SOCIAL PERCEPTION
Topic: SOCIAL PERCEPTION
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Introduction
Social perception is a process of understanding of how human beings develop impressions and come to conclusions about other people. So that they can understand other people, they depend on facts from the way they appear in person, how they talk and the body language that they display. There are always forms in which human beings can exchange information without necessarily uttering anything and this includes the expressions of the face, the tone of the voice, how the body is positioned and how one moves around and the way they look at and touch things around them. Charles Darwin was convinced that the way that human beings displayed their feelings was uniform. The modern research of this topic proves that Darwin was correct in his conclusions for expressions like anger, joy, surprise, disgust and sadness and the modern research continues to try to prove if others are right. Attributions also affect social perceptions in that they assist people to come to conclusions about why others behave in a particular manner and extrapolate how they might behave in days to come. (Lesko, 2012).
First Impressions
A human beings reaction to other human being is automatic and happens in an instant and this creates a discrete opinion within the first few seconds of meeting a stranger and these reactions that are immediate stay for a long time. When the cause of a particular behavior is not established, the mind tends to settle for what is closely related to the first impression that was created. In a case that the first impression was of an angry person after looking at his face, there would be the inference that he actually is if he has a loud voice. Impressions will stay for a long time since the brain keeps adding more findings to the original one and creating new ones that are closer to the truth. Psychologists have come to the conclusion that these judgments are holistic in that the bits of clues are taken all at the same time to form an observation that is larger than them.
When we meet a new person, the easiest sign to distinguish is a smile since it can be seen from a far and it also helps to make people feel welcome. It takes a time shorter than three seconds for the brain to come to a conclusion about the new people that we meet. Thus it is safe to say that people have developed an ability that enables them to quickly judge the people that they meet and rate them either as potentially dangerous or safe to stay around. Scientists believe that thin chunks of these snapshots are developed in the primitive area of the brain that are also responsible for the generating feelings. Feelings of distrust and loathe are generally created in this area of the brain. This way of interpreting these first impressions developed as a form of self-defense mechanism, (Jussim, 2012).
The only problem with this ability is that there is no way of knowing if a person is faking an emotion or pretending. Only a person that is trained to read these kinds of expression can come up with the correct inferences. When attitudes are formed in an implicit manner they can cause serious damage in the real world, for example someone that is angry coming across another person who is of a different religion or race is likely to picture and make a conclusion that is negative about that person. It might lead to anger and these are the kinds of situations that the police watch out for.
Deception
People have continually and always been successful at lie detection but then science has discovered ways that deception can be discovered and detected. How one acts when they meet someone new will help to show if there is deception involved. Nonverbal communication is also used to measure how honest a person is since emotions control some of these gestures such as fear that may cause fidgeting, (Miller & Stiff, 1993). Liars try to hide the signs of their deception which makes them act unnatural since they have to manage both none verbal and verbal cues that should otherwise be natural and first impressions are generated from here.
The brain develops a variety of impressions when we first meet someone from their facial expressions like a smile versus a frown makes us register to others as a friend, not an enemy and this will comfort. Colors also matter since if someone has a warm complexion is wearing cool colors, for example, or a set of clothes that doesn’t fit them well, we will perceive that something is not right, and we will form a negative impression of the person.
How first impressions can be deceptive
Our minds evaluate a lot of pointers as they create first impressions and try to make a connection between people and positive feelings. For instance, the authors of an October 2008 study discovered that people who held a hot cup for ten before meeting someone rated their first impressions of the stranger more positively than those who held an iced one as they warmed to the people they were meeting because they associated the strangers with the comforting feeling of gentle heat, (Goldberg, 2013). Biology could have been involved here since when we are happy and secure the reason to feel threatened by strangers diminishes and we are less likely to want to distance ourselves from them as a defense mechanism.
It is an experiment on first impressions on how stable the early judgments can be, what determines them and what relates this finding to how the person finding them acts and behaves. The person making these inferences normally has mindsets that remain constant throughout the evaluation process and these variables exist freely in nature. The observer normally has expectation about the person that they have met and these expectations are normally rigid. If the person observing is given information about the subject to be observed beforehand, he will normally have a threshold in place that he will expect the subject to meet and this makes a difference in the first impression. The results of these are normally restricted and modified to accommodate the expectations. When there is a description of the subject in terms like warm, there is a change in the entire impression of the subject and this effect can be both negative and positive. This might in the end yield results that are wrong.
Discussion
First impressions can make people judge each other negatively or even positively when their character is completely opposite when we are meeting them for the first time. A neat and tidy person might be judge as being clumsy and untidy simply because he met an accident on the way yet he is not always this unfortunate every day. Although first impressions are important in trying to understand people that we meet every day, it is vital to take longer to observe people and understand better to avoid judging them ignorantly and make informed inferences on their character.
Conclusion
There are a lot of assumptions about nonverbal behavior but scientists that research this trait have not been able to find one that can be relied on since they cannot be easily proven. Many judgments about deceptions never really receive feedback and professionals that have been trained in the detection of lies were given the wrong procedures that were incorrect. A direct attempt to detect deception is one of the reasons that make the process even less accurate as this does not avoid a case of being bias. In the end we find that detecting lies is a complex process and those that take part in the process might be depending on chance to get findings. Using methods that are not directed yield better results in the end than when the direct ones are employed. Relying on stereotypes like liars have less eye contact might take attention away from accurate results and consequently show that the study was conducted ignorantly.
References
Goldberg, L. R. (2013). Personality Topics in Honor of Jerry S. Wiggins: A Special Issue of
Multivariate Behavioral Research. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.
Jussim, L. J. (2012). Social perception and social reality: Why accuracy dominates bias and self-
fulfilling prophesy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lesko, W. A. (2012). Readings in social psychology: General, classic and contemporary
selections + mysearchlab. S.l.: Prentice Hall.
Miller, G. R., & Stiff, J. B. (1993). Deceptive communication. Newbury Park, Calif: Sage
Publications.