We view ourselves as the most important people and then give importance to others. People influence virtually every aspect of our life. It is not surprising, therefore we are so interested in understanding them. The perception we have of this world is not just through our sensory receptors and neurons but depends on much more than that. i.e. it may depend on such factors as prior experience, expectations, attention, needs, emotions, and the interrelations among the objects perceived. The same factors also govern the way we perceive and judge people but the social psychologists have added a few more concepts to them particularly to deal with the problem of person perception. The moment people start perceiving them, the self starts evolving. The word 'self' (Smith 1974) has been unpopular among psychologist in the past half century, but with the development of the empirical orientation and the experimental methods of behaviorism psychology what a person does was taken into consideration rather than what he thought he was. Without an immediate awareness of feelings and thoughts, one cannot define the field of human psychology.
Social perception is a process by which we came to know and understand the persons around us. The process of social perception sets the stage for much of our social behavior. Our perceptions of the way other persons feel, their motives and their traits play an important role in shaping the nature of our interaction with them.
Basically there are two different aspects of this topic :
I. We should consider the temporary states of others- for example their present emotion and feelings.
II. We should consider the more or lasting characteristics - for example their motives, intentions or traits. This process is usually know as attribution.
While we try to understand the person around us we try to find out their present moods, emotions and feelings because many a times behavior is as strongly affected by temporary changes in mood or feeling by lasting traits or motives, for example a person who is virtually very kind helpful naturally, may have his mood swings and can become quite nasty on some days. Most of the time people tell us about their emotional state and feeling, quite directly but sometimes we have to infer these moods and feelings through their behavior or other expressive cues in spite of their effective attempts at concealing them. These are known as Non-verbal cues which fall into three major categories:
II. Eye contact
III. Position and movement of their bodies.
However, in many cases, people usually hide inner feelings by not demonstrating emotions which they really feel. They are many different reasons for individual to engage in this kind of actions. For example: the actor who often shows emotions which they don't actually feel. Diplomats conceal their emotions during important negotiations. Therefore, whatever the reason for hiding the actual emotions, they tend to lessen, the usefulness of facial expression as an accurate guide for judging other's emotion.
There is an exception to this rule ie when a person gazing ie looking at a person in a continuous manner regardless of our reactions, we call it starting which is quite an unpleasant feeling. We interpret stares as a sign of hostility or anger.
We gain much information about other feeling from the position, posture and movement of their bodies. This body language reveals their current emotional state. For example: a large amount of movement suggests that either the position is emotionally aroused or that he or she is bored like fidgeting, continuous shifting of limbs etc. More specific information about other feelings can be obtained from gestures. For example: covering. of the eyes indicates shame or embarrassment, shrugging of the shoulders indicates uncertainty. Therefore the person's movement and gestures often give a clear picture of the person's present emotional state. Body language also tells us about the person's positive and negative feelings towards us. For example: if someone with whom we are speaking, faces us directly and learn forward, it is clear sign that he or she likes us and is interested in what we are saying. In contrast if the person sits away from us or leans back. This may suggested that he or she dislikes us.
Nonverbal cues generally occur together, We usually receive inputs from all three source conflict with those from another, however they provide a fairly consistent pictures about the feelings and emotions of the persons around us.
Gaining accurate knowledge of other's emotional state and feeling is important. It helps in explaining one's current behavior. But it is of little use in predicting how this person will behave some other time. Emotions, moods and feelings range very quickly and do not provide lasting basis for understanding or predicting other's behavior. Therefore, we are often concerned with more lasting causes of their behavior. The process through which we acquire knowledge of others motives, intentions and traits is known as attribution.
By paying close attention to their physical appearance for their age, styles of dress, etc we obtain a fairly good picture of the person. Secondly, for gaining further knowledge about a person, we question their friends or relatives. Further, we also carefully observe their behavior ie by observing their actions with others around them.
Most of the time, success in attributing causes to other's behavior, stems from our tendency to focus mainly on certain types of behavior.
First, we pay particular attention to those behaviors of others which has one or more distinct reasons. Through display of that behavior can assess the motives behind their actions. And once we know the motive, we know much about the behavior.
Second, we focus upon actions of other's which are not like the usual pattern of behavior. These actions set them a part from other persons, and tell us much about their unique motives, traits and goals.
While trying to understand the causes behind others actions we should also consider whether others behaviors stems mainly from: i) Internal causes - ie their own motives and traits or from. ii) External causes ie factors in the environment around them.
Internal causes: where other people act in the same manner ie behavior is common to few or when this person acts in the same way in other situation and this person acts in the same in the situations, they attribute these behavior to internal causes.
External causes: many other persons act in the same manner as this person or this person acts differently in other situation and this person acts in the same manner in this situations on other occasions, we attribute this behavior to external causes. For example: if a person is complaining about food at particular joint and you know that she does this quite often, then you attribute this behavior to internal causes i.e she is hard to please.
In contrast the same friend is a very patient person and has never before complained about anything anywhere but today she is angry with the food, then we attribute this behavior to external causes, ie the joint has served bad food.
Finally, if we are good at guessing whether ones behavior is due to internal cause or external cause we would avoid jumping to false conclusions about their behavior.
