Social Cognition and Perception

Order Description

Select one person’s behavior for each of the following two categories:
A person you do not know and who you probably will not see again (clerk at the grocery store, etc.)
A person you have known for some time and for whom you can remember your first impressions (acquaintance, friend, spouse, etc.)

Briefly describe each person including his or her specific behavior at your first meeting, the context of your interaction with each person, and your first impression
of each person.
Explain whether you made external (situational) and/or internal (dispositional) causes for each person’s behavior during that first meeting.

Did you engage in automatic thinking or controlled thinking in forming your first impression of each person? Explain. What, if any, schemas or heuristics did you use?

According to the information in this week’s readings, how does your culture influence your impressions of others? For example, culture can influence the content of a
particular schema (Aronson, Wilson, & Sommers, 2016, p. 70); culturally-specific display rules can influence your impressions (Aronson, Wilson, & Sommers, 2016, pp.
90-91); and culture can predict holistic or analytic thinking (Aronson, Wilson, & Sommers, 2016, p. 110).

Required Sources for these assignment:
Aronson, E., Wilson, T. D., & Sommers, S. (2016). Social psychology (9th ed.). New York, NY: Pearson.

Chapter 3, “Social Cognition: How We Think About the Social World”

Chapter 4, “Social Perception: How We Come to Understand Other People”
“Social Psychology in Action 3: Psychology and the Law” (pp. 496–506 on Eyewitness Testimony)

Boeree, C. G. (1999). Person perception. In Social psychology basics.

Na, J., & Kitayama, S. (2011). Spontaneous trait inference is culture specific: Behavioral and neural evidence. Psychological Science, 22(8), 1025–1032.