Powerpoint Slides

Presentation of the Self to Others

Strategic vs. Authentic self-presentations
- depending on where you are is how you present yourself

Self-presentation failure: when you fail to give a good self-
presentation, use sympathy, or an excuse. The excuse must be plausible.
Plausible excuses can save people

Self-Handicapping: we don’t want to face reality, so we intentionally
sabotage ourselves.
- Ex. when you have a big paper due, you decide to clean your
room first. If your paper is not handed in on time, your excuse is that
you had to clean your room.

Strategic Self-Presentations
- how you present yourself to look better using:
- exemplification
- modesty: un-representing yourself
- intimidation: scaring people by convincing them you are
dangerous
- supplication: advertise your weakness in order to get sympathy
- ingratiation: flattering

Self-Monitoring
- use other people’s cues to control your self-presentation. More
likely to change your presentation if you’re a high self-monitored
person
- high self-monitored people are more in theater, psychology, and
public relations
- low self-monitored people act more on how they feel, more
guided by attitudes and beliefs. Less interested to present a nice
image of themselves.

Social Perception: your impression of what a person is like
- look at their physical appearance, similarity to you, and what
they say

Impression formation: process by which we integrate various sources of
information about another into overall judgment

Stereotype: a fixed way of thinking about people because it’s the most
sufficient thing to do when we don’t know anything else
- names are one way we stereotype
- women are judged more attractive by their names

Non-verbal behavioral cues: pay attention to what people do (ex. facial
expressions)
- facial expressions tend to be universal.
- Happiness, surprise, sadness, fear, disgust, and anger

Eye contact is a sign of dominance.
- staring, avoidance, or gaze aversion
- it depends on the duration, too long can scare people

Ellsworth (1972)
- tested people by staring at them from a bench, car, and
motorcycle while at a red stop light
- subjects sped off faster when started at

Body Movements
- ready people’s behavior
- mimic people’s posture and you feel more connected to them
- in ballet, more angular positions tend to be more threatening
than more circular positions
- more relaxed people tend to spread out more.
- Guys tend to spread out more
- Women are more compact

Impression Formation

                The process by which we integrate various sources of info about another into an overall

judgment

We are likely to use “averaging” when making impression of people

Implicit Personality Theory

                The assumptions people make about which personality traits go together

False Consensus Bias

                We think other people think like we do.

Positivity Bias

                Tendency for people to rate individual human beings more positively than groups or

impersonal objects

Negativity Bias

                Tendency for negative traits to be weighted more heavily in impression formation than

positive traits

                Attributions

                                How we explain someone’s theory

                                                External-emotion due to outside influence

                                                Internal-emotions are gained from within

                                Fritz Heider’s Naïve psychology

                                                People are motivated to form a coherent view of the world

                                                People have a need to gain control over their environment

                                                Internal vs. external

                                                Stable vs. unstable

                                Correspondent Inference Theory

                                                The action of an actor corresponds to or is indicative of a stable personality

characteristic

                                                Rules:

                                                                Social desirability of the behavior

                                                                Actor’s degree of choice

                                                                Non-common effects

                                Kelley’s Covariation Model

                                                Covariation principle:

                                                                Whenever there are several casual explanations for a particular event,

we tend to be less likely to attribute the effect to any particular cause

                                                                consensus

                                                                consistency

                                                                distinctiveness

                                Fundamental Attribution Error

                                                When explaining the actions of others, we tend to locate the cause in terms of

dispositional characteristics rather than more appropriate situational factors

                                The Actor Observer effect

                                                The tendency to attribute other’s behavior to external causes

                                Self-serving Bias

                                                The tendency to assign an internal locus of causality for our positive outcomes

and an external locus for our negative outcomes          

Heuristics: The Cliff Notes of Attributions

                Reverse stereotypes

                                You see people have a certain characteristic therefore they belong to a certain group

                Representativeness Heuristic

                Availability Heuristic