Chapter 13 Introduction

The Person in a World of People

PART

VII

We humans are social beings through and through. We are motivated to understand others. We are concerned about what others think of us. Our understanding of ourselves is strongly affected by our perceptions of what others think of us. This two-chapter unit is on social psychology—the study of human thought and behavior in relation to the social contexts in which they occur. Chapter 13 is about the mental processes involved in understanding others, ourselves, and the social world in general. Chapter 14 is about some of the ways in which other people influence our behavior.

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Social Perception and Attitudes

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Forming Impressions of Other People

  • Making Attributions from Observed Behavior
  • Effects of Facial Features on Person

Perceptions Perceiving and Evaluating the Self

  • Seeing Ourselves Through the Eyes of Others
  • Actively Constructing Our Self-Perceptions
  • Self-Control

Perceiving Ourselves and Others as Members of Groups

  • Shifting Between Personal and Social Identities
  • Stereotypes and Their Automatic Effects on Perception and Behavior

Attitudes: Their Origins and Their Effects on Behavior

  • Relationships of Attitudes to Behavior: Distinction Between Explicit and Implicit Attitudes
  • The Origins of Attitudes, and Methods of Persuasion
  • Attitudes as Rationalizations to Attain Cognitive Consistency

Reflections and Connections

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Humans are intensely social animals. We are designed, by natural selection, to depend on one another for even our most basic needs. We are not good, for example, at obtaining food alone; we need the help of others and the knowledge that is shared by members of a human community. Throughout our evolutionary history, to be thrown out of the tribe was tantamount to death. We are also thinking social animals. Most of what we think about is other people, ourselves, our relationships with other people, and the social conventions and norms that are essential aspects of life in any human society.

This is the first of a two-chapter sequence on social psychology, the subfield of psychology that deals most explicitly with how we view one another and are influenced by one another. This chapter focuses on person perception, the processes by which we perceive and understand one another and ourselves, and on attitudes, the evaluative beliefs that we have about our social world and the entities within it. The next chapter focuses on the effects that those perceptions and beliefs have on our emotions and actions.