Self-presentations are often carefully constructed and monitored.
Strategic self-presentations are conscious and deliberate attempts to shape others' impressions in order to achieve ulterior goals. Strategies include self-promotion, exemplification, modesty, intimidation, supplication, ingratiation.
Embarrassment and excuse-making commonly follow failed self-presentations.
Self-handicapping can provide an excuse even before a potential lapse. This strategy can protect self-esteem and lower anxiety.
Men and women use different types of self-handicapping strategies.
High self-monitors are social chameleons.
Self-monitoring: the tendency to use cues from other people's self-presentations in controlling one's own self-presentations.
II. Impression Formation
Our impressions of others are shaped by their nonverbal behavior.
Facial expressions.
Charles Darwin proposed that emotional expressions play an important role in communication and are innate.
People around the world can reliably generate and identify six "basic" emotions.
Survival value hypothesis: attending to facial expressions allows people to predict behavioral intentions and understand how others are interpreting the world. This hypothesis predicts people will be most attentive to facial expressions that signal potential danger.
Body movements.
Can convey a wide variety of information, although there is more cultural variation in the interpretation of gestures than facial expressions.
Do people differ in using nonverbal cues?
Emotional displays are linked to gender socialization.
People high in self-monitoring use nonverbal cues in a conscious manner more often than those low in self-monitoring
Can women "read" nonverbal cues better than men?
Females appear to be consistently better at decoding nonverbal cues than men.
We form personality impressions with the help of central traits.
Central traits are traits that exert a disproportionate influence on people's overall impressions by causing them to assume the existence of other traits.
Additive or averaging model? It appears that an averaging model is a more accurate description than an additive model in describing how people form impressions. Anderson proposed a weighted averaging model as a compromise.
Our personality judgments are often based on biased thinking.
Implicit personality theory is a naive theory or belief system about which traits "go together"; for example, people often assume that all good things occur together in people.
Positivity bias is the tendency to view people more positively than groups or impersonal objects.
Negativity effect is the tendency to give more weight to negative than positive traits in impression formation.
Primacy and recency effects. Information presented early and information presented last may carry inordinate weight in impression formation.
III. Making Attributions
The primary dimension of causal experience is the locus of causality
Locus of causality can be internal or external.
Internal attribution: the cause of an action is internal to the actor (personality traits, moods, attitudes, etc.).
External attribution: the cause of an action is external to the actor (the situation, the actions of others, luck).
Other important attributional questions are whether behavior is stable and controllable.
Correspondent inference theory assumes that people prefer making dispositional attributions.
People try to infer the cause of a single instance of behavior by determining whether it corresponds to a stable personality characteristic of the actor.
Dispositional attributions are likely when the behavior is socially undesirable, is freely chosen, has noncommon effects.
The covariation model explains attributions derived from multiple observational points.
People make judgments using the covariation principle: for something to be the cause of a particular behavior, it must be present when the behavior occurs and absent when it does not occur.
Discounting principle: Whenever there are several possible causal explanations for a particular event, we tend to be less likely to attribute the effect to any particular cause.
People rely on three types of information to make attributions: consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness. Internal attributions are made with low consensus, low distinctiveness, and high consistency.
IV. Biases in Attribution
The fundamental attribution error describes the tendency to make internal attributions over external attributions.
The role of perceptual salience. When another person is observed in a social setting, that person is more salient than situational factors.
Is this really a "fundamental" error? The FAE may be more common in individualist cultures, and may be learned through socialization.
The actor-observer effect: Actors give more weight to external factors than do observers.
May be due to differences in perceptual salience from the two perspectives.
Effect is less likely when the actors making the attributions have personalities that match the behavior in a given situation.
Self-serving attributions enhance and protect self-esteem.
People tend to take credit for positive outcomes but blame negative outcomes on external causes.
Many social perceptual errors may ultimately be beneficial.
Many errors are corrected through normal interactions with others.
Some errors help justify our self-concepts and worldviews, serving a self-protective function.
V. Application: How Good Are You at Detecting Lies?
When judging other people's self-presentations, we pay attention to two types of expressions.
Expressions given: words and gestures that are consciously transmitted.
Expressions given off: also known as nonverbal leakage, these behaviors are unintentionally transmitted.
Expressions given off are generally a better predictor of deception than expressions given.
Not all nonverbal cues are equally instructive in detecting deception.
Body movements such as fidgeting and shifts in body posture are best predictors among nonverbal behavior.
