Hi everyone and welcome to the last lecture on social perception.
So the first thing we’ll talk about is correspondent inferences.
And correspondent inferences is again all about how do we make judgments about other people’s
behavior like all the ones in this lecture will be about.
And the theory of correspondent inferences says the first question we ask is, “could
the person have realistically chosen something else?’
So, for example if somebody’s in the military and they do something because of an order
you’re going to say, “Well they probably did it for an external reason, for a situational
reason, not for an internal reason.” Another thing that we’ll ask is, “Is the
behavior socially desirable?” So shaking hands is a pretty socially desirable
behavior and it’s not really noteworthy, it doesn’t really tell you anything about
somebody if they shake somebody’s hand because that’s something that’s kind of socially
desirable. And in fact if somebody doesn’t shake another
person’s hand that actually does tell you something.
So again this is another question that you can ask to do a little bit of detective work
that we all do this and we all do this little bit of detective work to try and decide, is
this an internal attribution or an external attribution that I’m going to make for somebody’s
behavior. The last thing that we can do is we can say,
“Well what are the consequences?” Does this person gain something good or bad
from this? So here’s Spongebob Squarepants who looks
pretty unhappy to be doing all of these chores. And so we would say, “Well, he’s not getting
any pleasure from this so there must be something outside of him that’s getting him to do
these chores.” And so we’d probably make an external attribution
for his behavior and not an internal attribution, it’s not something that he’s doing because
he wants to, its something he’s doing because he feels he has to.
Trait inference is basically that people will automatically make distributional attributions
for others’ behavior. So, if I show you a picture of this guy, this
is an actor who plays this really spoiled brat of a king on Game of Thrones and if you
think about this actor you’ll probably think some maybe negative things because the character
is very, very negative. But now here’s a picture of the actor being
super cute with a puppy. And the gif that this picture came from is
titled, “The Most Important Video of King Joffrey Kissing A Puppy You Will Ever See.”
So, even for people who know that this person is an actor and isn’t really like the character
he’s playing, the fact that he’s being so friendly with a puppy just blows their
minds because they make dispositional attributions for the actor about things that the character
does even though we know that it’s an actor and it’s not really how that person is.
But you often find that people who play bad guys will say that people in the streets tend
to treat them like their bad guy characters because people find it very hard to distinguish
between a character and the actor and that’s all about spontaneous trait inference.
And now we’ll talk about the Three State Model of Attribution.
And the Three State Model of Attribution essentially says the first thing we do is we decide what
the behavior is and then we make an internal attribution and then after that we will adjust
for some kind of external possibilities. So this is kind of similar to anchoring and
adjustment that we talked about in a previous chapter.
You’re anchoring on this internal attribution, then you adjust.
So here’s how this works: You see this guy, you characterize the behavior,
he’s shouting. And then you make an internal attribution,
he’s shouting because he’s a bad guy. And then you adjust for external possibilities
and say, but maybe it’s just his job. So the Three State Model of Attribution says
this is how we characterize other people’s behavior and understand them: first we label
the behavior, then we make some kind of internal attribution about it, and then lastly we’ll
adjust knowing that everybody isn’t purely internally motivated all the time.