the tendency for people to see what they expect
Affiliate five. Perceiving Others
Individual Differences in Person Perception
- Outline some of import individual differences factors that influence people'southward causal attributions.
- Explain the means that attributions tin can influence mental health and the ways that mental wellness can impact attributions.
- Explore how and why people engage in self-handicapping attributions and behaviors.
To this bespeak, we have focused on how the appearance, behaviors, and traits of the people we encounter influence our understanding of them. It makes sense that this would be our focus because of the emphasis within social psychology on the social state of affairs—in this case, the people we are judging. But the person is also of import, and so let'south consider some of the person variables that influence how we judge other people.
Perceiver Characteristics
And then far, we have assumed that dissimilar perceivers will all form pretty much the same impression of the aforementioned person. For instance, if ii people are both thinking about their mutual friend Janetta, or describing her to someone else, they should each call back about or draw her in pretty much the same mode. After all, Janetta is Janetta, and she should accept a personality that they can both see. Only this is not ever the instance; they may course different impressions of Janetta for a variety of reasons. For one, the two people'southward experiences with Janetta may be somewhat different. If one sees her in different places and talks to her nigh different things than the other, then they will each take a different sample of behavior on which to base of operations their impressions.
But they might even class different impressions of Janetta if they meet her performing exactly the aforementioned behavior. To every experience, each of us brings our own schemas, attitudes, and expectations. In fact, the process of interpretation guarantees that nosotros will not all form exactly the same impression of the people that we come across. This, of class, reflects a basic principle that nosotros have discussed throughout this book—our prior experiences color our electric current perceptions.
One factor that influences how we perceive others is the current cerebral accessibility of a given person characteristic—that is, the extent to which a person characteristic chop-chop and easily comes to mind for the perceiver. Differences in accessibility volition lead different people to attend to different aspects of the other person. Some people first notice how attractive someone is because they intendance a lot about physical appearance—for them, appearance is a highly attainable characteristic. Others pay more attention to a person'due south race or faith, and still others nourish to a person's height or weight. If yous are interested in mode and fashion, yous would probably showtime notice a person's clothes, whereas some other person might be more likely to notice a person'south athletic skills.
You tin see that these differences in accessibility will influence the kinds of impressions that we form about others because they influence what we focus on and how we think most them. In fact, when people are asked to describe others, in that location is often more overlap in the descriptions provided by the aforementioned perceiver about unlike people than there is in those provided by different perceivers about the same target person (Dornbusch, Hastorf, Richardson, Muzzy, & Vreeland, 1965; Park, 1986). If someone cares a lot about mode, that person will depict friends on that dimension, whereas if someone else cares about athletic skills, he or she will tend to describe friends on the basis of those qualities. These differences reflect the emphasis that we as observers place on the characteristics of others rather than the existent differences between those people. Our view of others may sometimes be more informative about us than it is about them.
People too differ in terms of how carefully they procedure information well-nigh others. Some people have a strong need to think about and empathise others. I'1000 sure you know people like this—they desire to know why something went incorrect or right, or just to know more nearly anyone with whom they collaborate. Need for noesis refers to the trend to think carefully and fully about our experiences, including the social situations we come across (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982). People with a potent demand for cognition tend to procedure information more thoughtfully and therefore may make more causal attributions overall. In dissimilarity, people without a strong demand for noesis tend to exist more than impulsive and impatient and may make attributions more quickly and spontaneously (Sargent, 2004). In terms of attributional differences, there is some evidence that people college in need for noesis may accept more than situational factors into account when considering the behaviors of others. Consequently, they tend to make more than tolerant rather than punitive attributions about people in stigmatized groups (Van Hiel, Pandelaere, & Duriez, 2004).
Although the need for knowledge refers to a trend to retrieve carefully and fully about whatsoever topic, at that place are also private differences in the trend to exist interested in people more specifically. For case, Fletcher, Danilovics, Fernandez, Peterson, and Reeder (1986) found that psychology majors were more curious nearly people than were natural scientific discipline majors. In turn, the types of attributions they tend to brand about behavior may be different.
