What does initial perceptions mean

For instance, Fletcher, Danilovics, Fernandez, Peterson, and Reeder found that psychology majors were more curious about people than were natural science majors. In turn, the types of attributions they tend to make about behavior may be different. Entity theorists tend to focus on the traits of other people and tend to make a lot of personal attributions. On the other hand, incremental theorists are those who believe that personalities change a lot over time and who therefore are more likely to make situational attributions for events.

In one relevant study, Molden, Plaks, and Dweck found that when forced to make judgments quickly, people who had been classified as entity theorists were nevertheless still able to make personal attributions about others but were not able to easily encode the situational causes of a behavior.

On the other hand, when forced to make judgments quickly, the people who were classified as incremental theorists were better able to make use of the situational aspects of the scene than the personalities of the actors. Individual differences in attributional styles can also influence our own behavior. Incremental theorists, on the other hand, are more optimistic and do better in such challenging environments because they believe that their personality can adapt to the new situation.

They assessed the attributional tendencies and the math performance of junior high school students at a public school in New York City. When they first entered seventh grade, the students all completed a measure of attributional styles. As you can see in the following figure, the researchers found that the students who were classified as incremental theorists improved their math scores significantly more than did the entity students.

It seems that the incremental theorists really believed that they could improve their skills and were then actually able to do it. These findings confirm that how we think about traits can have a substantial impact on our own behavior. As we have seen in this chapter, how we make attributions about other people has a big influence on our reactions to them.

But we also make attributions for our own behaviors. Social psychologists have discovered that there are important individual differences in the attributions that people make to the negative events that they experience and that these attributions can have a big influence on how they feel about and respond to them. The same negative event can create anxiety and depression in one individual but have virtually no effect on someone else.

A major determinant of how we react to perceived threats is the type of attribution that we make to them. Attributional style refers to the type of attributions that we tend to make for the events that occur to us. These attributions can be to our own characteristics internal or to the situation external , but attributions can also be made on other dimensions, including stable versus unstable , and global versus specific.

Stable attributions are those that we think will be relatively permanent , whereas unstable attributions are expected to change over time. Global attributions are those that we feel apply broadly , whereas specific attributions are those causes that we see as more unique to particular events. You may know some people who tend to make negative or pessimistic attributions to negative events that they experience.

We say that these people have a negative attributional style. This is the tendency to explain negative events by referring to their own internal, stable, and global qualities. People with a negative attributional style say things such as the following:. Indeed, Alloy, Abramson, and Francis found that college students who indicated that they had negative attributional styles when they first came to college were more likely than those who had a more positive style to experience an episode of depression within the next few months.

Learned helplessness was first demonstrated in research that found that some dogs that were strapped into a harness and exposed to painful electric shocks became passive and gave up trying to escape from the shock, even in new situations in which the harness had been removed and escape was therefore possible.

Similarly, some people who were exposed to bursts of noise later failed to stop the noise when they were actually able to do so. Most people tend to have a more positive attributional style — ways of explaining events that are related to high self-esteem and a tendency to explain the negative events they experience by referring to external, unstable, and specific qualities.

Thus people with a positive attributional style are likely to say things such as the following:. In sum, we can say that people who make more positive attributions toward the negative events that they experience will persist longer at tasks and that this persistence can help them. There are limits to the effectiveness of these strategies, however. We cannot control everything, and trying to do so can be stressful. Having a positive, mildly optimistic outlook is healthy, as we explored in Chapter 2, but we cannot be unrealistic about what we can and cannot do.

Unrealistic optimism is the tendency to be overly positive about the likelihood that negative things will occur to us and that we will be able to effectively cope with them if they do. We may think that we are immune to the potential negative outcomes of driving while intoxicated or practicing unsafe sex, but these optimistic beliefs can be risky. Attributional retraining interventions have been developed based on this idea.

These types of psychotherapy have indeed been shown to assist people in developing a more positive attributional style and have met with some success in alleviating symptoms of depression, anxiety, and obsessive compulsive disorders Wang, Zhang, Y.

Again, retraining couples to make more balanced attributions about each other can be useful, helping to promote more positive communication patterns and to increase relationship satisfaction Hrapczynski, Epstein, Werlinich, LaTaillade, Attributions also play an important part in the quality of the working relationships between clients and therapists in mental health settings.

As well as developing a more positive attributional style, another technique that people sometimes use here to help them feel better about themselves is known as self-handicapping. Self-handicapping occurs when we make statements or engage in behaviors that help us create a convenient external attribution for potential failure.

There are two main ways that we can self-handicap. One is to engage in a form of preemptive self-serving attributional bias, where we claim an external factor that may reduce our performance, ahead of time, which we can use if things go badly. For example, in a job interview or before giving a presentation at work, Veronica might say she is not feeling well and ask the audience not to expect too much from her because of this.

