1. Lecturer: Eric Vassilikos
Perception
Lecturer:
Eric Vassilikos

2. Impression formation Asch’s (1946) Configural Model:
Central traits: Traits that have disproportionate influence on the configuration of final impressions
Peripheral traits: Traits that have insignificant influence on the configuration of final impressions
Central traits influence the meaning of other traits and the perceived relationship between traits

3. Asch’s Experiment Intelligent Skillful Industrious
________  Warm/cold or polite/blunt
Determined
Practical
Cautious
Impression traits: Wise, happy, reliable, generous

4. Central traits Intrinsic degree of correlation with other traits
Function of context
Social vs. intellectual dimension
Universal dimensions of social cognition: Warmth and competence
(Fiske, Cuddy & Glick, 2007)

5. Biases in impression formation
Primacy
Earlier presented information influence the final impression disproportionately
Recency
Later presented information influence the final impression disproportionately
Positivity/negativity
Distinctive or unusual information
Information poses potential threat

6. Biases in impression formation
Personal constructs (Kelly, 1955)
Idiosyncratic/Personal ways of characterising other people, usually in terms of bipolar dimensions
Implicit personality theories
Explaining behaviour based on idiosyncratic principles regarding how traits interrelate

7. Biases in impression formation
Stereotypes
Widely shared and simplified evaluative image of a social group and its members
Social judgeability
How socially acceptable is it to judge a specific target?
Physical appearance

8. Social schemas
Cognitive structures that represent knowledge about a concept/stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among them.
Top-down instead of bottom-up processing
Theory-driven (emphasis on prior knowledge) instead of data driven processing (emphasis on seeking information)

9. Types of schemas They influence: Person schema Role schema
The encoding of new information
The retaining of old information
Inferences about missing information
Person schema
Role schema
Script (event schema)
Content-free schema
Self-schema

10. Schema use Salience A stimulus is salient when: Cues
What makes a stimulus stand out among other stimuli and attract attention
A stimulus is salient when:
It is novel or figural
It demonstrates unusual behaviour
It is subjectively important
It dominates the visual field
You are compelled to notice it
Cues

11. Selective perception Preparatory set Orientation Motivation
Stimuli we naturally find salient (e.g. toys to a child)
Orientation
Motivation
Familiarity
Cognitive dissonance

12. Cognitive dissonance The cognitive consistency assumption
Postulate: People try to reduce inconsistency among cognitions, because they find it unpleasant, while striving to maintain harmony among their beliefs and avoid dissonance
People will try to reduce dissonance by changing one or more inconsistent cognitions by:
Looking for additional evidence to bolster existing cognitions
Looking for additional evidence to refute dissonant cognitions
Derogating the source of dissonant cognitions
Selective exposure hypothesis

13. Impression management
Five basic strategies
Exemplification
Becoming the example
Ingratiation
Charming the others
Self-promotion
Promoting one’s abilities
Supplication
Projecting an image of weakness aiming at attracting help
Intimidation
Projecting an image of potentially dangerous and probably provocative behavior

14. Impression management
Examples of tactics
Playing safe
Playing dumb
Citing experts
Disclosing the overcoming of obstacles
Opinion conformity
Doing favours

15. Attribution
How do we assign a cause to our own behaviour, and to the behaviour of others.

16. Jones & Davis’ correspondent influence
Postulate: People’s behaviour tends to correspond to underlying dispositions (traits)
Cues for correspondent inferences
Freely chosen behaviour
The chosen behaviour’s non-common (exclusive) effects
Socially undesirable behaviour
Behaviour with hedonic relevance (important direct consequences) for us
Behaviour high in personalism (benefit or harm expressly intended for us)

17. Kelley’s covariation (ANOVA) model
Postulate: People attribute causes to factors that covary (i.e. change systematically in the same direction) with the behaviour they’re trying to explain
Cues for covariation inferences
Consistency of the behaviour
Distinctiveness of the behaviour
Consensus among observed behaviours

18. Self-serving biases in attribution
Attributional distortions that protect or enhance our self-esteem:
Self-handicapping: Publicly making external attributions in advance for an anticipated failure or poor performance
Illusion of control: Belief that we have more control over our world than we really do
Belief in a just world: Belief that the world is a just and predictable place where good things happen to ‘good people’ and bad things to ‘bad people’

19. Intergroup attribution
Ethnocentrism: Evaluative preference for all aspects of our own group relative to other groups
Ultimate attribution error (Pettigrew, 1979): We tend to attribute bad outgroup and good ingroup behaviour internally, and good outgroup and bad ingroup behaviour externally
Emphasis on sociohistorical context and the parallel use of stereotypes (Tajfel, 1981)