Individual differences exist not just in the depth of our attributions but also in the types of attributions we tend to make about both ourselves and others (Plaks, Levy, & Dweck, 2009). Some people are entity theorists whotend to believe that people'due south traits are fundamentally stable and incapable of change. Entity theorists tend to focus on the traits of other people and tend to make a lot of personal attributions. On the other paw, incremental theorists are those who believe that personalities change a lot over fourth dimension and who therefore are more likely to make situational attributions for events. Incremental theorists are more focused on the dynamic psychological processes that arise from individuals' changing mental states in different situations.
In one relevant report, Molden, Plaks, and Dweck (2006) institute that when forced to make judgments chop-chop, people who had been classified as entity theorists were nevertheless still able to make personal attributions virtually others but were not able to easily encode the situational causes of a behavior. On the other hand, when forced to make judgments speedily, the people who were classified every bit incremental theorists were amend able to make use of the situational aspects of the scene than the personalities of the actors.
Individual differences in attributional styles can also influence our own behavior. Entity theorists are more likely to have difficulty when they move on to new tasks considering they don't think that they will be able to accommodate to the new challenges. Incremental theorists, on the other manus, are more optimistic and exercise improve in such challenging environments because they believe that their personality can accommodate to the new state of affairs. You tin can encounter that these differences in how people make attributions can aid us sympathize both how we think virtually ourselves and others and how nosotros respond to our own social contexts (Malle, Knobe, O'Laughlin, Pearce, & Nelson, 2000).
Research Focus
How Our Attributions Can Influence Our School Performance
Carol Dweck and her colleagues (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007) tested whether the type of attributions students brand about their own characteristics might influence their schoolhouse performance. They assessed the attributional tendencies and the math operation of 373 junior high school students at a public school in New York City. When they starting time entered seventh form, the students all completed a measure of attributional styles. Those who tended to concord with statements such as "You have a sure amount of intelligence, and yous really can't practice much to change information technology" were classified equally entity theorists, whereas those who agreed more with statements such as "You can always greatly alter how intelligent you are" were classified as incremental theorists. Then the researchers measured the students' math grades at the end of the autumn and leap terms in seventh and eighth grades.
Equally yous can come across in the following effigy, the researchers found that the students who were classified as incremental theorists improved their math scores significantly more than than did the entity students. It seems that the incremental theorists really believed that they could improve their skills and were then actually able to do it. These findings ostend that how we think about traits tin have a substantial bear on on our own behavior.
Attributional Styles and Mental Health
Equally we accept seen in this chapter, how we make attributions about other people has a big influence on our reactions to them. Just we as well make attributions for our own behaviors. Social psychologists have discovered that there are important individual differences in the attributions that people make to the negative events that they experience and that these attributions can have a big influence on how they feel nigh and respond to them. The aforementioned negative outcome tin create anxiety and depression in one individual but have virtually no upshot on someone else. And still some other person may see the negative outcome as a challenge and try even harder to overcome the difficulty (Blascovich & Mendes, 2000).
A major determinant of how we react to perceived threats is the type of attribution that we make to them. Attributional style refers to the type of attributions that we tend to brand for the events that occur to the states. These attributions can exist to our ain characteristics (internal) or to the state of affairs (external), but attributions tin also be made on other dimensions, including stable versus unstable, and global versus specific. Stable attributions are those that we think volition be relatively permanent, whereas unstable attributions are expected to change over time. Global attributions are those that we feel use broadly, whereas specific attributions are those causes that we meet as more than unique to particular events.
You may know some people who tend to make negative or pessimistic attributions to negative events that they experience. Nosotros say that these people have a negative attributional mode. This is the tendency to explain negative events by referring to their own internal, stable, and global qualities. People with a negative attributional way say things such every bit the following:
- "I failed because I am no good" (an internal attribution).
- "I ever neglect" (a stable attribution).
- "I fail in everything" (a global attribution).
You might well imagine that the result of these negative attributional styles is a sense of hopelessness and despair (Metalsky, Joiner, Hardin, & Abramson, 1993). Indeed, Blend, Abramson, and Francis (1999) found that college students who indicated that they had negative attributional styles when they first came to college were more probable than those who had a more positive style to experience an episode of depression within the next few months.
