How do you form your first impressions of others? Do you look at their clothes or body language? Do you compare them in some way to someone else you know with similar characteristics? Do you allow your personal biases and prejudices to influence how you perceive the person? Does culture influence your impressions of others? Think about an example of making a social judgment about another person or a group of people

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• How do you form your first impressions of others? Do you look at their clothes or body language? Do you compare them in some way to someone else you know with similar characteristics? Do you allow your personal biases and prejudices to influence how you perceive the person? Does culture influence your impressions of others? Think about an example of making a social judgment about another person or a group of people. For instance, if you met a mother with four young children, you probably would have some preconceived ideas of what she is like and how she will behave. This expected behavior will be very different from a distinguished looking elderly man in a suit and bowtie. You probably make some kind of judgment with every encounter you have or observation you make of others.This week, you explore social cognition and perception which deal with how people make sense of the world around them. This week's readings focus on how the brain uses schemas and heuristics to make automatic inferences. You also study how additional factors, such as unintentional nonverbal communication, impact our impressions of other people.
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• Select one person in each category below:
  • A person you do not know and who you probably will not see again (clerk at the grocery store, etc.)
  • A person you have known for some time and for whom you can remember your first impressions (acquaintance, friend, spouse, etc.)
• Briefly describe each person including his or her specific behavior at your first meeting, the context of your interaction with each person, and your first impression of each person.
• Explain whether you made external (situational) and/or internal (dispositional) attributions for each person's behavior during that first meeting.
• Did you engage in automatic thinking or controlled thinking in forming your first impression of each person? Explain. What, if any, schemas or heuristics did you use?
• With which culture(s) do you identify? According to the information in this week's readings, how does your culture influence your impressions of others? For example, (a) how does your culture influence the content of a particular schema (Aronson, Wilson, & Sommers, 2019, p. 70), (b) which culturally-specific display rules influence your impressions (Aronson, Wilson, & Sommers, 2019, pp. 889-90), or (c) when have you engaged in holistic or analytic thinking as your culture would predict (Aronson, Wilson, & Sommers, 2019, p. 110)

PERSON PERCEPTION Dr. C. George Boeree MENTAL STRUCTURES The basic building blocks of meaning we could call contrasts: we cut up the world into little pieces, we separate this from that, we make differentiations. There are many other names we could use: constructs, concepts, percepts, categories, dimensions, and so on, all with slightly differing meanings. But they all ultimately refer to this process of making one into two: more or less; it's this or it's that; there are two kinds of people in the world; it's them or us; it's got to be one or the other; it's black or white; please answer, yes or no; what goes up must come down. Most of the time, we use only one end or the other of a contrast at a time. These ends are called characteristics or, especially in reference to the characteristics of people, traits. But the other end is always there, lurking in the background. You can't have one without the other -- good without bad, up without down, fat without thin... Please note that these contrast need not be verbal: My cat knows the difference between the expensive cat food and the cheap stuff, yet can't tell you about it; an infant contrasts between mommy and non-mommy; wild animals contrast safe areas and dangerous ones, etc. Even adult humans sometimes "just know" without being about to say -- unconscious contrasts, if you like: what is it about that person that you like or dislike? Contrasts don't just float around independently, either. We interrelate and organize them. For example, we can define a category: "Women are adult female human beings." Or we can go a step further and organize things into taxonomies, those treelike structures we come across in biology: A Siamese is a kind of cat, which is a kind of carnivore, which is a kind of mammal, which is a kind of vertebrate.... Or we can put contrasts into more temporal structures, like rules. These are often called schemas or scripts. You can find explicit examples in books about card games, etiquette, or grammar; but you know quite a few rule systems yourself, even if they have become so automatic as to be unconscious! Not all organization of contrasts are so tightly structured. We can describe something: "Women are delicate." As the example is intended to suggest, descriptions, as opposed to definitions, need not be true! Beliefs are similar to, but looser than, taxonomies. Whereas birds definitely (i.e. by definition) are vertebrates and have feathers, it is only my belief that they all fly—I could be wrong! Stereotypes are examples of beliefs; so are opinions. But some beliefs are so strongly held that we see them as definite. There are also narratives—the stories we have in our minds. These are temporal, like rules, but are amazingly flexible. They