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Person Perception

Our perceptions of other people, known as person perception, are influenced by several cognitive biases and effects. The primacy effect causes our first impressions of others to strongly shape our overall judgments about them. We also tend to attribute our own behaviors to external situational factors but others' behaviors to internal personality traits through the actor-observer effect. Additionally, we categorize others into social groups based on limited information, which then affects our perceptions and judgments of their behaviors.

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2K views

Person Perception

Our perceptions of other people, known as person perception, are influenced by several cognitive biases and effects. The primacy effect causes our first impressions of others to strongly shape our overall judgments about them. We also tend to attribute our own behaviors to external situational factors but others' behaviors to internal personality traits through the actor-observer effect. Additionally, we categorize others into social groups based on limited information, which then affects our perceptions and judgments of their behaviors.

Uploaded by

uzii09
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Person Perception:

The mental processes we use to form judgments and draw conclusions about the characteristics and motives of other people. Primacy Effect:
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The first thing we find out about a person often has the most influence on our judgments about them. Also known as "first impressions" Primacy effect becomes less important if there's Prolonged exposure (you know the person for a long time) Knowledge of primacy effects (you can be taught to ignore your first impression, personnel workers are taught this sometimes)

Actor-Observer Effect:
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We think other people do things because of their personalities. We think we do things because of the situation we're in.

So often the first thing we find out about a person (primacy effect) causes us to decide what their personality is like (actor-observer effect). Social Categorization:
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Classifying a person into a certain group (a social category) based on something you observe about the person. Once you've classified a person into a certain group, that affects what you notice about them and your judgments of them. Teacher study Researchers randomly classified students good or bad. Students labeled as good students get better grades Hospital study Normal people who enter mental hospital are diagnosed as mentally ill

Person Perception Our perceptions of people differ from the perceptions of inanimate objects like tables, chairs, books, pencil, etc. mainly because we are prone to make inferences regarding the intentions of people and thus form judgment about them. The perceptions and judgments regarding a persons actions are often significantly influenced by the assumptions we make about the persons internal state. Attribution theory refers to the ways in which we judge people differently, depending on what meaning we attribute to a given behaviour. Whenever we observe the behaviour of an individual, we attempt to determine whether it was internally or externally caused. Internally caused behaviours are those that are believed to be under the personal control of the individual or have been done deliberately by him. Externally caused behaviour is seen as resulting from outside causes, that is the person is seen as having been compelled to behave in a particular way by the force of the situation, and not because of his own choice. When after repeated requests your friend failed to turn up at the special old school boys meet you might ascribe his absence as a deliberate move on his part, and you will feel hurt since it appeared that he is quite unconcerned and careless about your feeling. But if someone now points out about his recent increased responsibilities in the business after his fathers untimely death and acute time shortage, you tend to condone him as you are now ascribing his absence to the external factors. The determination of internally or externally caused behaviour depends chiefly on the following three factors : Distinctiveness which refers to whether an individual displays different behaviour at different situations. If the behaviour (say being late in the class on a particular day) is unusual, we tend to give the behaviour an external attribution; and if it usual, the reverse. Consensus refers to the uniformity of the behaviour shown by all the concerned people. If every one reports late on a particular morning, it is easily assumed that there must be a severe traffic disruption in the city and thus the behaviour is externally attributed. But if the consensus is low, it is internally attributed. Consistency is the reverse of distinctiveness. Thus in judging the behaviour of an individual, the person looks at his past record. If the present behaviour is consistently found to occur in the past as well (that is being late at least three times a week), it is attributed as internally caused. In other words, the more consistent the behaviour, the more the observer is inclined to attribute it to external causes.

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