Social Perceptions and Misperceptions

One of the most fundamental questions we can ask about two individuals is whether they share the same reality, whether when they both look at it they see the same thing, whether they hear the same thing when they both listen to it.

We typically assume in everyday life that other people share our reality, and to a large extent, they do, but not always and not entirely. Our perceptions are strongly influenced by where, by context, by past experience, expectations, motivations, and many other variables, our attention happens to be. Our experience of reality, in other words, is psychologically constructed.

Most people do not see anything wrong with this photo until it is pointed out that the name of the restaurant says "McDonlad's" rather than "McDonald's." We don't usually spell-check them when we look at restaurant signs.

We see what we expect to see often, and we don't see what we don't expect to see. Perception, however, is not just a matter of expectations, it's also a question of motives. That is, we see what we want to see very often, and we don't see what we don't want to see.

In a classic 1954 study of two American football rivals: Princeton and Dartmouth, this dynamic was illustrated. The researchers asked students in each school to watch the very same film of the game after a particularly rough football game with lots of penalties and record each violation of the rule they saw. Princeton students have seen Dartmouth break the rules more than twice as often as students from Dartmouth. That is, a different reality was seen by them. "It's inaccurate and misleading to say that different people have different attitudes concerning the same thing, for the thing simply is not the same for different people, whether the thing is a football game, a presidential candidate or Communism”

Confirmation Bias arises from the direct influence on beliefs by desire. When individuals want a certain concept or idea to be true, they end up believing it to be true. They are motivated by wishful thinking. This mistake leads the person to stop collecting information when the evidence collected so far confirms the opinions or prejudices that one would like to be true. We embrace information once we have formed a view that confirms that view while ignoring, or rejecting, information that casts doubt on it. Confirmation bias indicates that conditions are not objectively perceived by us. We pick out those bits of information that make us feel good because our prejudices are confirmed. We may, therefore, become prisoners of our assumptions.

Our perceptions are also influenced by context, by previous experience, and by our tendency to seek out evidence that confirms our expectations. But social perceptions and social expectations affect more than the person who holds them. They can also affect the person about whom the expectations are held. In fact, in some cases, our predictions and our expectations can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. The term "self-fulfilling prophecy" was coined in a classic 1948 journal article by a sociologist named Robert Merton. Here's what Merton wrote: "The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation, evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true, thereby perpetuating a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events, as proof of being right from the beginning. Such are the perversities of social logic."

A relationship researcher at the University of Washington, John Gottman, invited 124 newlywed couples to visit his laboratory and be videotaped while discussing an ongoing marriage disagreement. In the first three minutes of the couple's discussion, these videos were then rated by independent observers as to how much positive or negative emotion was displayed. Outcomes? Social judgments of this brief marital relationship significantly predicted the divorce of couples six years later. It's surprising enough that six years into the future, anything could predict divorce, but it borders on shocking that the prediction could be made by strangers watching the couple interact for only three minutes, which is known as a thin slice of behaviour in psychology, a brief observation, a small sample of behaviour.

In a 1992 Psychological Bulletin article by Nalini Ambady and Bob Rosenthal, the same individual who documented the Pygmalion effect, the term “thin slice” was coined and popularised in the runaway bestseller Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. Ambady and Rosenthal performed a meta-analysis, a statistical method that combines and analyses the results of various studies (literally, an analysis of analyses, a meta-analysis). And what they found, ba" was coined in a classic 1948 journal article by a sociologist named Robert Merton. Here's what Merton wrote: "The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation, evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true, thereby perpetuating a reign of terror. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events, as proof of being right from the beginning. Such are the perversities of social logic."

In fact, a year after the 1992 article, Ambady, and Rosenthal published a study showing that at the end of the semester, ratings by people who watched three ten-second video clips of a university teacher teaching a class, with no students in the video and no sound, accurately forecast the teacher's student ratings. What I just showed you were exactly 10 seconds of teaching by a professor. All it took was just like three video clips, all nonverbal, stuff like whether the teacher seemed confident, enthusiastic, warm, active, and so on. Professor Ambady and her colleagues have also found that after individuals watched only one minute of silent video footage focused on the nonverbal behaviour of the therapist, long-term physical therapy outcomes could be predicted. After listening to the voice of the person for only 20 seconds, the sales effectiveness of a sales manager could be identified, with the words masked to maintain the tone of voice but hide the content of what was said.

Even in direct encounters, social impressions are formed with great rapidity, even if the encounter is to last a long time. The first few seconds of interaction between strangers is often the most important time for the creation of social justice and will have significant consequences on how their future interaction will develop. First impressions are hard to overcome, especially if they are bad.

#psychology #socialpsychology