can be a matter of remembered personal experiences, or memorized history lessons, or pure fiction. I have a suspicion that these contribute greatly to our sense of identity, and that animals don't have them to the degree we do. Generativity One lovely thing we can do with the verbal contrasts and characteristics is describe a person to someone—i.e., give a list of traits. We then begin to deal with them socially before we actually meet them! They, in fact, could be long dead, and yet we can get to know them somewhat. Each word or phrase we give or hear narrows the range of possible expectations a little more. He's male? So what. He's male, 40-ish, chubby, a professor of psychology... Oh, I know who you mean. The more that is said, the more precise the anticipations. In linguistics, it is said that language is generative. That means that, with a small set of words and a small set of rules of grammar, you can create (generate) a potentially infinite set of meaningful sentences. Well, this generativity is characteristic of all human activity. This means that, no matter how many contrasts you can relate about a chubby professor or whatever, there are still an infinite number of possible characteristics or behaviors that the 40-ish professor can generate. That professor, in other words, can still surprise you! Since we are still "built" to try to anticipate him, we try one more thing: We try to anticipate others by putting ourselves into our anticipations! We make the assumption that they will do what we would do if we were in their situation and in the kinds of pigeon-holes we have placed them in. I call this "the assumption of empathic understanding." This seems to be such a strong tendency in human beings that we often do it when we are trying to anticipate non-human beings and things. We tend to be anthropomorphic in our dealings with animals, for example. I tend to see my cat as being manipulative, Machiavellian, even sociopathic when, in fact, she doesn't have the I.Q. of a bean sprout. We even attribute "souls" to non-living things, which is called animism. So our ancestors attempted to appease angry volcanoes, or give thanks for the generosity of the earth, and so on. When all else fails, we expect others to be like us. Interaction of traits Some of the preceding makes people sound rather computerish—all orderly and neat. For better or for worse, however, there is nothing terribly neat about our use of traits. Trait meanings can vary quite a bit, depending on the context they, and we, are in. Traits vary, for example, in the presence of other traits. The original research on this involved giving people lists of trait adjectives, as if we were describing a blind-date: "He's cute, has a good personality, works at the mall, drives a 'vette..." For example, try to imagine this person: cold, handsome, intelligent, concerned. Compare your image with this person: warm, handsome, intelligent, concerned. If I asked you for details, you might have some like mine: Number one is a physicist, looks a bit like James Bond, and is concerned about the disposal of nuclear waste; Number two is a psychologist, is the "cute" kind of handsome, and is concerned with the emotional welfare of young children. Some traits—called central traits—are "heavier" than others, that is, are responsible for more alteration in other traits while tending to remain relatively untouched themselves. Warm-cold is an example. Or try imagining this person: Strong, tough, cold, athletic, and...female. What happened? Well, we all know strong, tough, cold, athletic women; but malefemale is a very strong contrast and influences our interpretation of other traits dramatically. It also seems that the first traits we hear have the greatest effects. Try this one: Popular, friendly, warm, ugly. And compare it with this one: Ugly, warm, friendly, popular.. In the second example, you more easily adapted the following words to the prime one (ugly), whereas in the first, your stereotypes had you imagining a fairly attractive person. Note that these things don't just happen when we describe someone with a list of trait adjectives. They happen as we piece together our impressions of a real person right in front of us! And so our last example is also the way "first impressions" happen. And first impressions do, indeed, have a large impact. Put first impressions together with the heaviest contrast of all—good-bad—and you have what is called the halo effect: If we quickly evaluate a person as good, everything afterwards will be seen with a "halo" around it... this person can do no wrong! If we see them as bad, the halo becomes horns, hoofs, and a pointy tail, and even possible positive traits are interpreted negatively! Inferences As I said earlier, contrasts don't just float around loose. They are organized to some degree. This means that we can make inferences from one characteristic to another. Usually, this means going from a fairly obvious characteristic to one that is more "abstract," hidden, or uncertain. For example, when you see a person in a lab coat with a stethoscope around her neck and a certain kind of diploma on the wall, you might infer that this person is a physician. Or if you see someone being rude to someone else, you might infer that she is obnoxious, that is, has some inner trait that will lead her to be rude in other situations and might involve other behaviors as well. Note that some of our inferences are more a matter of definitions, and others are more a matter of beliefs. Certain college degrees, for example, are crucial to who is or isn't a doctor; their manner of dress, or their bedside manners, might be important, but are not crucial. There are