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Chapter 4
Social Perception and Cognition


LECTURE OUTLINE

I. Introduction

II. Schemas

A. Types of Schemas - Social psychologists use the term schema to denote a well-
organized structure of cognitions about some social entity such as a person, group,
role, or event. Schemas usually include information about an entitys attributes and
about its relations with other entities.

Person schemas are cognitive structures that describe the personalities of others. Self-
schemas are structures that organize our conception of our own characteristics. Group
schemas, also called stereotypes, are schemas regarding the members of a particular
social group or social category. Role schemas indicate which attributes and behaviors
are typical of persons occupying a particular role in a group. Event schemas (i.e.,
scripts) are schemas regarding important, recurring social events.

B. Schematic Processing - Although schemas may produce reasonably accurate
judgments much of the time. We come to rely on schemas because they give us a way
to efficiently organize, understand, and react to the complex world around us.
Schemas help us do this in several ways, they:

1. Influence our capacity to recall information by making certain kinds of facts
more salient and easier to remember;
2. Help us process information faster;
3. Guide our inferences and judgments about people and objects;
4. Allow us to reduce ambiguity by providing a way to interpret ambiguous
elements in the situation.

Greater schematic complexity leads to less extreme judgments. This is called the
complexity-extremity effect.

III. Person Schemas and Group Stereotypes

A. Person Schemas - There are several distinct types of person schemas. Some person
schemas are very specific and pertain to particular people. Other person schemas are
very abstract and focus on the relations among personality traits.
A schema of this type is an implicit personality theory - a set of unstated assumptions
about which personality traits are correlated with one another.

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The tendency for our general or overall liking for a person to influence our
subsequent assessment of more specific traits of that person is called the halo effect.
The halo effect produces bias in impression formation, and can lead to inaccuracy in
our ratings of others traits and performances.

B. Group Stereotypes - A stereotype is a set of characteristics attributed to all
members of some specified group or social category. Just like other types of schemas,
stereotypes simplify the complex social world. Rather than treating each member of a
group individually, stereotypes encourage us to think about and treat all feminists,
southerners, or lawyers the same way.

Stereotypes can also have less direct effects on members of stereotyped groups
through a process called stereotype threat. Investigators have studied ethnic, racial,
and gender stereotypes for many years, and the results show that the content of
stereotypes changes over time.

IV. Impression Formation

A. Trait Centrality - Regardless of how we get information about the other, we as
perceivers must find a way to integrate these diverse facts into a coherent picture.
This process of organizing diverse information into a unified impression of the other
person is called impression formation. We say that a trait has a high level of trait
centrality when it has a large impact on the overall impression we form of that
person. Individuals try to make a good impression when interviewing for a new job,
entering a new group, or meeting an attractive potential date, for example.
Observers forming an impression of a person who gives more weight to information
received early in a sequence than to information received later, are engaging in the
primacy effect.

B. First Impressions - Sometimes, however, we find a recency effect, when the most
recent information we have influences our impressions. It is likely to occur when so
much time has passed that we have largely forgotten our first impression or when we
are judging characteristics that change over time, like moods or attitudes.

C. Impressions as Self-Fulfilling Prophecies - Because our own actions evoke
appropriate reactions from others, our initial impressions whether correct or
incorrect are often confirmed by the reactions of others. When this happens, our
impressions become self-fulfilling prophecies.

D. Heuristics - A heuristic provides a quick way of selecting a schema that although
far from infallible often helps us make an effective choice amid considerable
uncertainty. One factor that determines how likely we are to choose a particular
schema is how long it has been since we have used that particular schema, this is
referred to as the availability heuristic. A second heuristic we often use is called the
representativeness heuristic. Oftentimes, we will use some particular standard as a
starting point. This starting point is called an anchor, and our modification relative to
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the anchor is called adjustment. When using this heuristic, however, we do not always
have meaningful anchors.

V. Attribution Theory

A. Dispositional Versus Situational Attributions - The term attribution refers to the
process that an observer uses to infer the causes of anothers behavior. Theories of
attribution focus on the methods we use to interpret another persons behavior and to
infer its sources.

The most crucial decision that observers make is whether to attribute a behavior to the
internal state(s) of the person who performed it, dispositional attribution, or to
factors in that persons environment, situational attribution.

B. Inferring Dispositions From Acts - When we try to infer a persons dispositions, our
perspective is much like that of a detective. We can observe only the act (a man gives
coins to the Salvation Army) and the effects of that act (the Salvation Army receives
more resources, the woman smiles at the man, the mans pocket is no longer cluttered
with coins).

Several factors influence observers decisions regarding which effect(s) the person is
really pursuing and, hence, what dispositional inference is appropriate. These factors
include the commonality of effects, the social desirability of effects, and the
normativeness of effects.

C. Covariation Model of Attribution - We try to figure out whether the behavior
occurs in the presence or absence of various factors (actors, objects, contexts) that are
possible causes. Then to identify the cause(s) of the behavior, we apply the principle
of covariation: We attribute the behavior to the factor that is both present when the
behavior occurs and absent when the behavior fails to occur - the cause that covaries
with the behavior. The three types of information we rely on are consensus,
consistency, and distinctiveness of information (see Table 4.3).

D. Attributions for Success and Failure - Four factors ability, effort, task difficulty,
and luck are general and apply in many settings. Observers must consider two
things. First, they must decide whether the outcome is due to causes within the actor
(i.e., an internal or dispositional attribution), or due to causes in the environment (i.e.,
an external or situational attribution). Second, they must decide whether the outcome
is a stable or an unstable occurrence. Only after observers make judgments regarding
internality-externality and stability-instability can they reach conclusions regarding
the cause(s) of the success or failure.

VI. Bias and Error in Attribution

A. Overattribution to Dispositions - The tendency to overestimate the importance of
personal (dispositional) factors and to underestimate situational influences as causes
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of behavior is so common that it is called the fundamental attribution error, and it
has been documented in many studies over the years. This bias is especially
dangerous when it causes us to overlook the advantages of power built into social
roles.

B. Focus of Attention Bias - A closely related error is the tendency to overestimate the
causal impact of whomever or whatever we focus our attention on; this is called the
focus of attention bias. We perceive the stimuli that are most salient in the
environment those that attract our attention as most causally influential.

C. Actor-Observer Difference - Actors and observers make different attributions for
behavior. Observers tend to attribute actors behavior to the actors internal
characteristics, whereas actors see their own behavior as due more to characteristics
of the external situation. This tendency is known as the actor-observer difference.

D. Motivational Biases - Motivational factors, or a persons needs, interests, and goals,
are another source of bias in attributions. When events affect a persons self-interests,
biased attribution is likely. People tend to take credit for acts that yield positive
outcomes, whereas they deflect blame for bad outcomes and attribute them to external
causes. This phenomenon, referred to as the self-serving bias.
Various motives may contribute to this self-serving bias in attributions of
performance.