When we are trying to understand other persons by observing their behavior and the condition under which it occurs there is a possibility that there is some amount of bias in our judgment. Many a times, we tend to perceive that our behavior is occurring in response to situational factors, but the behavior of others is stemming mainly from internal traits or causes. This type of bias is known as actor-observer differences in attribution.
For example: while walking on the road, if you see a person trip and fall, you usually come to a conclusion that he is clumsy and often trips. i.e you are attributing his action to .internal causes. But suppose the same thing happens to you, you would immediately explain it by blaming it on the uneven road or. to your shoes which are slippery. Here the attribution is to external factors.
There is another type of bias which is described as self-servicing. Wherein there is a tendency in us to view the positive behavior by us as stemming from internal factors, ie our positive traits and abilities. And when we do badly or the results are disappointing, we simply explain our behavior in terms external causes beyond our control. This bias helps us to protect and enhance our self-esteem.
Something closely related to this type of bias is described as egocentric, wherein there is a tendency to take more credit in joint projects than what is actually deserved.
Thus attribution is. not always a cold and logical process. It is often affected by such motives as the desire to protect our self-esteem or to feel that we are in control of our own fate.
The social character of perception appears to be more important while perceiving another human being because while perceiving people all aspects of the self are brought into play, and the resulting experiences reflect a complex blend of our own characteristics and those of the person, In forming an impression cf another, we more or less attempt at taking note of his physical appearance (his social role and class, his dress and hairstyle), his actions, his voice, his expressive movements and all other cues that are psychologically informative and meaningful with the above information we formulate though not exactly, a fairly detail perception of what he is like-his thoughts, his needs, his feelings, his personality etc. This precept typically represents an integration of all available cues, and embodied a portrait of a complete person and not just a few features of his personality.
Now, the question arises as to why we should form any impressions of other people?
There are many answers to this , but the most important of all is when we 1.oust actively cope with the other person, we need to make sense of other persons behavior. Therefore we must form and overall impression of his personality which aids us in predicting his actions and helps us to adopt accordingly.
Structure : We give structure to what we perceive by selecting, attending, categorizing and we also have certain amount of expectations of them. For example: when we see a person for the first time who is shabbily dressed with disheveled hair and awkward shoes, we immediately class him. This is done because, we have some existing prejudices ie a certain form of expectations, and we believe a person who is dressed like this would not be normal.
Another important thing is we establish a Constancy, while perceiving people. We judge a person as having a rather constant personality or set of traits, which may be manifested in various ways. Feldman ( 1972) gave a person's a list of traits description and asked them to indicate which of this traits could be expected to apply to professional · persons and which of them to working class.
This person's who answered the questionnaire had a proper agreement that professional people, when compared to working class people, have many good traits like they are persistent, independent, ,complex and intelligent. This shows a single hint, a cue i.e. the person's occupational category was enough to create a highly organized structure about the group.
Further they are other ways in which we jump to conclusion example when, we are told that someone is intelligent, industrious and well educated, we.immediately assume that he or she would be as successful, vigorous and likable person. i.e. we are expecting that if an individual has certain traits he would also have other traits which are consistent with the earlier traits and we are not happy or at ease when we get the opposite picture of our expectations, i.e. when there is an inconsistency in the set of traits i.e. a person is intelligent, industrious and well educated, but is with drawn and silent. Since these do not match though there is possibility of it happening. Hence people like a consistent personality more than an inconsistent one.
We usually believe that we can predict the behavior of persons, we know well enough if we find that we cannot, we doubt how well enough do we really know them. Whatever kind of human interaction we engage in being good friends, husband and wife, children and mother etc, we feel happy and competent only when we can predict the behavior of the other person more or less accurately. We will be disappointed with ourselves when we cannot do it, we feel satisfied, when we can accurately verdict the behavior of others. It is also very useful and important to be able to predict accurately the behavior of others.
There is no adequate criterion as such to evaluate the behavior of others in an accurate manner. When we want to predict some concrete form of behavior such as performing a particular task in a given situation, may be it is easier to predict that behavior but even here we have certain difficulties. Ability to predict some kinds of behavior may not generalize to other kinds of situations. For example: a person is very helpful and would not hesitate to help when asked. Thus we form an impression of this person and we expect and hope that h behaves in the same way every time. But sometimes when approached for help he may deny it. Now we wonder at our ability to predict his behavior based on our past experience. Actually we have been generalizing his behavior. The difficulty of generalizing in person of person prediction is people may be relatively accurate with one kind of prediction but may not necessarily be accurate with other kinds of behavior. This is because each of us have some sensitive areas and some blind spots which effect our perception of others. We tend to assess or perceive others behavior our own angle and we form impression others by attributing our thoughts, actions on to others which is dealt. More in detail in the lesson impression formation.
