Family Background Influences How a Person Perceives the World

Affiliate 5. Perceiving Others

Individual Differences in Person Perception

1. Outline some of import individual differences factors that influence people'southward causal attributions.
2. Explain the ways that attributions tin can influence mental wellness and the ways that mental wellness can affect attributions.
3. Explore how and why people engage in self-handicapping attributions and behaviors.

To this point, nosotros accept focused on how the appearance, behaviors, and traits of the people nosotros encounter influence our understanding of them. It makes sense that this would be our focus because of the emphasis inside social psychology on the social situation—in this example, the people we are judging. Merely the person is also important, then let'due south consider some of the person variables that influence how we guess other people.

Perceiver Characteristics

So far, we have assumed that different perceivers will all form pretty much the same impression of the same person. For instance, if ii people are both thinking virtually their mutual friend Janetta, or describing her to someone else, they should each retrieve most or draw her in pretty much the same mode. Later all, Janetta is Janetta, and she should have a personality that they tin both see. But this is non always the example; they may form unlike impressions of Janetta for a variety of reasons. For one, the two people's experiences with Janetta may be somewhat dissimilar. If i sees her in different places and talks to her well-nigh different things than the other, and then they will each have a different sample of behavior on which to base their impressions.

But they might fifty-fifty form different impressions of Janetta if they see her performing exactly the same beliefs. To every experience, each of us brings our own schemas, attitudes, and expectations. In fact, the process of estimation guarantees that we will not all grade exactly the same impression of the people that we see. This, of form, reflects a basic principle that we have discussed throughout this book—our prior experiences color our electric current perceptions.

One cistron that influences how we perceive others is the current cognitive accessibility of a given person feature—that is, the extent to which a person characteristic speedily and hands comes to heed for the perceiver. Differences in accessibility volition lead unlike people to attend to unlike aspects of the other person. Some people start detect how attractive someone is because they care a lot virtually physical appearance—for them, advent is a highly attainable characteristic. Others pay more than attention to a person's race or organized religion, and still others attend to a person's height or weight. If you are interested in way and fashion, you would probably first notice a person's dress, whereas another person might be more likely to notice a person'south able-bodied skills.

You can meet that these differences in accessibility will influence the kinds of impressions that nosotros form well-nigh others considering they influence what we focus on and how we call back almost them. In fact, when people are asked to describe others, at that place is often more overlap in the descriptions provided by the aforementioned perceiver about different people than there is in those provided past unlike perceivers almost the same target person (Dornbusch, Hastorf, Richardson, Muzzy, & Vreeland, 1965; Park, 1986). If someone cares a lot almost fashion, that person will depict friends on that dimension, whereas if someone else cares almost athletic skills, he or she volition tend to describe friends on the basis of those qualities. These differences reflect the emphasis that nosotros every bit observers place on the characteristics of others rather than the real differences betwixt those people. Our view of others may sometimes be more informative nigh us than information technology is about them.

People also differ in terms of how carefully they procedure data nearly others. Some people accept a strong need to call up most and understand others. I'1000 sure you know people similar this—they desire to know why something went wrong or right, or merely to know more than about anyone with whom they interact. Need for knowledge refers to the tendency to think carefully and fully about our experiences, including the social situations we encounter (Cacioppo & Lilliputian, 1982). People with a potent need for knowledge tend to process information more than thoughtfully and therefore may make more causal attributions overall. In contrast, people without a strong need for cognition tend to be more impulsive and impatient and may make attributions more than rapidly and spontaneously (Sargent, 2004). In terms of attributional differences, in that location is some evidence that people higher in need for cognition may have more situational factors into account when considering the behaviors of others. Consequently, they tend to make more tolerant rather than punitive attributions about people in stigmatized groups (Van Hiel, Pandelaere, & Duriez, 2004).

