© Hodder Education 2010 Part 4 Social Psychology Chapter 22 Social Perception.

© Hodder Education 2010

Part 4Social Psychology

Chapter 22

Social Perception


Perceiving objects & perceiving people

Perceiving objects & perceiving people continued

• Gahagan (1984) defines interpersonal perception as ‘the study of how the layperson uses theory and data in understanding people’. This involves the study of how we perceive others as physical objects, psychological entities, and the lay person as psychologist.



The person as thinkerAccording to Fiske & Taylor (1991), there are four guises that the cognitive tradition has assumed. They see the person as:1. Consistency seeker: e.g. cognitive dissonance theory

(Festinger, 1957).2. Naive scientist: Heider’s (1958) common-sense psychology

and all subsequent attribution theories.3. Cognitive miser: study of error/bias in the attribution process

(e.g. Nisbett & Ross, 1980) and heuristics (such as availability and representativeness: Tversky & Kahneman, 1974).

4. Motivated tactician: the ‘cognitive-affective human being’ (Leyens & Codol, 1988).


Social representations (SRs)• Moscovici (1981) defined SRs as: ‘a set of concepts,

statements and explanations originating in daily life in the course of inter-individual communications ... they might ... be said to be the contemporary version of common sense’.

• Personification: new and complex ideas are linked with a person.

• Figuration: complex ideas are concerted into visual images.• Both of these are examples of objectification: the need to make

the abstract concrete. • Related to this is the need to anchor new and unfamiliar ideas

into some pre-existing (i.e. familiar) system (e.g. Jodelet, 1980).


Forming global impressions of people

Central vs peripheral traits• Asch (1946): principle of coherence; Kelley (1950); Zebrowitz

(1990); Anderson’s (1974) averaging/algebraic model; Bruner & Tagiuri’s (1954): both general impressions and inferences about additional traits reflect implicit personality theories (IPTs).

The primacy-recency effect• Initial support for the primacy effect (‘first impressions count’)

came from Asch (1946); Luchins (1957). But Jones et al.’s (1968) unexpected findings support the recency effect. Negative first impressions are especially resistant to change than positive ones.


Inferring what people are like• The halo effect (positive/negative) is a very general form of

implicit personality theory (IPT); this enables us to infer what people are like when we have only very limited information about them (e.g. names, physical appearance (Allport, 1954)).

• Stereotypes (Lippmann (1922): ‘pictures in our heads’) can be thought of as a special kind of IPT that relate to an entire social group. The Princeton studies (Katz & Braly, 1933; Gilbert, 1951; Karlins et al., 1969) were conducted in relation to prejudice. American researchers saw stereotypes as false overgeneralisations, but from a cognitive perspective, stereotyping is a normal mental shortcut based on the normal process of categorisation.

© Hodder Education 2010 Part 4 Social Psychology Chapter 22 Social Perception.

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