1. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Chapter 4 Social Perception: How We Come to Understand Other People “Things are seldom as they seem. Skim milk masquerades as cream.” – W. S. Gilbert

2. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Other people are not easy to figure out. Why are they the way they are? Why do they do what they do?

3. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Social Perception

4. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Nonverbal Behavior What do we know about people when we first meet them? Nonverbal Communication Nonverbal cues include:

5. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Nonverbal Behavior We have a special kind of brain cell called __________. Nonverbal cues serve many functions in communication.

6. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Facial Expressions of Emotion Are facial expressions of emotion universal? Decoding facial expressions accurately is complicated.

7. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Culture and the Channels of Nonverbal Communication Display rules

8. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Emblems are not universal. Emblems Culture and the Channels of Nonverbal Communication

9. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Gender and Nonverbal Communication In general, women are better at encoding and decoding nonverbal cues.

10. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Implicit Personality Theory Implicit Personality Theories: Filling in the Blanks

11. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Culture and Implicit Personality Theories These general notions, or schemas, are shared by people in a culture, and are passed from one generation to another..

12. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Culture and Implicit Personality Theories In Western cultures The Chinese

13. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Causal Attribution: Answering the “Why” Question According to attribution theory, This helps us understand and predict our social world.

14. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. The Nature of the Attribution Process Heider discussed what he called “naive” or “commonsense” psychology.

15. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. The Nature of the Attribution Process When trying to decide what causes people’s behavior, we can make one of two attributions:

16. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. The Covariation Model: Internal versus External Attributions We notice and think about more than one piece of information when we form an impression of another person. Covariation Model It examines how the perceiver chooses either an internal or an external attribution.

17. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. The Correspondence Bias: People as Personality Psychologists One common shortcut is the correspondence bias:

18. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. The Correspondence Bias: People as Personality Psychologists We can’t see the situation, so we ignore its importance. Perceptual Salience

19. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. The Two-Step Process In sum, we go through a two-step process when we make attributions. Why?

20. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. People from individualistic and collectivistic cultures both demonstrate the correspondence bias. Culture and the Correspondence Bias

21. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. The Actor/Observer Difference The actor-observer difference is an amplification of the correspondence bias:

22. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Self-Serving Attributions Defensive Attributions Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

23. Self-Serving Attributions Why do we make self-serving attributions?

24. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. Culture and Other Attributional Biases There is some evidence for cross-cultural differences in the Actor-Observer Effect and in Self-Serving and Defensive Attributions.

25. Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education. All rights reserved. How Accurate Are Our Attributions and Impressions? Our impressions are sometimes wrong because of the mental shortcuts we use when forming social judgments.