Although the need for cognition refers to a tendency to call up carefully and fully about any topic, at that place are also individual differences in the trend to exist interested in people more than specifically. For instance, Fletcher, Danilovics, Fernandez, Peterson, and Reeder (1986) plant that psychology majors were more curious about people than were natural science majors. In plow, the types of attributions they tend to make virtually behavior may be unlike.

Private differences exist not only in the depth of our attributions but as well in the types of attributions we tend to make nearly both ourselves and others (Plaks, Levy, & Dweck, 2009). Some people are entity theorists whotend to believe that people's 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 hand, incremental theorists are those who believe that personalities change a lot over time 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 dissimilar situations.

In one relevant report, Molden, Plaks, and Dweck (2006) found that when forced to brand judgments apace, people who had been classified as entity theorists were nevertheless still able to make personal attributions about others but were not able to easily encode the situational causes of a behavior. On the other hand, when forced to make judgments quickly, the people who were classified as incremental theorists were better able to brand employ 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 probable to have difficulty when they move on to new tasks because they don't call up that they volition be able to adapt to the new challenges. Incremental theorists, on the other hand, are more optimistic and practise improve in such challenging environments considering they believe that their personality can arrange to the new situation. You can come across that these differences in how people make attributions can help u.s. understand both how we recall about ourselves and others and how we respond to our own social contexts (Malle, Knobe, O'Laughlin, Pearce, & Nelson, 2000).

Research Focus

How Our Attributions Can Influence Our School Performance

Ballad Dweck and her colleagues (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007) tested whether the type of attributions students make nigh their own characteristics might influence their school performance. They assessed the attributional tendencies and the math functioning of 373 inferior high school students at a public school in New York Metropolis. When they first entered 7th course, the students all completed a measure of attributional styles. Those who tended to concord with statements such as "You take a certain amount of intelligence, and yous actually tin can't do much to alter it" were classified as entity theorists, whereas those who agreed more with statements such as "You tin always profoundly modify how intelligent you are" were classified equally incremental theorists. Then the researchers measured the students' math grades at the cease of the fall and spring terms in seventh and eighth grades.

As you lot can see in the following figure, the researchers found that the students who were classified every bit 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 so actually able to do it. These findings confirm that how we remember about traits can have a substantial impact on our own behavior.

Figure 5.10 Students who believed that their intelligence was more than malleable (incremental styles) were more likely to amend their math skills than were students who believed that intelligence was hard to change (entity styles). Data are from Blackwell et al. (2007). Blackwell, L. S., Trzesniewski, K. H., & Dweck, C. S. (2007). Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement beyond an adolescent transition: A longitudinal study and an intervention. Child Development, 78(1), 246–263.

Attributional Styles and Mental Health

As we accept seen in this affiliate, how we make attributions about other people has a large influence on our reactions to them. Merely nosotros besides make attributions for our ain behaviors. Social psychologists accept discovered that there are important private differences in the attributions that people make to the negative events that they feel and that these attributions tin can have a large influence on how they feel about and answer to them. The same negative event can create anxiety and depression in one individual but accept well-nigh no effect on someone else. And yet some other person may see the negative event every bit a challenge and endeavor 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 brand to them. Attributional way refers to the blazon of attributions that we tend to make for the events that occur to us. These attributions can be to our own characteristics (internal) or to the situation (external), but attributions can also be fabricated on other dimensions, including stable versus unstable, and global versus specific. Stable attributions are those that nosotros call back will be relatively permanent, whereas unstable attributions are expected to change over fourth dimension. Global attributions are those that we experience apply broadly, whereas specific attributions are those causes that we see as more unique to item events.

