend to underestimate situational influences and overestimate the role of dispositional causes. This tendency is referred to as correspondence bias, or the fundamental attribution error. In other words, people prefer to explain other people’s behavior in terms of their traits or personalities rather than in terms of situational factors, even when situational factors actually caused the behavior.

In addition to these biases, social psychologists have examined other ways in which people’s impressions of others and inferences about the causes of their behavior can be inaccurate or biased. In their work, for example, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have described a number of simple but efficient thinking strategies, or rules of thumb, called heuristics. The availability heuristic
is the tendency to explain behaviors on the basis of causes that are easily or quickly brought to mind. Similarly, the representativeness heuristic is the tendency to believe that a person who possesses characteristics that are associated with a social group probably belongs to that group. Although heuristics make social thinking more efficient and yield reasonable results most of the time, they can sometimes lead to significant judgment errors.

Influence of Schemata and Primacy Effect

Bias can also arise in social perception in a number of other ways. Because of the enormous amount of social information that people must process at any given moment, they have developed various ways of organizing, categorizing, and simplifying this information and the expectations they have about various people, objects, and events. These organizational structures are called schemata. For example, schemata that organize information about people’s membership in different categories or groups are called stereotypes
or prototypes. Schemata that organize information about how traits go together in forming a person’s personality are called implicit personality theories (IPTs). Although schemata, like heuristics, help make social thinking more efficient and yield reasonable results most of the time, they can also sometimes lead to significant judgment errors, such as prejudice and discrimination.

Finally, social perception can be influenced by a variety of factors of which people are unaware but that can exert tremendous influence on their thinking. Social psychologist Solomon Asch was the first to describe the primacy effect in impression formation. The primacy effect is the tendency for things that are seen or received first to have a greater impact on people’s thinking than things that come later. Many other things in the environment can prime people, or make them “ready,” to see, interpret, or remember things that they might not otherwise have seen, thought about, or remembered. Priming occurs when something in the environment makes certain things easier to bring to mind.

During the 1970s and 1980s, social psychologists made numerous alterations and extensions of the existing theories of attribution and impression formation to keep pace with the field’s growing emphasis on mental (cognitive) and emotional (affective) processes. These changes focused primarily on incorporating work from cognitive psychology on memory processes, the use of schemata, and the interplay of emotion, motivation, and cognition.

Stereotype and Conflict Research

Social psychologists have argued that many social problems have their roots in social perception processes. Because social perception biases can sometimes result in inaccurate perceptions, misunderstandings, conflict between people and groups, and other negative consequences, social psychologists have spent much time and effort trying to understand them. Their hope is that by understanding such biases they will be able to suggest solutions for them. In a number of experiments, social psychologists have attempted to understand the social perception processes that may lead to stereotyping, which can result in prejudice and discrimination.

For example, one explanation for why stereotypes are so hard to change once they have been formed is the self-fulfilling prophecy. Self-fulfilling prophecies occur when people have possibly inaccurate beliefs about others (such as stereotypes) and act on those beliefs, bringing about the conditions necessary to make those beliefs come true. In other words, when people expect something to be true about another person (especially a negative thing), they frequently look for and find what they expect to see. At other times, they actually bring out the negative (or positive) qualities they expect to be present. In a classic 1968 study by social psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, for example, children whose teachers expected them to show a delayed but substantial increase in their intelligence (on the basis of a fictitious intelligence test) actually scored higher on a legitimate intelligence quotient (IQ) test administered at the end of the school year. Presumably, the teachers’ expectations of those students caused them to treat those students in ways that actually helped them perform better. Similarly, social psychologists Rebecca Curtis and Kim Miller have shown that when people think someone they meet likes them, they act in ways that lead that person to like them. If, however, people think a person dislikes them, they act in ways that actually make that person dislike them.

The behaviors that produce self-fulfilling prophecies can be subtle. For example, in 1974, social psychologists Carl Word, Mark Zanna, and Joel Cooper demonstrated that the subtle behaviors of interviewers during job interviews can make applicants believe that they performed either poorly or very well. These feelings, in turn, can lead to actual good or poor performance on the part of the applicants. What was most striking about this study, however, was that the factor that led to the subtle negative or positive behaviors was the interviewers’ stereotypes of the applicants’ racial group membership. Black applicants received little eye contact from interviewers and were not engaged in conversation; the behaviors displayed by interviewers in the presence of white applicants were exactly the opposite. Not surprisingly, black applicants were seen as less qualified and were less likely to be hired. Clearly, subtle behaviors produced by racial stereotypes can have major consequences for the targets of those stereotypes.

Primacy Effect in Academic Settings

The relevance of social perception processes to everyday life is not restricted to stereotyping, although stereotyping is indeed an important concern. In academic settings, for example, situational factors can lead teachers to form impressions of students that have little bearing on their actual abilities. Social psychologist Jones and his colleagues examined the way in which primacy effects operate in academic settings. Two groups of subjects saw a student perform on a test. One group saw the student start out strong and then begin to do poorly. The other group saw the student start out poorly and then begin to improve. For both groups, the student’s performance on the test was identical, and the student received the same score. The group that saw the student start out strong and then falter thought the student was brighter than the student who started out poorly and then improved. Clearly, first impressions matter.

Correspondence Bias

Finally, research on the correspondence bias (fundamental attribution error) makes it clear that people must be very careful when trying to understand what other people are like. In many situations, the demands of people’s occupations or their family roles force them to do things with which they may not actually agree. Substantial research has shown that observers will probably think these people have personalities that are consistent with their behaviors. Lawyers, who must defend people who may have broken the law; debaters, who must argue convincingly for or against a particular point of view; and actors, who must play parts that they did not write, are all vulnerable to being judged on the basis of their behavior. Unless the observer is particularly sensitive to the fact that when these people are doing their jobs, their behaviors do not reveal anything about their true personalities, the observer may actually (and incorrectly) believe that they do.

Influential Research and Theories

The study of social perception has multiple origins that can be traced back to a number of influential researchers and theorists. It was one of the first topics to be emphasized when the modern study of social psychology began during World War II. Later perspectives on social perception processes can be traced to the early work of Asch, a social psychologist who emigrated to the United States before the war. His work yielded important demonstrations of primacy effects in impression formation.

Also important to the development of an understanding of social perception was the work of Heider, another German émigré, who came to the United States as World War II was ending in Europe. Heider’s influential book The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations (1958) arguably started the cognitive approach to social perception processes. In many circles, it is still regarded as a watershed of ideas and insights on person perception and attribution.

Perhaps the most important historical development leading up to the modern study of social perception, however, was the work of Jerome Bruner
and other “new look” cognitive psychologists. Following World War II, a number of psychologists broke with the then-traditional behaviorist/learning theory perspective and applied a Gestalt perspective to human perception. They emphasized the subjective nature of perception and interpretation and argued that both cognition (thinking) and situational context are important in determining “what” it is that a person perceives. Using ambiguous figures, for example, they demonstrated that the same object can be described in many different ways depending on the context in which it is seen.

Theoretical Commonalities

Although their perspectives differ, theorists of social perception generally share some common themes. First, they all acknowledge that social perception is inherently subjective; the most important aspect of understanding people is not what is “true” in an objective sense, but rather what is believed to be true. Second, they acknowledge that people think about other people and want to understand why people do the things they do. Finally, they believe that some general principles govern the ways in which people approach social perception and judgment, and they set out to demonstrate these principles scientifically.

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