What are Traits?
• behavioural tendencies which are reasonably consistent overtime and situations. • Traits labels like “honest” are our shorthand and used to describe these behavioural tendencies quickly and in a way that can easily be communicated with others. • They serve as an efficient way to organize vast amounts of information about others.
Why are person perceptions so important?
• From an evolutionary perspective we need to be able to identify social ideas and threats from conspecifics (member of the same species). • When we meet new people, we need to establish quickly if they’re likely to hurt us or hinder us in our pursuit to our goals. • In general, we are much more attuned to negative then we are positive personal behavior’s because negative social behaviors are more likely to represent a threat. For example, an aggressive person is likely to do physical harm or a dishonest person is likely to lie to us, betray our trust or reciprocate our behavior’s (cooperation and assistance in times of need).
*evolution and everyday life
What are the two primary dimensions of person perceptions?
(A) Warmth:
a. We determine the
probability that their
intentions are to hurt or
harm us based on our
perceptions of their
interpersonal warmth.
b. Morality-based judgements
on likability, friendliness,
honesty or trustworthiness
etc.
(B) Competence:
a. We determine their ability to
act their intentions to help
or harm us.
b. An intelligent enemy is
more of a threat to us than a
malevolent idiot.Spontaneous Trait Inferences?
• When we implicitly infer people’s personality traits based on their observable behaviors. For example, if Tom is described as having engaged in honest behavior, we are likely to infer that he is in fact an honest person. • What we infer about someone influences how we subsequently interact with them. • Anything can influence our impressions outside our awareness.
• Implicit impressions: impressions outside of conscious awareness, available to conscious memory, require explicit recall of behaviors that served as the foundation for the impression and are not easily communicated to others. • Are implicit and automatic i.e., you do not need to be explicitly asked whether you think Nicola is an honest person to infer that she is dishonest for cheating. • They occur without intention of the perceiver i.e., did not consciously aim to infer someone’s traits from their behavior or have to be thinking about impression formation at the time for STI’s to occur. • However, these STI’s still influence how we think, feel and act towards other people.
*what we infer about others
influences how we act
towards them!
Evidence of STI’s is quite clear:
• When exposed to a behavior which implies a specific trait, not only do perceivers abstract the persons trait from the behavior but they also link it directly to the actor. • This is an example of how we can make spontaneous trait inferences about others and infer their disposition from their behavior - If we catch Nicola cheating on a test the trait “dishonest” is activated and we link that behavior directly to her and conclude that Nicola is a dishonest person. • From an evolutionary perspective because making spontaneous trait inferences are fundamentals to socialization, and survival it is expected that we have evolved to do so quickly, reliably and with little effort. • Eeg studies show we can process and recognize a face in 200milliseconds, we encode faces incredibly faces. Secondly, we process face which are angry or threatening faces much more quickly and stand out in visual array tasks.
In most cases, the information we use to infer personalities of others is not from their behaviour. In fact, the first and only information we have about someone is …
Their visual cues such as their physical appearance. The most salient aspect of physical appearance is their face, it draws our attention, and we are hard-wired to rapidly recognize and process them.
Empirical Evidence on Facial Processing:
• In lower primates, monkeys have neurons in the inferior temporal cortex only fire in response to the faces of other monkeys. • It is proposed that humans share a similar facial recognition center. As evident in newborn babies which have the facial recognition capacity to recognize and mimic the facial expressions of their caregivers. • Brain imaging in natural lesion studies have identified areas of activation that only occur when faces are being processed, in the fusa form face area and the superior temporal solcus.
*We are especially in tuned to faces because they’re biologically relevant and once attention has been drawn to the face, we can them make rapid judgements about socially relevant domains.
How much information do we really need before we can make an inference?
Willis & Todorov (2006):
When looking at faces it can be as little as 100ms.
Willis & Todorov (2006): provide evidence that when participants were given novel faces and asked to rate them in terms of attractiveness, trustworthiness, competency, likability and aggressiveness.
Conditions:
(A) Self-paced condition- could
look at the faces for as long
as they wanted before
making a judgement.