You may know some people who tend to make negative or pessimistic attributions to negative events that they experience. We say that these people have a negative attributional style. This is the trend to explain negative events by referring to their own internal, stable, and global qualities. People with a negative attributional manner say things such every bit the following:

• "I failed because I am no good" (an internal attribution).
• "I e'er fail" (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, Alloy, Abramson, and Francis (1999) plant that higher students who indicated that they had negative attributional styles when they first came to college were more likely than those who had a more positive way to experience an episode of depression inside the side by side 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 be experiencing learned helplessness (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978; Seligman, 1975). Learned helplessness was first demonstrated in inquiry that found that some dogs that were strapped into a harness and exposed to painful electrical shocks became passive and gave up trying to escape from the shock, even 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 racket when they were really able to do so. Those who experience learned helplessness do not feel that they have any control over their own outcomes and are more than likely to have a variety of negative wellness outcomes, including anxiety and depression (Henry, 2005; Peterson & Seligman, 1984).

Near people tend to have a more positive attributional mode —means of explaining events that are related to high self-esteem and a tendency to explain the negative events they feel past referring to external, unstable, and specific qualities. Thus people with a positive attributional style are likely to say things such equally the following:

• "I failed because the task is very difficult" (an external attribution).
• "I will practise better next time" (an unstable attribution).
• "I failed in this domain, only I'thou adept in other things" (a specific attribution).

In sum, we can say that people who make more positive attributions toward the negative events that they experience volition persist longer at tasks and that this persistence can help them. These attributions can also contribute to everything from bookish success (Boyer, 2006) to improve mental wellness (Vines & Nixon, 2009). In that location are limits to the effectiveness of these strategies, nevertheless. We cannot control everything, and trying to do and so can be stressful. We can change some things but not others; thus sometimes the of import thing is to know when it's better to requite upwards, stop worrying, and simply allow things happen. Having a positive, mildly optimistic outlook is healthy, every bit we explored in Affiliate 2, but we cannot be unrealistic well-nigh what we can and cannot do.Unrealistic optimism is thetrend to be overly positive well-nigh the likelihood that negative things volition occur to u.s.a. and that we will be able to finer cope with them if they do. When we are too optimistic, we may fix ourselves up for failure and depression when things exercise non work out every bit we had hoped (Weinstein & Klein, 1996). Nosotros may call up that nosotros are immune to the potential negative outcomes of driving while intoxicated or practicing unsafe sex, but these optimistic behavior tin can be risky.

The findings here linking attributional style to mental health lead to the interesting prediction that people's well-beingness 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 thought. These types of psychotherapy have indeed been shown to assistance people in developing a more than positive attributional way and have met with some success in alleviating symptoms of depression, anxiety, and obsessive compulsive disorders (Wang, Zhang, Y., Zhang, North., & Zhang, J., 2011). Dysfunctional attributions tin can besides exist at the heart of human relationship difficulties, including abuse, where partners consistently brand negative attributions virtually each other's behaviors. Once more, retraining couples to brand more balanced attributions about each other can be useful, helping to promote more positive communication patterns and to increase human relationship satisfaction (Hrapczynski, Epstein, Werlinich, LaTaillade, 2012).

Attributions also play an important part in the quality of the working relationships between clients and therapists in mental health settings. If a client and therapist both make similar attributions nearly the causes of the client's challenges, this can assist to promote mutual understanding, empathy, and respect (Duncan & Moynihan, 1994). As well, clients generally rate their therapists every bit more than credible when their attributions are more than similar to their own (Atkinson, Worthington, Dana, & Skillful, 1991). In turn, therapists tend to report being able to work more than positively with clients who make similar attributions to them (O'Brien & Murdock, 1993).

Too equally developing a more positive attributional style, some other technique that people sometimes utilize here to help them feel ameliorate about themselves is known as self-handicapping. Self-handicapping occurs when we make statements or appoint in behaviors that help united states of america create a user-friendly external attribution for potential failure. There are ii main ways that we can self-handicap. Ane is to engage in a form of preemptive self-serving attributional bias, where we claim an external gene that may reduce our performance, alee of fourth dimension, which nosotros can apply if things get badly. For example, in a job interview or before giving a presentation at work, Veronica might say she is not feeling well and enquire the audience not to expect also much from her because of this.