Another method of self-handicapping is to behave in ways that make success less likely, which can be an effective way of coping with failure, particularly in circumstances where we feel the task may ordinarily be too difficult.

For instance, in research by Berglas and Jones , participants first performed an intelligence test on which they did very well. It was then explained to them that the researchers were testing the effects of different drugs on performance and that they would be asked to take a similar but potentially more difficult intelligence test while they were under the influence of one of two different drugs.

The participants were then given a choice—they could take a pill that was supposed to facilitate performance on the intelligence task making it easier for them to perform or a pill that was supposed to inhibit performance on the intelligence task, thereby making the task harder to perform no drugs were actually administered.

From the Cambridge English Corpus. Problems, then, are raised about the ecological validity of this constraint and the role it might play in the perception of ordinary, everyday motion. In this framework, conceptual representations are contiguous with the representational forms of perception and action. Such a perception prompts people to ask whether something valuable is lost when non-market modes of interaction are replaced by market ones. Memory complaints do reflect perceptions of past memory performance and are also an early manifestation of memory impairment.

Due recognition must also be given to changes in nuptial fertility and to apparently changing perceptions of the roles of marriage and the family. Is there some concept, identifiable as ' perception ', which affects or controls a human being's knowledge of the surrounding landscape? If the mirroring is too accurate, the perception itself can become a source of fear, and it loses its symbolic potential.

Developmentalists show that these schemas operate between language and perception , thereby facilitating semantic development. It may be perceived as an area of concern if this is the perception of students accessing the course. This process tends to be relevant to functions that are universal to all members of a species such as visual depth perception or language development. In fact, he has always suffered this condition; what is new is his perception of it, and its internalization.

Once again, the stimulus will be sufficient to force the correct perception. Like cooking, cleaning, shopping, and washing, men can do it too, but the societal perception is that these are women's tasks or feminine gendered activities.

Many tasks involve sensory information that is ambiguous, and other sources of information may be required for adequate perception. These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

Translations of perception in Chinese Traditional. In fact, the original work of the researcher who developed signal detection theory was focused on improving the sensitivity of air traffic controllers to plane blips Swets, Our perceptions can also be affected by our beliefs, values, prejudices, expectations, and life experiences.

The shared experiences of people within a given cultural context can have pronounced effects on perception. For example, Marshall Segall, Donald Campbell, and Melville Herskovits published the results of a multinational study in which they demonstrated that individuals from Western cultures were more prone to experience certain types of visual illusions than individuals from non-Western cultures, and vice versa. Figure 2. These perceptual differences were consistent with differences in the types of environmental features experienced on a regular basis by people in a given cultural context.

In contrast, people from certain non-Western cultures with an uncarpentered view, such as the Zulu of South Africa, whose villages are made up of round huts arranged in circles, are less susceptible to this illusion Segall et al. It is not just vision that is affected by cultural factors. Think about a time when you failed to notice something around you because your attention was focused elsewhere.

Skip to main content. Sensation and Perception. Search for:. What is Perception? Learning Objectives Discuss the roles attention, motivation, and sensory adaptation play in perception.

People often form impressions of others very quickly, with only minimal information. We frequently base our impressions on the roles and social norms we expect from people. For example, you might form an impression of a city bus driver based on how you would anticipate a person in that role to behave, considering individual personality characteristics only after you have formed this initial impression. Physical cues can also play an important role.

If you see a woman dressed in a professional-looking suit, you might immediately assume that she works in a formal setting, perhaps at a law firm or bank. The salience of the information we perceive is also important. Generally, we tend to focus on the most obvious points rather than noting background information. The more novel or obvious a factor is, the more likely we are to focus on it. If you see a woman dressed in a tailored suit with her hair styled in a bright pink mohawk, you are likely to pay more attention to her unusual hairstyle than her sensible business attire.

One of the mental shortcuts we use in person perception is social categorization. In this process, we mentally categorize people into different groups based on common characteristics. Sometimes this process occurs consciously, but for the most part, social categorizations happen automatically and unconsciously.

Some of the most common social categories are age, gender, occupation, and race. As with many mental shortcuts, social categorization has both positive and negative aspects. Realistically, you simply do not have time to get to know every person you come into contact with. Using social categorization allows you to make decisions and establish expectations of how people will behave quickly, allowing you to focus on other things.

Problems with this technique include the fact that it can lead to errors, as well as to stereotyping or even prejudice. There are only two seats available. One is next to a petite, elderly woman; the other is next to a burly, grim-faced man. Based on your immediate impression, you sit next to the elderly woman, who unfortunately turns out to be quite skilled at picking pockets.

Because of social categorization, you immediately judged the woman as harmless and the man as threatening, leading to the loss of your wallet.