Study guide: Perception and Social Cognition

📋 Course Outline

1. Foundations of Perception
2. Social Perception and Identity
3. Perceptual Factors and Barriers
4. Selective Perception Biases
5. Attribution Theory and Biases
6. Stereotypes and Social Categorization
7. Stereotype Effects and Expectations

📖 1. Foundations of Perception

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Perception: a cognitive process that enables people to interpret and understand their environment
• Physical perception: the process of gathering information through the five senses and adding meaning to it

★ Must-know

• 🔄 Perception proceeds through three stages:
  1. Selective attention
  2. Organization and categorization
  3. Interpretation

Further detail

• Perception is a translation and distortion mechanism that is unique to each individual because people perceive the world around them differently.

💡 Memory Hook

Select → organize → interpret

📖 2. Social Perception and Identity

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Social perception: the process by which people come to understand one another

★ Must-know

📌 Personality is a psychological question, whereas identity is a sociological question connected to perception.

• Social perception is based on acquired and unconscious assumptions and mental models, and it is guided by needs, motivations, interests and mood.

Further detail

• Social perception is an interactive, intersubjective process, and perceptions influence current and future behavior.

💡 Memory Hook

Personality is psychological; identity is sociological

📖 3. Perceptual Factors and Barriers

★ Must-know

• Factors in the perceiver include:

  • Attitudes
  • Motives
  • Interests
  • Values
  • Familiarity with the target
  • Self-concept

• Factors in the target include:

  • Novelty
  • Motion
  • Sounds
  • Size
  • Background
  • Proximity
  • Similarity
  • Verbal and non-verbal communication
  • Inferred intention

• Barriers to social perception include:

  • Attribution errors
  • Selective perception
  • Stereotyping
  • First-impression effects
  • Projection
  • Self-fulfilling prophecies

Further detail

• Factors in the situation include:
  • Time
  • Work setting
  • Social setting
  • Mood
  • Experience
  • Knowledge
  • Expectations

📖 4. Selective Perception Biases

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Selective perception: selecting information that supports one’s viewpoint while ignoring other information
• Selective exposure: the active avoidance of arguments that contradict one’s own opinions
• Confirmation bias: influences the search for information, the interpretation of facts and the selective memory of facts in favor of an existing view
• Halo effect: drawing a general impression about a person from a single positive or negative characteristic
• Projection bias: attributing one’s own characteristics, beliefs, expectations and behavior to other people and assuming that one’s beliefs and values are commonly held
• Contrast effect: evaluating a person’s characteristics by comparing them with those of recently encountered people who rank higher or lower on the same characteristics

📖 5. Attribution Theory and Biases

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Attribution theory: explains how people infer whether behavior is caused by internal factors, such as values, personality, effort, motivation or ability, or external factors, such as luck, fate, other people’s behavior or the environment
• Fundamental attribution error: the systematic tendency to attribute another person’s behavior to internal causes while underestimating external causes
• Self-serving bias: the systematic tendency to attribute one’s successes to internal causes and one’s failures to external causes

📝 Essential Points

• Jones and Harris’s 1967 study found that participants inferred an essay writer’s attitude from the essay content while neglecting whether the writer had been forced to write it.

💡 Memory Hook

Others: situation ignored; self: success claimed, failure externalized

📖 6. Stereotypes and Social Categorization

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Stereotype: the cognitive dimension of an attitude and a social belief that individuals from one group have about a target group

★ Must-know

📌 Stereotype is the cognitive dimension of an attitude, prejudice is the emotional dimension, and discrimination is the conative dimension.

• Research on sex stereotypes found that men are commonly viewed as competent and independent, whereas women are commonly viewed as warm and expressive. — Fiske, 1998

• 🔄 Social identification proceeds through:

  1. Categorization
  2. Identification
  3. Comparison

Further detail

• Stereotypes can simplify reality and save time, support a positive self-image through favorable group comparison, and help people maintain control through shared schemes and opinions.

💡 Memory Hook

Categorization → identification → comparison

📖 7. Stereotype Effects and Expectations

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Stereotype threat: Steele & Aronson, 1995 — the tension caused by fear of confirming a negative stereotype, which can decrease performance and thereby confirm the stereotype
• Self-fulfilling prophecy: Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968 — occurs when expectations about another person shape interactions in ways that cause the person’s behavior to become consistent with those expectations

★ Must-know

• Rosenthal and Jacobson found a significant IQ increase among students designated as late bloomers, averaging 8 points, with differences of 5 points at the first post-test, 2.5 points at the second and 1 point at the third. — Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968

Further detail

• The four explanatory factors were:

  • Climate
  • Input
  • Participation
  • Feedback

• Jane Elliott’s classroom exercise showed that children labeled inferior adopted the behavior and performance of inferior students, while children labeled superior excelled and discriminated against their former peers. — A Class Divided, 1970

• The Clark Doll Experiment found that most Black children preferred a white doll over an otherwise identical Black doll because they considered the white doll nicer. — Kenneth B. Clark, 1939

💡 Memory Hook

Expectations → interaction → behavior

📊 Synthesis Tables

Attitude Dimensions