Another method of self-handicapping is to conduct in ways that brand success less likely, which can be an effective way of coping with failure, especially in circumstances where nosotros feel the chore may ordinarily be too hard. For instance, in research by Berglas and Jones (1978), participants commencement performed an intelligence exam on which they did very well. It was and so explained to them that the researchers were testing the furnishings of different drugs on performance and that they would be asked to take a like merely potentially more than difficult intelligence test while they were under the influence of i of two unlike drugs.

The participants were and so given a choice—they could accept 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 chore, thereby making the task harder to perform (no drugs were actually administered). Berglas found that men—but non women—engaged in self-handicapping: they preferred to take the performance-inhibiting rather than the operation-enhancing drug, choosing the drug that provided a convenient external attribution for potential failure. Although women may also self-handicap, particularly past indicating that they are unable to perform well due to stress or time constraints (Hirt, Deppe, & Gordon, 1991), men seem to do it more than ofttimes. This finding is consistent with the general gender differences we take talked about in many places in this book: on boilerplate, men are more concerned than women about using this type of self-enhancement to boost their self-esteem and social status in the eyes of themselves and others.

You lot can run across that there are some benefits (but also, of course, some costs) of cocky-handicapping. If we fail after we self-handicap, we but blame the failure on the external factor. But if nosotros succeed despite the handicap that we accept created for ourselves, we tin can make articulate internal attributions for our success. "Look at how well I did in my presentation at work, even though I wasn't feeling well!"

Engaging in behaviors that create self-handicapping can be costly because doing so makes it harder for usa to succeed. In fact, inquiry has found that people who report that they cocky-handicap regularly show lower life satisfaction, less competence, poorer moods, less interest in their jobs, and greater substance abuse (Zuckerman & Tsai, 2005). Meta-analytic evidence shows that increased self-handicapping also relates to more negative academic outcomes (Schwinger, Wirthwein, Lemmer, & Steinmayr, 2014). Although self-handicapping would seem to be useful for insulating our feelings from failure, it is not a good tack to accept in the long run.

Fortunately, near people accept a reasonable rest between optimism and realism in the attributions that they brand (Taylor & Armor, 1996) and exercise non often rely on self-handicapping. They also tend to ready goals that they believe they tin attain, and to regularly make some progress toward reaching them. Research has found that setting reasonable goals and feeling that we are moving toward them makes us happy, even if nosotros may not in fact reach the goals themselves (Lawrence, Carver, & Scheier, 2002). As the saying goes, being on the journey is often more important than reaching the destination.

• Because we each employ our own expectations in judgment, people may grade different impressions of the same person performing the same behavior.
• Individual differences in the cognitive accessibility of a given personal characteristic may lead to more overlap in the descriptions provided by the aforementioned perceiver most different people than there is in those provided by different perceivers well-nigh the same target person.
• People with a strong need 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 brand situational attributions for events.
• Individual differences in attributional styles can influence how we reply to the negative events that nosotros experience.
• People who take extremely negative attributional styles, in which they continually make external, stable, and global attributions for their behavior, are said to be experiencing learned helplessness.
• Self-handicapping is an attributional technique that prevents u.s.a. from making ability attributions for our ain failures.
• Having a positive outlook is healthy, but it must be tempered. Nosotros cannot be unrealistic about what we can and cannot do.

1. Think of a fourth dimension when your ain expectations influenced your attributions about another person. What type of expectations did you have and what type of attributions did you finish up making? In hindsight, how authentic do yous think that these attributions were?
2. Which constructs are more cognitively accessible for y'all? How do these constructs influence the types of attributions that you brand about other people?
3. Consider a fourth dimension when you or someone you knew engaged in self-handicapping. Why practise y'all recollect that they did this? What was the upshot of doing so?
4. Do you think that y'all have a more than positive or a more negative attributional mode? How exercise you call up this style influences your judgments most your own successes and failures? What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages for you lot of your attributional fashion?

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