What is self? The self (according to the dictionary is the total, essential or particular being of one person. It is thought as a synonym of personality and often stresses on individual's consciousness of what he is. The measurement of the rural or actual self is a baffling task. A person cannot discriminate between what one thinks one is and what one really is. The question of how can anyone know about himself without first having a concept of self arises. Still confidently assumes that what one sees ourself to be is what one actually is. But this kind of assumption is not made of others, for what others perceive of themselves is often erroneous, over simplified and distorted and feels that the way one perceives others is actually what that other person is. But this assumption is wrong because our impressions of others are also likely to be over simplified distorted and mistaken. This seems up to the definition (Smith 1974) that self is a person one feels, perceive and thinks of oneself. A person can perceive oneself just as one perceives any other objects and other people are incomplete and inaccurate. The self defined in this way permits us to measure aspects of self. Individuals perceive themselves as practical, religious or scientific. With such measures we can examine the relationship between the perceived self and the actual self and later on how the self is organized and how that organization develops.
The artists and psychologist describe the developing person from different perspectives, by different goals in minds. The artist strives to illuminate what a person feels and experience as he is developing and the scientists try to answer the questions. What is to happen to him next? By giving the theory of self-differentiation what is going to happen to him next?
The answer is differentiation: differentiation is the process of developing from the one to the many, from the simple to the complex, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. Organisms differentiate as they climb the phylogenetic scales. These differentiated structures adapt more effectively than the more primitive structures.
Awareness also grows and in the process differentiates.
To many, the self has conjured up an image of a little being inside the persons skull, this directs the person behavior (Vallacher, 1980) concerns about the scientific legitimacy of the self have warned somewhat in the years. More so after the dramatic advances that have occurred in the computer technology over the past two decades.
It was thought that a human being can also selectively encode a systematically transformed environmental events in accordance with internal programs, producing output behavior that reflects such programs. Some of the most intriguing human "programs" involve the selection and transformation of data concerning the self. Due to· this new lease on legitimacy, the concept of self has become central to social psychology. A variety of phenomena, person perception, morality reactions to success and failures, cognitive consistency and many other-are considered by theorists to reflect the individuals attempts to achieve or maintain a particular self view (Vallacher, 1980).
Each Individual is very much-aware that he or she exists, that he or she has had and is currently having certain experiences and that he or she has specific physical, psychological and social characteristics (Albrecht et, 1980).
People frequently seek to discover the a true" nature of their self-as they search for an 'identity" or "sense of being".
• Angyal (1941) described the "self image" as the symbolic representation of one's self, a person as the person imagines himself to be the aspect of the subject pole of which he is aware.
• Fromm (1941) - places emphasis on man, social and pseudo self: man's true identity is to be found within himself, in his whole being with all of his capabilities which is the real self, when a person is unable to identify with his real self, he becomes estranged from himself. He experiences himself as a thing and alienates himself to prevent himself from insanity that comes with the social rules that he plays. Thus the social self becomes his pseudo self.
• Lecky (1945) -Theories that, the nucleus of personality around which the other ideas revolve is the person's conception of what he means, who he is, what he can do and how he fits into the world.
Any change in behavior is accompanied by a change in his self-concept and also any alternation in self-concept will be depicted in his behavior. What ever image one wants to communicate of himself should be consistent with his self-concept. Behavior according to Lecky should be consistent with the self-concept. When the persons self-concept is not accurate, one cannot also try to manage the image he wants to portray.
• Horney (1950) - postulated three selves : real, actual and idealized self: out of the three two are common to all and the third is a neurotic manifestation. Each person posses a real self which is, what the person can be, what he has the potential for.
Everyone also has an 'actual self' which is conscious. "The true picture the person has of himself'. For a healthy person, the gap between the actual and the real selves will be narrowed by growth and the struggle towards self realization. The third self of Horney neurotic manifestation emerges when the individual is exposed to an environment that promotes feelings of anxiety, in his early years. The neurotic erects and idealized image of himself until-it supersedes his. real self and becomes his idealized self. He experiences a neurotic pride in his idealized self, while his real and actual selves are hated and held in contempt.
• Jung (1951) - takes a more global view of self in which apart from self he uses two other terms ego and persona.
The term ego refers to the complex factor ie the subject of the contents of the consciousness.
The one aspect of ego which terms the outer world is persona which is fundamentally a comprise between individual and society as to what a man should appear to be. It aids in adjusting with the outside world or society it should behave keeping in mind that it is a mask and not really himself.
As the ego is the reference point of the conscious psych, the self is the central of the total personality.
When the person's concept of himself is limited to the superficial persona, or the small ego, he has restricted and distorted view of himself. The more aspects of his personality he can recognize an incorporate, the closer he comes to conceiving himself as he truly is.
• Roger (1959) - limited his definition of self -concept to experiences available to awareness which makes it easier for the construct to be measured.
If the individual's conception of himself is an accurate one and is congruent with his total experience, the tendency is toward self actualization of the whole organism. In case the self concept is distorted and portions of the individuals actual experiences are not recognized by him, the general actualizing tendency of the organism may operate in opposition to the relatively independent sub motive of self actualization.
Self concept is the central construct in Roger's theory the individual perceives situations and other individual as he perceives himself. When there is an alternation in self-concept there will be a corresponding change in the av others are perceived and when there is a distortion in one's self-concept, his behavior will reflect this discrepancy between the self experiences he is aware of and those which he is unaware.
• According to Allport (1961)-one of the important aspects of personality is the individuals sense of existence. Allport introduced the term "proprium", which refers to those functions that seem self relevant to us. Allport identified the seven aspects of propriate functioning or stages of self relevance ie bodily self, continuing self identity, self-esteem, extension of self, self image, self as rational cope and propriate self.
