SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY Social psychology: the study of how we think about (thoughts), feel towards (emotion), and influence and relate (behavior) to one another → social psychologists are interested how the social context/situation affects the individual

FORMING IMPRESSIONS Person perception refers to the process of forming impressions of other people based on factors such as physical appearance and stereotypes → unsurprisingly, our impressions of others are often distorted (yet we still rely on them!?!)

FORMING IMPRESSIONS In general, we tend to see physically attractive people as having both desirable personality characteristics AND more competence (though no correlation exists) → in contrast, we are capable of making more accurate observations based on mere snippets of nonverbal expressiveness

FORMING IMPRESSIONS Also affecting person perception, stereotypes are overgeneralized BELIEFS about a group of people, such as an age, gender, ethnic/racial, or occupational group → even those aware of diversity within groups are often swayed by the ease of falling back on stereotypes in judging individuals

FORMING IMPRESSIONS → our person perceptions are subjective; we see what we expect to see and selectively recall how often (illusory correlation) we see it and what we remember → the end result being that stereotypes are resistant to change

FORMING IMPRESSIONS Stereotypes play a huge role in creating prejudice: a negative ATTITUDE held toward members of a group (as opposed to discrimination, which refers to BEHAVIOR) → social roots of prejudice: the just-world phenomenon says that people believe the world is fair and people get what they deserve

FORMING IMPRESSIONS → emotional roots of prejudice: the scapegoat theory states that negative emotions are given an outlet by blaming someone else

FORMING IMPRESSIONS → cognitive roots of prejudice: we categorize those different from us; the other-race effect is the tendency to recall faces of one’s own race easier than those of other races (making stereotypes easier to sustain)

FORMING IMPRESSIONS Evolutionary psychologists believe we are programmed to instantly differentiate between friend or foe → those in our ingroup (‘us’) we share a common identity with; those in our outgroup (‘them’) we perceive as different from our ingroup

FORMING IMPRESSIONS → ingroup bias leads us to favor our own group, predisposing prejudice against strangers (even when groups are created arbitrarily and especially when in pursuit of scarce resources)

FORMING IMPRESSIONS → furthermore, when our social identity (ingroup) is threatened, we may respond by showing prejudice (ingroup favoritism/ outgroup degradation) to restore self-esteem

ATTRIBUTION THEORY We have a strong desire to understand and explain our experiences, therefore we make attributions about ourselves and others → attributions are explanations that people make about the causes of events, their own, and others’ behavior

ATTRIBUTION THEORY Fritz Heider proposed two types of attributions, within or outside a person: 1) Internal (dispositional) attributions describe behavior as caused by stable, enduring personal traits 2) External (situational) attributions describe behavior as caused by the demands/constraints of the environment

ATTRIBUTION ERRORS Since making attributions involves guesswork based (to a degree) on personal biases, they are often inaccurate → the fundamental attribution error refers to the tendency for observers to underestimate situational factors and overestimate dispositional factors in explaining others behavior

ATTRIBUTION ERRORS → it is easy to blame others’ behavior on their disposition and much more difficult to be aware of and/or think about situational factors (fueling stereotypes/prejudice)

ATTRIBUTION ERRORS → thus, we generally blame the situation for our own poor behavior, while an observer would blame our personal qualities * This is consistent with the idea of self-serving bias: our readiness to perceive ourselves favorably and take more responsibility for our successes than for our failures

ATTRIBUTION ERRORS Defensive attribution (basically the just-world phenomenon) refers to the tendency to blame victims for their misfortune → this shields us from believing we will suffer similar misfortunes while also portraying victims in a negative light (fueling stereotypes/prejudice)

CULTURE AND ATTRIBUTION Research suggests that more collectivist cultures (putting the group in front of the individual) such as found in Asia, are less likely to make the fundamental attribution error → it is more common in individualistic cultures (hey, that’s u.s.!) where individuals are more autonomous