People who havean extremely negative attributional style, in which they continually make external, stable, and global attributions for their behavior, are said to exist experiencing learned helplessness (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978; Seligman, 1975). Learned helplessness was first demonstrated in enquiry that institute that some dogs that were strapped into a harness and exposed to painful electric shocks became passive and gave up trying to escape from the stupor, fifty-fifty in new situations in which the harness had been removed and escape was therefore possible. Similarly, some people who were exposed to bursts of noise later failed to stop the noise when they were actually able to do so. Those who feel learned helplessness do non feel that they have any control over their own outcomes and are more probable to have a variety of negative health outcomes, including anxiety and depression (Henry, 2005; Peterson & Seligman, 1984).
Nearly people tend to have a more positive attributional mode —ways of explaining events that are related to high self-esteem and a tendency to explain the negative events they experience by referring to external, unstable, and specific qualities. Thus people with a positive attributional fashion are likely to say things such equally the following:
- "I failed because the chore is very hard" (an external attribution).
- "I will do better next time" (an unstable attribution).
- "I failed in this domain, just I'1000 good in other things" (a specific attribution).
In sum, we tin say that people who make more positive attributions toward the negative events that they feel will persist longer at tasks and that this persistence tin can assistance them. These attributions can also contribute to everything from academic success (Boyer, 2006) to improve mental health (Vines & Nixon, 2009). There are limits to the effectiveness of these strategies, notwithstanding. We cannot control everything, and trying to practise and so can exist stressful. We can change some things but not others; thus sometimes the important thing is to know when information technology'southward better to surrender, end worrying, and simply let things happen. Having a positive, mildly optimistic outlook is healthy, as we explored in Chapter 2, just nosotros cannot be unrealistic about what nosotros tin and cannot do.Unrealistic optimism is thetendency to be overly positive about the likelihood that negative things will occur to us and that nosotros will exist able to effectively cope with them if they do. When we are as well optimistic, we may ready ourselves up for failure and depression when things do not work out as we had hoped (Weinstein & Klein, 1996). We may think that nosotros are immune to the potential negative outcomes of driving while intoxicated or practicing unsafe sexual practice, only these optimistic beliefs tin can be risky.
The findings hither linking attributional way to mental health atomic number 82 to the interesting prediction that people'southward well-being could be improved past moving from a negative to a (mildly) positive or optimistic attributional style. Attributional retraining interventions take been developed based on this idea. These types of psychotherapy take indeed been shown to assist people in developing a more positive attributional style and have met with some success in alleviating symptoms of depression, feet, and obsessive compulsive disorders (Wang, Zhang, Y., Zhang, N., & Zhang, J., 2011). Dysfunctional attributions tin can also be at the eye of relationship difficulties, including abuse, where partners consistently make negative attributions almost each other's behaviors. Again, retraining couples to make more balanced attributions nearly each other can be useful, helping to promote more positive advice patterns and to increase relationship satisfaction (Hrapczynski, Epstein, Werlinich, LaTaillade, 2012).
Attributions also play an important role in the quality of the working relationships between clients and therapists in mental health settings. If a client and therapist both brand similar attributions about the causes of the client'southward challenges, this tin aid to promote common understanding, empathy, and respect (Duncan & Moynihan, 1994). Too, clients generally rate their therapists as more credible when their attributions are more similar to their ain (Atkinson, Worthington, Dana, & Skillful, 1991). In plow, therapists tend to written report existence able to work more positively with clients who brand similar attributions to them (O'Brien & Murdock, 1993).
As well every bit developing a more positive attributional fashion, another technique that people sometimes use hither to help them feel ameliorate about themselves is known as self-handicapping. Self-handicapping occurs when we make statements or engage in behaviors that help u.s.a. create a user-friendly external attribution for potential failure. There are 2 primary ways that nosotros tin self-handicap. Ane is to engage in a class of preemptive self-serving attributional bias, where we claim an external factor that may reduce our performance, ahead of time, which we can use if things go badly. For example, in a job interview or before giving a presentation at work, Veronica might say she is non feeling well and inquire the audience not to look also much from her because of this.