• Cattell (1965) - States that sentiment "Is a learned set of inter correlated attitudes that all relate to a social institution". In turn , all of a person's sentiments, the "self sentiment". Cattell defines this as "the sentiment structure entered up on the individual's conception of himself and his desires to maintain this self concept in the eyes of himself and others, in tact and acceptable.
Further self has also been defined as the combination of one's physical appearances, personal memories and sensory images. These characterize the self as the mental images of "who I am" or" what I want to be". Sullivan(1953) conceptualized the self as an organization of educative.experiences called into being by the necessity to avoid or to minimize incidents of anxiety.
The "good me" avoids unpleasant social disapproval.
Despite this diversity, the various manifestations of self reflection have much in common and this commonality is quite revealing about human functioning.
Social structure generally refer to perception of the self as an individuals self concepts or feeling of esteem. The self concept is the more general of the two and includes an identification of the characteristics of the individual as well as an evaluation of them, example: a person's self concept may be built around the perception that he or she is a good singer, dancer or athlete. Self-esteem is sometimes used as a synonym for self concept but usually emphasizes the evaluation of the person's characteristics.
An individual with high self esteem consider one self as a person of worth who posses valuable characteristics, experiences or traits which, a person with low self-esteem feels incompetent or of little value.
The review of the above studies reveal certain patterns in the development of self. This theorists and researchers have differentiated different components of self. The components most frequently, identified or the material self and social self. The material self include the perceptions that one has of ones own body. Frequently the material self is extended beyond the persons -own body and includes other people and objects, ie spouse, children, kit and kin or a car are part of his material self. An attack on any of these persons or objects is experienced as an attack on the self and achievement by them is a source of pride to the self.
The social self is defined by the perception a person has of the various social roles he or she occupies and how they are performed.
James (1890), Cooley (1902) and Mead (1932) were the earlier founders of the symbolic interactionists view of the self. They were influenced by philosophy and by the relatively new discipline of psychology. Which was breaking away from its philosophical traditions at the turn of century. language enables communication between individuals, it also allows people to talk to themselves (thoughts) which play significant role in the crystallization of self.
For James (1890) the undeniable subjective reality of being aware of both dimensions simultaneously, the I (knower) and the me (known) was the self. However, he stressed the "me" more than the" I'". to James (l968) the "me" was a social object that was identified by how others respond to the person.
Cooley (1902) defined the social self as a system of ideas, drawn .from communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own. According to Cooley, the self develops via the reactions of others to the person. The resulting self conception was labeled the "looking-glass self". The self is thus shaped by the responses (or more accurately the interpretations of the responses) one receives from other people. Just as one sees one's faces and figures reflected in a looking glass, one also see one's self in the social mirror of others as they react to one's presence, words or deeds. According to Cooley ( 1902) there are three stages of development of the looking glass self.
I. Imagination of one's appearances to others.
II. Imagination of one's judgment of that appearance.
III. Some resulting self-feeling - Pride and personal satisfaction if one imagines that the judgments of others was positive and embarrassment, fear or humiliation, is one imagines that the appearances was judged negative. The looking-glass self develops from one's imagination of the response of others.
If one feels that others are responding negatively towards him or her, it would seriously affect ones self concept, even though those others may have intended to communicate approval and acceptance. (Thomas, 1928).
Mead (1968) stressed that the self arises out of and is maintained through social interaction. For Mead, symbols permits the individual to receive information about self from others and even more importantly to anticipate through role taking how others will react to one's behavior.
Further Mead (1968) suggests that child like progress through two stages in developing self awareness through role taking. The first is the play stage in which the child enacts different roles and thus acceptable role behavior is learnt.
The second stage is the game stage, which implies that the individual can simultaneously take a number of roles relevant to a particular behavior.
It is also suggested that there are many selves which Cooley (1902) termed as multiple selves, elaborating it, he explains in terms of symbolic interaction theory which implies that some where within the individual there is a ''core" self that provides meaning and identity as well as direction for actions.
Some symbolic interactionists contend, that one has multiple selves to deal with social contexts. Ones behavior changes to the extent that one has developed a different self to each of the different roles that are occupied.
The idea of multiple selves is implied in the· work of Cooley (1902) when he maintains that one is what one thinks about one self. Our self attitudes are at least in part situationally determined.
However, the recognition that behavior changes from audience to audience does not demand that the notion of a core self by eliminated. This core self may account for the stability and consistency that is evident in the behavior of most people and at the same time does not change from situation to situation.
Social psychology is concerned with the ways in which the people affect others and are in term affected by them. Two important determent of social behavior is social perception and person perception. In judging the emotional state of others, we rely heavily on facial expression and other forms of non-verbal behavior, such as gestures, posture and body movement.
By forming impressions about the personality, will help us to predict the actions of other person. A person is analyzed through understanding, predicting with certain factors, such as structuring ie selecting, attending and categorizing.
Self is said to be a total essential or particular being of one person, what a person does is taken into consideration rather than what he thought he was. People discover the "true" nature of their self-as they search for an "identity" or "sense of being". Different definitions and conceptions of the psychologists and artist describe the development of self.
