Psychology for Dummies (44 page)
Read Psychology for Dummies Online
Authors: Adam Cash
Tags: #Psychology, #General, #Body; Mind & Spirit, #Spirituality
Trying to explain other people’s behavior is pretty hard to do. You can’t look inside their minds and can only guess as to what’s going on in there. This doesn’t stop people from trying to explain others’ actions.
Have you ever experienced love at first sight? I’ve always wondered how that works. How can you fall in love with somebody based on just looking at him or her? Maybe research in the area of
snap judgments
can help answer that question. Snap judgments of people are instantaneous, automatic, and unconscious evaluations.
We base our snap judgments on two types of cues:
Static cues:
Things that are relatively unchanging about a person like their appearance, gender, and body-type (not including clothing). We use this information to make
evaluative judgments
about the person. These judgments can be right or wrong. I might evaluate a person wearing a bow tie as fun-loving and easy going, or I might see him as nerdy and uptight. Either way, I’m using an aspect of someone’s physical appearance to make a judgment about what kind of person he or she is.
Dynamic cues:
Things that tend to change depending on the situation, such as facial expressions and mannerisms. When I see a smile, I might evaluate that person as generally happy, or I might think that he or she just heard a funny joke. The point is that we use relatively basic information to make snappy evaluations of people’s personalities or about their lives.
Snap judgments are really just the beginning of our attempts to figure other people out. We all make snap judgments, even though we’re often unaware of doing so. In the process of
impression formation,
we go beyond snap judgments and make more in-depth inferences about the kind of person that someone is. Consider the following adjectives describing a person: hardworking, tense, skillful, cold, industrious. What kind of person is this? Regardless of your conclusion, you are attempting to pull these words together, based on your experience and knowledge, in a way that paints a summary picture.
Solomon Asch came up with a popular theory of impression formation that focused on the existence of
central traits
that color our interpretations and the meanings of other observed traits. It’s like we have an internal sense that certain traits go together. For example, an attractive person may have an easier time getting someone to help him or her change a flat tire than an unattractive person. This is probably because we assume that the attribute of attractiveness is automatically connected to the attribute of gratefulness. I’m not going to help an unattractive, ungrateful person change his tire.
Bruner and Tagiuri considered our internal sense of traits that belong together as part of an
implicit personality theory.
We learn that certain traits go together because we’ve either been told that they go together or we observe them going together. I was told a thousand times that polite people don’t interrupt, so I guess I’m pretty rude because I interrupt all the time. Interrupting and rudeness “belong” together in my implicit personality theory.
Basically, implicit personality theories are stereotypes. Stereotypes are an inevitable consequence of our attempt to make sense of our social world. Stereotypes are like shortcuts for thinking. We couldn’t possibly store independent evaluations of every single person that we’ve ever met. This would take up way too much space in our memories. Instead, we categorize people, and sometimes this categorization results in the formation of stereotypes. Unfortunately, in our attempt to simplify the world, we often over-generalize negative aspects of people, which too often leads to prejudice and racism.
We not only make snappy judgments about people based on limited information, but we also attempt to determine why people did what they did or what caused a particular behavior. According to Heider, all of us have a tendency to perceive behavior as either being caused by the person herself (internal cause) or by the environment (external cause).
The last time I went to Las Vegas, I witnessed an elderly woman win a progressive jackpot of $50,000. As I stood back and watched people crowd around her, I heard her telling her new-found fan club all about her strategy. I couldn’t help but laugh, thinking that her strategy had nothing to do with it. It was pure luck. In that situation, I attributed her success to an external, environmental cause, the programming of the particular slot machine she was using. She attributed it to her skill. Maybe she should write
Slot Machines For Dummies.
When making an attribution, we tend to focus on three important pieces of information:
Consistency:
People generally behave in the same way across different situations. That same behavior gives us a sense of their consistency. When someone exhibits a consistent behavior, we attribute that behavior to his or her personality. Something internally belonging to that person causes the behavior. The more inconsistent someone is, the more we attribute the behavior to the circumstance. I don’t lose in Las Vegas because I am a loser; I lose because of the circumstance. I hope.
Distinctiveness:
I used to think a buddy of mine had a real problem with women. Before I knew it, he always got slapped and shuffled back over to complain to me. It was only after I saw how he treated other people, including men, that I realized he was lousy with everyone. His behavior was distinct because he acted the same with all people. He responded to all people in the same way, not just specific people. Because his behavior did not vary by context or environment, it was probably an internal trait.
Consensus:
When Tom goes to the movies, he buys popcorn and a soda, gives his ticket to the usher, finds a seat, sits down, faces forward, doesn’t talk, and watches the movie. What does this tell you about Tom? Absolutely nothing. Why? Probably because Tom is engaging in typical moviegoer behavior. There’s a consensus that all people act in a particular way when going to the movies. This leads me to consider that Tom’s behavior is due to the situation. If Tom stood up and started screaming when the movie came on, he would be acting outside of the consensus and thus possibly showing more of his true personality through this unique act.
Numerous possible combinations of these three pieces of information exist: high consistency, high distinctiveness, low consensus, and so on. Consistently we find that the combination of high consistency, low distinctiveness, and low consensus leads to a
personal attribution
(internal cause or explanation for their behavior). When I act consistently across situations, respond to the same stimuli the same way every time, and act differently than other people in that same situation, it’s probably me. High consistency, high distinctiveness, and high consensus lead to an external attribution. When I act the same across situations, but I respond differently to the same stimuli, and everyone else is doing it, it’s probably the situation or the external environment. So what would you attribute my passion for polka music to? Doesn’t everyone love polka?