Culture and Implicit Personality Theories - Social Psychology, Slides of Social Psychology

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Social Psychology

Elliot Aronson

University of California, Santa Cruz

Timothy D. Wilson

University of Virginia

Robin M. Akert

Wellesley College slides by Travis Langley Henderson State University 6th edition

Chapter 4

Social Perception:

How We Come to

Understand Other People

“Things are seldom as they seem. Skim milk masquerades as cream.”

- W. S. Gilbert

Social Perception

Social Perception

The study of how we

form impressions

of and make

inferences about

other people.

Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Nonverbal Behavior

• What do we know about people when we

first meet them?

• We know what we can see and hear, and

even though we know we should not

judge a book by its cover, this kind of

easily observable information is crucial to

our first impression.

• With no words at all, we can

communicate volumes.

Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Nonverbal Behavior

• We have a special kind of brain cell called

mirror neurons.

• These neurons respond when we perform an

action and when we see someone else perform

the same action.

• Mirror neurons appear to be the basis of our

ability to feel empathy.

• For example, when we see someone crying,

these mirror neurons fire automatically and

involuntarily, just as if we were crying ourselves.

Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Nonverbal Behavior

Nonverbal cues serve many functions in

communication.

• You can express “I’m angry” by narrowing your

eyes, lowering your eyebrows, and setting your

mouth in a thin, straight line.

• You can convey the attitude “I like you” with

smiles and extended eye contact.

• And you communicate your personality traits,

like being an extrovert, with broad gestures and

frequent changes in voice pitch and inflection.

Facial Expressions of Emotion

Are facial expressions of emotion universal?

The answer is yes, for the six major emotional

expressions: anger, happiness, surprise, fear,

disgust, and sadness.

All humans encode or express these emotions in

the same way, and all humans can decode or

interpret them with equal accuracy.

Source of images: Microsoft Office Online.

Facial Expressions of Emotion

• Paul Ekman and others have conducted

numerous studies indicating that the

ability to interpret at least the six major

emotions is cross-cultural—part of being

human and not a product of people’s

cultural experience.

Source of images: Microsoft Office Online.

Facial Expressions of Emotion Decoding facial expressions accurately is more complicated than we have indicated, for three reasons.

1. Affect blends occur when one part of the face registers one emotion and another part, a different emotion.
2. At times people try to appear less emotional than they are so that no one will know how they really feel.
3. A third reason why decoding facial expressions can be inaccurate has to do with culture.

Culture and the Channels of Nonverbal Communication

Display rules are particular to each culture

and dictate what kinds of emotional

expressions people are supposed to

show.

Source of images: Microsoft Office Online.

Culture and the Channels of Nonverbal Communication

• Members of American culture become suspicious when a person doesn’t “look them in the eye” while speaking, and they find talking to someone who is wearing dark sunglasses quite disconcerting.
• Cultures vary greatly in what is considered normative use of personal space. Most Americans like to have a bubble of open space, a few feet in radius, surrounding them; in comparison, in some other cultures, strangers think nothing of standing right next to each other, to the point of touching.

Culture and the Channels of Nonverbal Communication The important point about emblems is that they are not universal. Each culture has devised its own emblems, and these need not be understandable to people from other cultures. Emblems Nonverbal gestures that have well-understood definitions within a given culture; they usually have direct verbal translations, like the “OK” sign. President George H. W. Bush once used the “V for victory” sign, but he did it backward—the palm of his hand was facing him instead of the audience. Unfortunately, he flashed this gesture to a large crowd in Australia—and in Australia, this emblem is the equivalent of “flipping the bird”! Source of image: Microsoft Office Online.

Multichannel Nonverbal Communication

• Except for certain specific situations, such

as talking on the telephone, everyday life

is made up of multichannel nonverbal

social interaction.

• Typically, many nonverbal cues are

available to us when we talk to or observe

other people.

• How do we use this information?
• And how accurately do we use it?

Gender and Nonverbal Communication

In general, women are better at encoding

and decoding nonverbal cues.

Source of images: Microsoft Office Online.