Social Perception
Social perception is a process by which we came to know and understand the persons around us. The process of social perception sets the stage for much of our social behavior. Our perceptions of the way other persons feel, their motives and their traits play an important role in shaping the nature of our interaction with them.
Basically there are two different aspects of this topic :
I. We should consider the temporary states of others- for example their present emotion and feelings.
II. We should consider the more or lasting characteristics - for example their motives, intentions or traits. This process is usually know as attribution.
While we try to understand the person around us we try to find out their present moods, emotions and feelings because many a times behavior is as strongly affected by temporary changes in mood or feeling by lasting traits or motives, for example a person who is virtually very kind helpful naturally, may have his mood swings and can become quite nasty on some days. Most of the time people tell us about their emotional state and feeling, quite directly but sometimes we have to infer these moods and feelings through their behavior or other expressive cues in spite of their effective attempts at concealing them. These are known as Non-verbal cues which fall into three major categories:
Major Categories :
I. Facial expressionII. Eye contact
III. Position and movement of their bodies.
I. Facial Expression:
We can normally guess the inner feelings of other persons from careful study of their frowns, smiles or tears. There are certain facial expressions which are quite universal.However, in many cases, people usually hide inner feelings by not demonstrating emotions which they really feel. They are many different reasons for individual to engage in this kind of actions. For example: the actor who often shows emotions which they don't actually feel. Diplomats conceal their emotions during important negotiations. Therefore, whatever the reason for hiding the actual emotions, they tend to lessen, the usefulness of facial expression as an accurate guide for judging other's emotion.
II. Eye Contact :
The eyes have been described as "windows of the soul" research has also shown that we can learn a great deal about other's internal state from their eyes. Examples: anger, joy etc. when people have a more positive feeling. However, when others avoid our gaze we conclude that they feel guilty or are feeling depressed.There is an exception to this rule ie when a person gazing ie looking at a person in a continuous manner regardless of our reactions, we call it starting which is quite an unpleasant feeling. We interpret stares as a sign of hostility or anger.
III. Position or movements of their body: Body language or touching :
We gain much information about other feeling from the position, posture and movement of their bodies. This body language reveals their current emotional state. For example: a large amount of movement suggests that either the position is emotionally aroused or that he or she is bored like fidgeting, continuous shifting of limbs etc. More specific information about other feelings can be obtained from gestures. For example: covering. of the eyes indicates shame or embarrassment, shrugging of the shoulders indicates uncertainty. Therefore the person's movement and gestures often give a clear picture of the person's present emotional state. Body language also tells us about the person's positive and negative feelings towards us. For example: if someone with whom we are speaking, faces us directly and learn forward, it is clear sign that he or she likes us and is interested in what we are saying. In contrast if the person sits away from us or leans back. This may suggested that he or she dislikes us.
Nonverbal cues generally occur together, We usually receive inputs from all three source conflict with those from another, however they provide a fairly consistent pictures about the feelings and emotions of the persons around us.
Attribution :
Gaining accurate knowledge of other's emotional state and feeling is important. It helps in explaining one's current behavior. But it is of little use in predicting how this person will behave some other time. Emotions, moods and feelings range very quickly and do not provide lasting basis for understanding or predicting other's behavior. Therefore, we are often concerned with more lasting causes of their behavior. The process through which we acquire knowledge of others motives, intentions and traits is known as attribution.
By paying close attention to their physical appearance for their age, styles of dress, etc we obtain a fairly good picture of the person. Secondly, for gaining further knowledge about a person, we question their friends or relatives. Further, we also carefully observe their behavior ie by observing their actions with others around them.
Most of the time, success in attributing causes to other's behavior, stems from our tendency to focus mainly on certain types of behavior.
First, we pay particular attention to those behaviors of others which has one or more distinct reasons. Through display of that behavior can assess the motives behind their actions. And once we know the motive, we know much about the behavior.
Second, we focus upon actions of other's which are not like the usual pattern of behavior. These actions set them a part from other persons, and tell us much about their unique motives, traits and goals.
Casual Attribution :
While trying to understand the causes behind others actions we should also consider whether others behaviors stems mainly from: i) Internal causes - ie their own motives and traits or from. ii) External causes ie factors in the environment around them.
Internal causes: where other people act in the same manner ie behavior is common to few or when this person acts in the same way in other situation and this person acts in the same in the situations, they attribute these behavior to internal causes.
External causes: many other persons act in the same manner as this person or this person acts differently in other situation and this person acts in the same manner in this situations on other occasions, we attribute this behavior to external causes. For example: if a person is complaining about food at particular joint and you know that she does this quite often, then you attribute this behavior to internal causes i.e she is hard to please.
In contrast the same friend is a very patient person and has never before complained about anything anywhere but today she is angry with the food, then we attribute this behavior to external causes, ie the joint has served bad food.
Finally, if we are good at guessing whether ones behavior is due to internal cause or external cause we would avoid jumping to false conclusions about their behavior.
Bias in Attribution:
When we are trying to understand other persons by observing their behavior and the condition under which it occurs there is a possibility that there is some amount of bias in our judgment. Many a times, we tend to perceive that our behavior is occurring in response to situational factors, but the behavior of others is stemming mainly from internal traits or causes. This type of bias is known as actor-observer differences in attribution.
