Question

Social perception plays a key role in our everyday life and in our activities at work, but it is inherently flawed and subject to many biases. Watch the YouTube video The Halo Effect and then answer the following questions:

• Discuss which factors you think contribute most to your perception of others.
• Conclude whether a person can affect how others perceive them. Explain your answer.
• Evaluate what perception can tell us about ourselves, if our perception is incorrect.

The video is call The Halo Effect

Answer 1

Discuss which factors you think contribute most to your perception of others?

My biggest factors in a person would be their attitudes and their moods. These differences in accessibility will influence the kinds of impressions that we form about others because they influence what we focus on and how we think about them. In fact, when people are asked to describe others, there is often more overlap in the descriptions provided by the same perceiver. Individual differences in attributional styles can also influence our own behavior. Entity theorists are more likely to have difficulty when they move on to new tasks because they don’t think that they will be able to adapt to the new challenges. We cannot control everything and trying to do so can be stressful. We can change some things but not others; thus, sometimes the important thing is to know when it’s better to give up, stop worrying, and just let things happen. Having a positive, mildly optimistic outlook is healthy.

Conclude whether a person can affect how others perceive them. Explain your answer?

Factors that can influence the impressions you form of other people include the characteristics of the person you are observing, the context of the situation, your own personal traits and your past experiences. 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. 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 grouping people use include age, gender, occupation, and race.

Evaluate what perception can tell us about ourselves, if our perception is incorrect?

Our tendency to underestimate situational factors and overestimate personal factors when making attributions about others’ actions is called fundamental attribution error. This can lead to us not giving someone the benefit of doubt. We tend to have a bias if someone is different than us instead of embracing it and trying to learn from them. It is important to make a good impression though because this is what people will remember about you in the long run. If our perceptions are wrong then we are judging people on their race, their sex, their looks, or their culture.