Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Perceiving Persons
Participants rated unfamiliar faces based on pictures they saw for one-
tenth, half, or a full second to see if their impressions would stay the
same or change with unlimited time.
-correlated their ratings with ratings made by observers with no
exposure time limits.
» Pryor & Merluzzi (1985) then randomized their list of events and
asked participants to arrange them into the appropriate order.
» Those with extensive dating experience were able to organize the
statements more quickly than those with less experience.
Judging Emotions in Context
Now look at her in the full context on the right. You can see that she was
actually euphoric, clenching her fist in victory at the 2008 U.S. Open.
In this meta-analysis, results showed people all over the world from 42
countries could recognize the 6 basic emotions from posed facial expressions.
A smile is a smile, a frown is a frown, and just about everyone knows what
these things mean.
Nonverbal Cues
• The face expresses emotions in ways that are both innate and understood by
people all over the world
– anger superiority effect: people are quicker to spot angry faces in a crowd
than faces with neutral, non-threatening emotions
– has a survival value!
– it’s more evolutionarily adaptive to be wary of someone who is angry and
hence prone to lash out in violence
– also adaptive to recognize disgust-can signal threats like foul odor, spoiled
food
• Other nonverbal cues:
– Body language
– Eye contact or gaze
– Physical touch
• Nonverbal cues are important! We see the social value of the human face when we
communicate by text or email and our words get misinterpreted, especially when
the writer is trying to be funny or sarcastic.
• Hence, the need for emojis to fill in the gap!
• People often stretch or conceal the truth, which can make social
perception even trickier.
• Can social perceivers tell the difference when someone is lying or
telling the truth?
• Freud: “No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he
chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every
pore.”
• Research has shown that there is no one behavioral cue like
Pinnocchio’s growing nose that can be used to signal deception.
• One reason it is so difficult to detect is that channels of
communication differ in terms of how easily they can be controlled
– The face, for instance, is relatively easier for deceivers to control
– Nervous movements of hands and feet are somewhat harder to control
• People try to infer from an action whether the act itself corresponds
to an enduring personal characteristic of the actor
• People make inferences on the basis of three factors:
– Person’s degree of choice
– behavior that’s freely chosen says more about a person than
behavior that’s coerced by the situation
– Expectedness of the behavior
– action tells us more about a person when it departs from the
norm than when it is expected under the circumstances
– ex: it might say more about a student who wears a 3-piece
suit to class than a student who wears jeans to class
– Intended effects or consequences of behavior
– acts that produce many desirable outcomes no not reveal
motives as clearly as acts that produce only one desirable
outcome
Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
What Does This Speechwriter Really
Believe?
• Perceiver characteristics
– We differ in the kinds of impressions we form
of others; we use different criteria
– We tend to use ourselves as a frame of
reference
– Our current mood can influence our
impressions
• Embodiment effects
– The way we view ourselves and others is
affected by the physical position, orientation,
sensations, and movements of our own bodies
Copyright © 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.
Deviations from the Arithmetic
(cont'd.)
• Priming effects
– The characteristics we tend to see in other
people can be influenced unconsciously by
our own recent experiences
– the tendency for frequently or recently used
concepts to come to mind easily and
influence the way we interpret new
information
• Target characteristics
– Across cultures, individuals can be distinguished along five
broad traits: extroversion, emotional stability, openness to
experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness
– Trait negativity bias: negative information carries more weight
than positive information
– ex: we form more extreme impressions of a person who is
said to be dishonest than someone said to be honest
– one bad trait might be enough to tarnish a person’s
reputation, regardless of other good qualities!
• Implicit personality theories
– A network of assumptions about the relationships among various
types of people, traits, and behaviors
– we assume certain traits and behaviors are linked together