For example: while walking on the road, if you see a person trip and fall, you usually come to a conclusion that he is clumsy and often trips. i.e you are attributing his action to .internal causes. But suppose the same thing happens to you, you would immediately explain it by blaming it on the uneven road or. to your shoes which are slippery. Here the attribution is to external factors.
There is another type of bias which is described as self-servicing. Wherein there is a tendency in us to view the positive behavior by us as stemming from internal factors, ie our positive traits and abilities. And when we do badly or the results are disappointing, we simply explain our behavior in terms external causes beyond our control. This bias helps us to protect and enhance our self-esteem.
Something closely related to this type of bias is described as egocentric, wherein there is a tendency to take more credit in joint projects than what is actually deserved.
Thus attribution is. not always a cold and logical process. It is often affected by such motives as the desire to protect our self-esteem or to feel that we are in control of our own fate.
PERSON PERCEPTION
The social character of perception appears to be more important while perceiving another human being because while perceiving people all aspects of the self are brought into play, and the resulting experiences reflect a complex blend of our own characteristics and those of the person, In forming an impression cf another, we more or less attempt at taking note of his physical appearance (his social role and class, his dress and hairstyle), his actions, his voice, his expressive movements and all other cues that are psychologically informative and meaningful with the above information we formulate though not exactly, a fairly detail perception of what he is like-his thoughts, his needs, his feelings, his personality etc. This precept typically represents an integration of all available cues, and embodied a portrait of a complete person and not just a few features of his personality.
Now, the question arises as to why we should form any impressions of other people?
There are many answers to this , but the most important of all is when we 1.oust actively cope with the other person, we need to make sense of other persons behavior. Therefore we must form and overall impression of his personality which aids us in predicting his actions and helps us to adopt accordingly.
Person Perception : An Analysis :
In understanding and predicting a persons behavior there are certain factors which helps us they are: i) structure ii) constancy iii) meaning.Structure : We give structure to what we perceive by selecting, attending, categorizing and we also have certain amount of expectations of them. For example: when we see a person for the first time who is shabbily dressed with disheveled hair and awkward shoes, we immediately class him. This is done because, we have some existing prejudices ie a certain form of expectations, and we believe a person who is dressed like this would not be normal.
Another important thing is we establish a Constancy, while perceiving people. We judge a person as having a rather constant personality or set of traits, which may be manifested in various ways. Feldman ( 1972) gave a person's a list of traits description and asked them to indicate which of this traits could be expected to apply to professional · persons and which of them to working class.
This person's who answered the questionnaire had a proper agreement that professional people, when compared to working class people, have many good traits like they are persistent, independent, ,complex and intelligent. This shows a single hint, a cue i.e. the person's occupational category was enough to create a highly organized structure about the group.
Further they are other ways in which we jump to conclusion example when, we are told that someone is intelligent, industrious and well educated, we.immediately assume that he or she would be as successful, vigorous and likable person. i.e. we are expecting that if an individual has certain traits he would also have other traits which are consistent with the earlier traits and we are not happy or at ease when we get the opposite picture of our expectations, i.e. when there is an inconsistency in the set of traits i.e. a person is intelligent, industrious and well educated, but is with drawn and silent. Since these do not match though there is possibility of it happening. Hence people like a consistent personality more than an inconsistent one.
Predicting others behavior :
We usually believe that we can predict the behavior of persons, we know well enough if we find that we cannot, we doubt how well enough do we really know them. Whatever kind of human interaction we engage in being good friends, husband and wife, children and mother etc, we feel happy and competent only when we can predict the behavior of the other person more or less accurately. We will be disappointed with ourselves when we cannot do it, we feel satisfied, when we can accurately verdict the behavior of others. It is also very useful and important to be able to predict accurately the behavior of others.
Evaluating the Predictions :
There is no adequate criterion as such to evaluate the behavior of others in an accurate manner. When we want to predict some concrete form of behavior such as performing a particular task in a given situation, may be it is easier to predict that behavior but even here we have certain difficulties. Ability to predict some kinds of behavior may not generalize to other kinds of situations. For example: a person is very helpful and would not hesitate to help when asked. Thus we form an impression of this person and we expect and hope that h behaves in the same way every time. But sometimes when approached for help he may deny it. Now we wonder at our ability to predict his behavior based on our past experience. Actually we have been generalizing his behavior. The difficulty of generalizing in person of person prediction is people may be relatively accurate with one kind of prediction but may not necessarily be accurate with other kinds of behavior. This is because each of us have some sensitive areas and some blind spots which effect our perception of others. We tend to assess or perceive others behavior our own angle and we form impression others by attributing our thoughts, actions on to others which is dealt. More in detail in the lesson impression formation.
SELF IN SOCIAL INTERACTION
What is self? The self (according to the dictionary is the total, essential or particular being of one person. It is thought as a synonym of personality and often stresses on individual's consciousness of what he is. The measurement of the rural or actual self is a baffling task. A person cannot discriminate between what one thinks one is and what one really is. The question of how can anyone know about himself without first having a concept of self arises. Still confidently assumes that what one sees ourself to be is what one actually is. But this kind of assumption is not made of others, for what others perceive of themselves is often erroneous, over simplified and distorted and feels that the way one perceives others is actually what that other person is. But this assumption is wrong because our impressions of others are also likely to be over simplified distorted and mistaken. This seems up to the definition (Smith 1974) that self is a person one feels, perceive and thinks of oneself. A person can perceive oneself just as one perceives any other objects and other people are incomplete and inaccurate. The self defined in this way permits us to measure aspects of self. Individuals perceive themselves as practical, religious or scientific. With such measures we can examine the relationship between the perceived self and the actual self and later on how the self is organized and how that organization develops.