Another method of cocky-handicapping is to behave in ways that brand success less likely, which can exist an effective way of coping with failure, peculiarly in circumstances where we feel the chore may commonly exist too difficult. For case, in enquiry by Berglas and Jones (1978), participants first performed an intelligence test on which they did very well. It was then explained to them that the researchers were testing the effects of different drugs on functioning and that they would be asked to accept a like but potentially more than difficult intelligence test while they were under the influence of 1 of two different drugs.
The participants were then given a choice—they could take a pill that was supposed to facilitate performance on the intelligence task (making it easier for them to perform) or a pill that was supposed to inhibit functioning on the intelligence task, thereby making the chore harder to perform (no drugs were actually administered). Berglas found that men—but not women—engaged in self-handicapping: they preferred to take the performance-inhibiting rather than the performance-enhancing drug, choosing the drug that provided a convenient external attribution for potential failure. Although women may too self-handicap, specially past indicating that they are unable to perform well due to stress or fourth dimension constraints (Hirt, Deppe, & Gordon, 1991), men seem to do information technology more oft. This finding is consistent with the full general gender differences we have talked almost in many places in this book: on boilerplate, men are more than concerned than women about using this blazon of self-enhancement to boost their self-esteem and social status in the eyes of themselves and others.
You tin can encounter that there are some benefits (only as well, of class, some costs) of cocky-handicapping. If we fail later on nosotros cocky-handicap, we merely arraign the failure on the external factor. Only if we succeed despite the handicap that we take created for ourselves, we can make clear internal attributions for our success. "Wait at how well I did in my presentation at piece of work, fifty-fifty though I wasn't feeling well!"
Engaging in behaviors that create self-handicapping tin can be costly because doing so makes it harder for us to succeed. In fact, research has found that people who study that they self-handicap regularly show lower life satisfaction, less competence, poorer moods, less interest in their jobs, and greater substance corruption (Zuckerman & Tsai, 2005). Meta-analytic evidence shows that increased self-handicapping also relates to more negative bookish outcomes (Schwinger, Wirthwein, Lemmer, & Steinmayr, 2014). Although self-handicapping would seem to be useful for insulating our feelings from failure, information technology is not a good tack to accept in the long run.
Fortunately, most people take a reasonable balance between optimism and realism in the attributions that they make (Taylor & Armor, 1996) and do not often rely on cocky-handicapping. They also tend to set goals that they believe they can attain, and to regularly make some progress toward reaching them. Inquiry has plant that setting reasonable goals and feeling that we are moving toward them makes u.s.a. happy, even if we may not in fact attain the goals themselves (Lawrence, Carver, & Scheier, 2002). As the saying goes, being on the journey is oftentimes more than important than reaching the destination.
- Because we each use our own expectations in judgment, people may form different impressions of the same person performing the same beliefs.
- Individual differences in the cognitive accessibility of a given personal characteristic may atomic number 82 to more overlap in the descriptions provided by the same perceiver about different people than there is in those provided by unlike perceivers near the same target person.
- People with a potent demand for cognition make more causal attributions overall. Entity theorists tend to focus on the traits of other people and tend to make a lot of personal attributions, whereas incremental theorists tend to believe that personalities change a lot over time and therefore are more than likely to make situational attributions for events.
- Individual differences in attributional styles can influence how we respond to the negative events that we experience.
- People who have extremely negative attributional styles, in which they continually make external, stable, and global attributions for their beliefs, are said to be experiencing learned helplessness.
- Self-handicapping is an attributional technique that prevents the states from making ability attributions for our own failures.
- Having a positive outlook is healthy, only it must exist tempered. We cannot be unrealistic well-nigh what we can and cannot do.
- Think of a time when your ain expectations influenced your attributions about another person. What type of expectations did you lot have and what blazon of attributions did yous end up making? In hindsight, how authentic practise you call back that these attributions were?
- Which constructs are more cognitively accessible for you? How exercise these constructs influence the types of attributions that yous make about other people?
- Consider a time when you lot or someone yous knew engaged in self-handicapping. Why exercise you recollect that they did this? What was the event of doing so?
- Practice you call back that yous take a more positive or a more than negative attributional style? How practice y'all think this manner influences your judgments about your own successes and failures? What do you lot encounter equally the advantages and disadvantages for yous of your attributional style?
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