several different bases for the inferences we make: (1) A smile is usually correctly understood as an indication of happiness because smiles seem to be a part of our biology. There is no culture in the world that does not understand the smile, though many misuse and pervert that understanding. (2) "The finger" is understood, in our culture, as an indication of contempt, because it is a part of our cultural communications system. Language, gestures, clothing, social ritual, occupation, and much of body language is cultural. (3) Being female has been, in our culture, traditionally assumed to imply poor mechanical ability. This assumption, of course, has lead parents to discourage the development of mechanical abilities in their daughters: Why bother? The inference is, therefore, a self-fulfilling prophecy. The expectation creates itself! (4) Finally, many of our inferences don't really work at all. They are perpetuated because we often ignore or deny contradictions—perhaps they are threatening to us— or the contradictions simply don't show up well, as when we have little contact with some category of people. We could call these superstitious inferences. INFERENCES FROM APPEARANCE Probably the simplest inferences we can make begin with the appearance of the person before us. As you'll see, there is a good deal of superstition here, but also some inferences well rooted in biology. Facial expression of emotion First, we tend to infer emotion from facial expressions. Charles Darwin noted that animals as well as people communicate emotion through facial expression, and that certain expressions appear to be universal among human beings: Smiling is a sign of happiness and warmth towards another; crying is a sign of sadness; the frown with down-turned eye-brows is a sign of anger. Laughter, too, is universal, but it is a more complex thing: It may signify happiness, yet if someone greeted you by laughing, you would feel funny—laughter can be very hostile, as when we find someone's misfortunes amusing. In other words, laughter reflects interpersonal tension and tension-release, such as when we conclude that we are not afraid of the stranger (that silly clown!) after all. Anthropologists have noted these and other expressions even in cultures that had had no previous contact with the mainstream of world cultures. Not only the expressions but the inferences we make from the expressions may be built-in. Notice how we tend to smile when someone smiles, or cry when they cry. Even babies do that! It's called "social contagion," and may explain the sometimes terrifying behavior of mobs. But notice that some expressions are culture-bound, such as the single raised eyebrow (signifying wry amusement in our culture) or the tongue pushing out the cheek (signifying sexual interest in Latin America). And further, we can manipulate even our natural expressions. All the European cultures use facial expressions willfully and in exaggerated fashion. Other cultures, notably the Japanese, suppress some expressions and use stereotypical versions of others. Only a few cultures, such as the Polynesians', tend to express their feelings fairly directly and honestly. Finally, of course, no matter what your natural feelings or your cultural adaptations, you can lie with your facial expressions. It takes a good eye to catch the minute differences between a well-acted emotion and the real thing! Facial structure It is perhaps the biological bases of facial expressions that leads us to make further inferences based on facial structures: A blockhead is honest but dumb, a weak chin means a weak personality, a high brow means great intelligence, a low brow means coarse or vulgar tastes, beady eyes means sneakiness, a prune-face suggests a prude, and so on. Most of these are superstitious or even bigoted: Some derive from the supposed characteristics of certain ethnic groups and their supposed similarity to certain animals (English stereotypes of Irish people, for example—they all look like leprechauns, don't they now?) Some—the prune face or beauty-pageant smiles, for example—are the results of habitual expressions of disgust or sociability. Beware of how you hold your face: It may stay that way! The body And if your face can tell something about you, why not your body? William Sheldon even developed a theory (with some supportive research) that connected body types with personality types: To exaggerate, thin people (ectomorphs) are neurotic (cerebrotonic), muscular people (mesomorphs) are jocks (somatotonic), and fat people (endomorphs) are jolly (viscerotonic). Sheldon maintained that there really is a biological (or, more precisely, an embryological) connection. But it could also be a matter of self-fulfilling prophecy: The broad-shouldered boy gets pushed into football by his over-zealous father, or the lonely chubby girl makes jokes at her own expense in order to make friends. Clothing Fortunately, we cover our bodies with clothing. (I've been to nude beaches and they are not a pretty sight!) And this gives us another opportunity for making inferences. Obviously, there's nothing biological here. First, it is a great opportunity for communicating about oneself, consciously and unconsciously. It is a way of expressing ourselves. Sometimes, the communication is very direct: you can wear a t-shirt with a political slogan or favorite band on it, for example, or wear a cross, or a star of David, or yinyang, or peace sign. But generally, in order to communicate, we need to rely on our cultures' stereotypes. Otherwise, how would others know what kind of statement we are trying to make? This is another example of the effect of context on person perception. For example, if