Development of Self:
The artists and psychologist describe the developing person from different perspectives, by different goals in minds. The artist strives to illuminate what a person feels and experience as he is developing and the scientists try to answer the questions. What is to happen to him next? By giving the theory of self-differentiation what is going to happen to him next?
The answer is differentiation: differentiation is the process of developing from the one to the many, from the simple to the complex, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. Organisms differentiate as they climb the phylogenetic scales. These differentiated structures adapt more effectively than the more primitive structures.
Awareness also grows and in the process differentiates.
To many, the self has conjured up an image of a little being inside the persons skull, this directs the person behavior (Vallacher, 1980) concerns about the scientific legitimacy of the self have warned somewhat in the years. More so after the dramatic advances that have occurred in the computer technology over the past two decades.
It was thought that a human being can also selectively encode a systematically transformed environmental events in accordance with internal programs, producing output behavior that reflects such programs. Some of the most intriguing human "programs" involve the selection and transformation of data concerning the self. Due to· this new lease on legitimacy, the concept of self has become central to social psychology. A variety of phenomena, person perception, morality reactions to success and failures, cognitive consistency and many other-are considered by theorists to reflect the individuals attempts to achieve or maintain a particular self view (Vallacher, 1980).
Each Individual is very much-aware that he or she exists, that he or she has had and is currently having certain experiences and that he or she has specific physical, psychological and social characteristics (Albrecht et, 1980).
People frequently seek to discover the a true" nature of their self-as they search for an 'identity" or "sense of being".
• Angyal (1941) described the "self image" as the symbolic representation of one's self, a person as the person imagines himself to be the aspect of the subject pole of which he is aware.
• Fromm (1941) - places emphasis on man, social and pseudo self: man's true identity is to be found within himself, in his whole being with all of his capabilities which is the real self, when a person is unable to identify with his real self, he becomes estranged from himself. He experiences himself as a thing and alienates himself to prevent himself from insanity that comes with the social rules that he plays. Thus the social self becomes his pseudo self.
• Lecky (1945) -Theories that, the nucleus of personality around which the other ideas revolve is the person's conception of what he means, who he is, what he can do and how he fits into the world.
Any change in behavior is accompanied by a change in his self-concept and also any alternation in self-concept will be depicted in his behavior. What ever image one wants to communicate of himself should be consistent with his self-concept. Behavior according to Lecky should be consistent with the self-concept. When the persons self-concept is not accurate, one cannot also try to manage the image he wants to portray.
• Horney (1950) - postulated three selves : real, actual and idealized self: out of the three two are common to all and the third is a neurotic manifestation. Each person posses a real self which is, what the person can be, what he has the potential for.
Everyone also has an 'actual self' which is conscious. "The true picture the person has of himself'. For a healthy person, the gap between the actual and the real selves will be narrowed by growth and the struggle towards self realization. The third self of Horney neurotic manifestation emerges when the individual is exposed to an environment that promotes feelings of anxiety, in his early years. The neurotic erects and idealized image of himself until-it supersedes his. real self and becomes his idealized self. He experiences a neurotic pride in his idealized self, while his real and actual selves are hated and held in contempt.
• Jung (1951) - takes a more global view of self in which apart from self he uses two other terms ego and persona.
The term ego refers to the complex factor ie the subject of the contents of the consciousness.
The one aspect of ego which terms the outer world is persona which is fundamentally a comprise between individual and society as to what a man should appear to be. It aids in adjusting with the outside world or society it should behave keeping in mind that it is a mask and not really himself.
As the ego is the reference point of the conscious psych, the self is the central of the total personality.
When the person's concept of himself is limited to the superficial persona, or the small ego, he has restricted and distorted view of himself. The more aspects of his personality he can recognize an incorporate, the closer he comes to conceiving himself as he truly is.
• Roger (1959) - limited his definition of self -concept to experiences available to awareness which makes it easier for the construct to be measured.
If the individual's conception of himself is an accurate one and is congruent with his total experience, the tendency is toward self actualization of the whole organism. In case the self concept is distorted and portions of the individuals actual experiences are not recognized by him, the general actualizing tendency of the organism may operate in opposition to the relatively independent sub motive of self actualization.
Self concept is the central construct in Roger's theory the individual perceives situations and other individual as he perceives himself. When there is an alternation in self-concept there will be a corresponding change in the av others are perceived and when there is a distortion in one's self-concept, his behavior will reflect this discrepancy between the self experiences he is aware of and those which he is unaware.
• According to Allport (1961)-one of the important aspects of personality is the individuals sense of existence. Allport introduced the term "proprium", which refers to those functions that seem self relevant to us. Allport identified the seven aspects of propriate functioning or stages of self relevance ie bodily self, continuing self identity, self-esteem, extension of self, self image, self as rational cope and propriate self.