(B) 100ms exposure to face
(C) 500ms exposure to face
(D) 1000ms exposure to faceResults:
(A) Correlations between
scores on the limited time
conditions and the
unlimited time conditions to
see whether or not similar
judgements were made
across the different
exposure times.
a. They found extremely strong
correlations for
attractiveness and
trustworthiness ratings (with
restrained and unrestrained
STI’s) even at the smallest
of presentation time
(100ms). Indicating that
people who made
impressions of
attractiveness and
trustworthiness at 100ms
produced very similar
impressions as people who
looked at the face for a
longer period of time (500
or 1000ms).
b. Not surprising, when these
two judgements are
important in mate selection
and thus, serves an
evolutionary function.
c. This is one way to think
about accuracy, whether or
not multiple raters agree on
a judgement.How do we determine accuracy of personality trait inferences?
Three criteria:
(A) Self-Other Agreement: • Someone rates themselves • Others rate the target • Compare self and other ratings for agreement. High correlation between self and other judgements indicate accuracy.
(B) Other-Other Agreement: • Two or more people rate the same target individual. • Seeking consensus among other’s in their ratings of the target individual.
(C) Behavioral prediction: • The extent to which our inferences made is useful in predicting behavior. • The best way to measure accuracy!
*none of these measurements are perfect on their own, ideally a researcher would use all three but there are research constraints which make it unlikely that all three can be used in the same study.
What you tend to see is: self-other and other-other agreements within the same study to observe the accuracy of people’s impression formations.
A better question than “are we accurate?” is “when and how do people make accurate personability judgments?”
Funder (2013) argues that in his Realistic Accuracy Model (RAM) there are four things necessary for accurate personality judgments to be made:
1. The person being judged
must do something
RELEVANT to the trait
(behavior made)
2. The trait-relevant behavior
must be AVAILABLE to the
judge (present and
observable)
3. The available trait relevant
behavior must be
DETECTED (perceived and
not misperceived, perceiver
not distracted)
4. The detected, available,
trait-relevant behavioral
information must be
UTALIZED correctly (trait
behavior must be
interpreted correctly i.e.,
friendly smile and not
sarcastic or deceptive)- how the behavioral information is interpreted (utilized) determines whether the personality inference made is likely to match the actual personality of the target.
- all four are required in order for any kind of inference about personality trait to be made accurately!
- this model depicts the conditions for what MUST be there for an accurate impression to be formed, it does NOT tell us how impressions are always formed, shows us that accurate judgements are hard and how bias can creep in at any one of these steps.
Accuracy judgments with self-other judgements:
*self-ratings compared to other ratings of people who know the target.
An underlying assumption is:
(A) that self-judgements are
accurate-
a. most people believe we
know ourselves better than
other people do but is this
accurate?
b. We have more information
available to make more
accurate judgments about
our own personality than
other could.
c. However, people may not
be aware of their own
behavior’s i.e., frowning
when talking to others
which can be perceived as
disliking or as arrogance
when it is actually due to
concentration.
d. There are motivations which
can bias how we view the
self.What cognitive biases influence peoples accuracy of self-perceptions:
i. We may attribute a negative
behavior to something
external to the self and
more likely to attribute
positive behaviors to a
dispositional factor about
ourselves.
ii. We are motivated to
maintain an enhanced
positive self-view and is
more biased towards
positive behaviours (relative
to negative) than others
perceptions of us will be.
iii. The better than average
effect, we have a tendency
to view ourselves as better
than average on positive
traits and below average
on negative traits.
Statistically, this cannot be
true.
iv. Another perceptual bias is
the tendency to think that
others will view us as we
perceive ourselves.
***despite the potential biases
which can influence self-
other biases they’re equally
as accurate at predicting
behavior as other-other
perceptions BUT they
provide different
information:What unique information does self-perception give us relative to others?
*SOKA effect.
a. The self provides better
information for judging
internal traits such as
thoughts and feelings (e.g.,
optimism or anxiety).
b. Others provide better
information for judging
external traits such as overt
behaviors (e.g., facial
expressions, enthusiasm).
