PSY 240 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Konrad Lorenz, Social Perception, Ethology
10 Dec 2020
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Social perception: a general form for the processes by which people come to understand one another. We cannot actually see someone"s mental or emotional state, motives, or intentions, any more than a detective can see a crime that has already been committed. So, the social perceiver comes to know others by relying on indirect clues the elements of social perception. These clues arise from three sources: persons, situations, and behavior. Janine willis and alexander todorov (2006) showed undergraduate students photographs of unfamiliar faces for one-tenth of a second, half a second, or a full second. Whether the students judged the faces for how attractive, likable, competent, trustworthy, or aggressive they were, their ratings even at the briefest exposure were quick and were highly correlated with judgments that other observers made without time-exposure limits. In 500 bce, the mathematician pythagoras looked into the eyes of prospective students to determine if they were gifted.