• Cattell (1965) - States that sentiment "Is a learned set of inter correlated attitudes that all relate to a social institution". In turn , all of a person's sentiments, the "self sentiment". Cattell defines this as "the sentiment structure entered up on the individual's conception of himself and his desires to maintain this self concept in the eyes of himself and others, in tact and acceptable.
Further self has also been defined as the combination of one's physical appearances, personal memories and sensory images. These characterize the self as the mental images of "who I am" or" what I want to be". Sullivan(1953) conceptualized the self as an organization of educative.experiences called into being by the necessity to avoid or to minimize incidents of anxiety.
The "good me" avoids unpleasant social disapproval.
Despite this diversity, the various manifestations of self reflection have much in common and this commonality is quite revealing about human functioning.
Social structure generally refer to perception of the self as an individuals self concepts or feeling of esteem. The self concept is the more general of the two and includes an identification of the characteristics of the individual as well as an evaluation of them, example: a person's self concept may be built around the perception that he or she is a good singer, dancer or athlete. Self-esteem is sometimes used as a synonym for self concept but usually emphasizes the evaluation of the person's characteristics.
An individual with high self esteem consider one self as a person of worth who posses valuable characteristics, experiences or traits which, a person with low self-esteem feels incompetent or of little value.
The review of the above studies reveal certain patterns in the development of self. This theorists and researchers have differentiated different components of self. The components most frequently, identified or the material self and social self. The material self include the perceptions that one has of ones own body. Frequently the material self is extended beyond the persons -own body and includes other people and objects, ie spouse, children, kit and kin or a car are part of his material self. An attack on any of these persons or objects is experienced as an attack on the self and achievement by them is a source of pride to the self.
The social self is defined by the perception a person has of the various social roles he or she occupies and how they are performed.
James (1890), Cooley (1902) and Mead (1932) were the earlier founders of the symbolic interactionists view of the self. They were influenced by philosophy and by the relatively new discipline of psychology. Which was breaking away from its philosophical traditions at the turn of century. language enables communication between individuals, it also allows people to talk to themselves (thoughts) which play significant role in the crystallization of self.
For James (1890) the undeniable subjective reality of being aware of both dimensions simultaneously, the I (knower) and the me (known) was the self. However, he stressed the "me" more than the" I'". to James (l968) the "me" was a social object that was identified by how others respond to the person.
Cooley (1902) defined the social self as a system of ideas, drawn .from communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own. According to Cooley, the self develops via the reactions of others to the person. The resulting self conception was labeled the "looking-glass self". The self is thus shaped by the responses (or more accurately the interpretations of the responses) one receives from other people. Just as one sees one's faces and figures reflected in a looking glass, one also see one's self in the social mirror of others as they react to one's presence, words or deeds. According to Cooley ( 1902) there are three stages of development of the looking glass self.
I. Imagination of one's appearances to others.
II. Imagination of one's judgment of that appearance.
III. Some resulting self-feeling - Pride and personal satisfaction if one imagines that the judgments of others was positive and embarrassment, fear or humiliation, is one imagines that the appearances was judged negative. The looking-glass self develops from one's imagination of the response of others.
If one feels that others are responding negatively towards him or her, it would seriously affect ones self concept, even though those others may have intended to communicate approval and acceptance. (Thomas, 1928).
Mead (1968) stressed that the self arises out of and is maintained through social interaction. For Mead, symbols permits the individual to receive information about self from others and even more importantly to anticipate through role taking how others will react to one's behavior.
Further Mead (1968) suggests that child like progress through two stages in developing self awareness through role taking. The first is the play stage in which the child enacts different roles and thus acceptable role behavior is learnt.
The second stage is the game stage, which implies that the individual can simultaneously take a number of roles relevant to a particular behavior.
Multiple Selves :
It is also suggested that there are many selves which Cooley (1902) termed as multiple selves, elaborating it, he explains in terms of symbolic interaction theory which implies that some where within the individual there is a ''core" self that provides meaning and identity as well as direction for actions.
Some symbolic interactionists contend, that one has multiple selves to deal with social contexts. Ones behavior changes to the extent that one has developed a different self to each of the different roles that are occupied.
The idea of multiple selves is implied in the· work of Cooley (1902) when he maintains that one is what one thinks about one self. Our self attitudes are at least in part situationally determined.
However, the recognition that behavior changes from audience to audience does not demand that the notion of a core self by eliminated. This core self may account for the stability and consistency that is evident in the behavior of most people and at the same time does not change from situation to situation.
SUMMARY
Social psychology is concerned with the ways in which the people affect others and are in term affected by them. Two important determent of social behavior is social perception and person perception. In judging the emotional state of others, we rely heavily on facial expression and other forms of non-verbal behavior, such as gestures, posture and body movement.
By forming impressions about the personality, will help us to predict the actions of other person. A person is analyzed through understanding, predicting with certain factors, such as structuring ie selecting, attending and categorizing.
Self is said to be a total essential or particular being of one person, what a person does is taken into consideration rather than what he thought he was. People discover the "true" nature of their self-as they search for an "identity" or "sense of being". Different definitions and conceptions of the psychologists and artist describe the development of self.