one dresses sloppily (relative to the norms of your society), that might suggests to people in one culture that one is lazy. In another culture, it might suggest that the person is interested in higher things. In a third, it might suggest that the person is relaxed and comfortable. In a fourth, it might mean you are uncouth.... Within a culture, sloppy may mean good things at a family barbecue, and bad things at uncle Joe's funeral! A curious point: If you dress "conventionally" (for whatever place and time you are in), people will trust you more! Deviation in dress suggests deviation in other matters as well. Actually, you needn't move from one culture to another. You can stay in one place and just wait a few years: The styles will change. In the 1950's lipstick meant liberal; in the 1960's, it meant conservative. Today...I don't know. Glasses used to mean smart, reliable, industrious (frequent reading may have led to this stereotype!); today, with the availability of contacts, glasses are simply a choice. Again notice that we can lie with clothes, even more easily than with our facial expressions. We can, for example, "dress for success," or at least for an interview. Please notice that these inferences are not necessarily from the obvious to the less visible—we can work them backwards, too. For example, what does a librarian look like? Forgive me my stereotypes, but I picture a woman (despite the many male librarians I've met), a bit older, dressed in a conservative suit (tweed, even), dark stockings, sensible shoes, hair in a bun, and glasses with one of those little gold chains. I'm ashamed of myself, but there is in fact a little of the self-fulfilling prophecy at work here: Someone who wants to be a librarian, identifies with the profession, may in fact tend to dress in keeping with the stereotype and thereby promote it! Attractiveness The strongest effect of face and body is the overall characteristic of attractiveness. We tend to see pretty people as being nicer, smarter, even morally better—we like them more. This has held up under the research: for example, psychologists found that teachers preferred and expected more from the pretty kids and less from the unattractive ones. They even made excuses when the attractive ones didn't meet up with their expectations! I should note that the longer you know someone, the less important their attractiveness becomes. And also note that there are plenty of exceptions to the rules when it comes to making inferences from attractiveness—note the "dumb blonde" stereotype. And finally, don't forget that beauty is in the eye of the beholder—it is very subjective and (beauty pageants to the contrary) impossible to measure! Speech Along with appearance we can include how you sound. We can make quite a few inferences from the sound of your voice, and not too inaccurately, either. For example, we can infer social class. In England, for example, we can easily tell the upper class dialects of Brideshead Revisited from the lower class dialects of Upstairs Downstairs. This isn't restricted to England by any means, though. On Long Island, for example, you can hear a range of class dialects running from "Long Island Lockjaw," named for the way its speakers keep their teeth together when they speak, to the working class dialects famous for their "Jeet yet?" and "Watcha doon?" We can also tell people's origins. Australians (“Ozzies”), for example, stand out when they speak "Strilian" and wish you a "G'die mite." Likewise, we can tell Americans from Brits, Scotsmen from Englishmen, and Liverpudlians from Londoners. We can even tell which part of London a person is from. Only a "Cockney" Londoner, for example, would say "vewwy li'oo" for "very little." How we deal with r's alone can tell a lot: If American news anchors pronounce "fire" with a light r, central Pennsylvanians say "fiyur," with a strong r, and Oklahomans say "fahrr," New Yorkers say "fiyuh," and aristocratic Brits say "faah." In Massachusetts, an r changes a preceding a: "a nice caah." And Rhode Islanders drop nearly all r's: "thwee nice caahs." Words may differ in different dialects. The plural for you is a good example: Many Americans say "you guys." New Yorkers often say "youse" and even "youse guys." Southerners say "you-all" or "y'all." And in Appalachia they say "you-uns." In Pennsylvania, you can practically tell what county someone is from on the basis of a few sentences: If you're from Lancaster (pronounced Lancster), you might say "the lawn needs mowed," "the peanut butter is all," or "outen the light." On the other hand, if you're from Huntingdon, you might say "leave him go" or "I left the dog out," "youuns comin'?" or even "thar she be! Thar be yer woman!" Generally, city dialects are loose, open, fast, and loud. Country dialects are slow and drawled. Upper class dialects tend to be tenser, more precise, and rather clipped. Surprisingly, this pattern holds well even cross-culturally! Some dialects have different speech patterns for men and women! Japanese is notorious for this, with different pronunciations, grammatical structures, and even words for each gender. But they are not alone: Haven't you ever noticed that certain words (naughty ones) are spoken much more frequently by men? Or that women tend to speak in a more roundabout, less confrontational, fashion? And in Oklahoma there are even phonetic differences: men will say "thenk yuh," while women tend to say "think yuu." We also infer emotion, especially anxiety, from the pitch of your voice, the stop-gaps you use (umm, and uh, you know...), stuttering and so on, with some accuracy. When the pitch of your voice begins to rise, it's not a bad bet that you're ly...