*this effect has been labeled as the “self-other knowledge asymmetry” (SOKA) and suggests that self- perceptions on highly evaluative traits are biased by motivations to see the self positively.
How does non-conscious behavioural mimicry link to person perception?
• Person perception is all about sending and receiving social signals. • As the RAM model showed, the actor needs to send signals that are both relevant and accessible by the perceiver. • The perceiver must receive, encode and interpret these signals in order for the possibility of an accurate impression to be formed. • Mimicry is all about sending signals that can overwhelm other signals that could be more diagnostic in evaluating another person. In other words, create a positive impression formation that is not actually grounded in any diagnostic behaviors he engages in that directly link to his personality. It’s a form of subtle behavior mirroring that causes us to think we are more alike than we really are and inadvertently rate them more positively (because we like similar others and think they will like us more as well). • We all engage in mimicry and it most often occurs at a subconscious level, automatic = nonconscious behavioral mimicry. • Synchronous behavior is common in our daily lives.
Video: The human spark (I liked to be mimicked)
• Non-consciously pick up on people’s mannerisms, gestures, postures and mirror them in our own behavior. • A consequence of being mimicked by other people it puts us in a prosocial orientation, feel closer to others in general and as a function of this be more willing to sit next to a stranger. • Improves confederates and participants likability ratings when mimicry is present. • Mimicry made people act more pro-socially and helped the confederate pick up their pens when they dropped them. • In trials that the confederate anti-mimicked the participants leads them to feel rejected and disrupted what people perceive to be a normal social interaction and lead them to be less able to regulate themselves on a later task (e.g., procrastination or binge- eating etc.).
There are a lot of ways in which our social judgements can be biased. Through the use of quick and dirty heuristics:
The Linda Problem:
Linda majored in philosophy and deeply concerned with issues on discrimination and social justice and participated in many anti-nuclear demonstrations. What is more likely that Linda is a bank teller or that is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement? Most people say (B) that Linda is both a bank teller and active in the feminist movement. This is wrong, and an example of the “
The probability of someone being a part of two categories is less likely than them being a part of one. This is an example of the conjunction fallacy, how the descriptions about Linda increased how representative she is perceived to be as a feminist (a category) and leads us to infer that she is more likely to be a member of two categories rather than one, which is statistically less likely.
What would happen if you added a third option into the Linda problem (likely to be a feminist)
Now if we added a third option, is Linda a bank teller, Linda is active in the feminist movement or Linda is both. Most people would not choose the last option given that description.
What other factors could influence our perceptions of Linda?
(A) Misalignment or Alignment
of beliefs
(B) What is accessible at the
time
(C) More sensitive to
negativity than positive
traits. Why?it is better to
make a false positive
mistake than to make a
false negative mistake
when it comes to potential
danger. It’s better to
incorrectly infer that a nice
person is aggressive then
to infer than an aggressive
person is nice. On the one
hand you may avoid
someone who is perfectly
pleasant, but you could
also avoid someone who
may physically harm you.
(D) We are also overly positive
to people we are close to;
we give close friends and
romantic partners the
benefit of the doubt.Despite the evidence on biases:
We generally do pretty well, make accurate person perceptions. Given the adaptive and functional importance of person perceptions and its roots in our everyday lives its perhaps its unsurprising that we have evolved these highly efficient processes that can take a great deal of complex social information and compact it into something we can use to make rapid judgements.
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Module 1: Introduction to Psychology28
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Module 3: Abnormal37
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Module 5: Compensatory Control READINGS28
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Module 6: Emotion Regulation31
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module 5: lectures24
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Module 8: Impression Formation READINGS34
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Module 8: Impression Formation Lectures19
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Module 10: Love and Romantic Relationships21
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Module 10: Reading15
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Module 11: Psychopathic Personality LECTURES28
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Module 11: READINGS (3)11
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Module 11: READINGS (2)16
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Module 11: READINGS (1)18
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last minuet cue cards3
