Social Perception and Prejudice (AAMC 8B)
Content category 8B is about how we think about other people: how we form impressions, explain their behavior, and why those processes can harden into stereotypes and prejudice. The attitudes and social behavior page defines the fundamental attribution error and related biases, and social interaction and social thinking introduces stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination. This page adds the mechanisms and the evidence: Kelley's covariation model, impression formation effects, the main theories of where prejudice comes from, the experiments behind stereotype threat and expectancy effects, and what reliably reduces prejudice.
Social Perception and Impression Formation
Social perception (social cognition) is how we form impressions of and make inferences about other people. It involves three elements: the perceiver (whose experience, motives and mood shape what is noticed), the target (the person being judged), and the situation (the context that affects what information is available).
- Primacy effect
- Early information has a stronger influence on an overall impression than later information. A person described as intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, envious is rated more favorably than one described with the same words in reverse order.
- Recency effect
- The most recent information dominates; more likely when there is a delay or when people are warned against snap judgments.
- Halo effect
- A positive impression in one domain spreads to unrelated traits. Physically attractive people are often assumed to be more intelligent and kind.
- Implicit personality theory
- Assumptions about which traits go together (people who are warm are also generous), used to fill gaps in what we know about someone.
- Just-world hypothesis
- The belief that people get what they deserve, which can lead to blaming victims.
Other systematic errors include the false consensus effect (overestimating how many people share our views), the optimism bias (believing bad events are less likely to happen to us than to others), and the confirmation bias in interviewing, where people ask questions likely to confirm what they already suspect.
Attribution: Explaining Behavior
Attribution theory asks whether behavior is explained by dispositional (internal: personality, ability, effort) or situational (external: circumstances, luck, other people) causes. Kelley's covariation model describes how we decide, using three kinds of information:
| Dimension | Question | High value points toward |
|---|---|---|
| Consensus | Do other people behave the same way in this situation? | Situational cause |
| Consistency | Does this person behave this way in this situation every time? | A stable cause (needed for any confident attribution) |
| Distinctiveness | Does this person behave this way only in this situation, or in many situations? | Situational cause |
The combinations that matter: low consensus, high consistency, low distinctiveness leads to a dispositional attribution (it is the person). High consensus, high consistency, high distinctiveness leads to a situational attribution (it is the situation).
Jordan always falls asleep in Professor Lee's biology lecture. Most other students also fall asleep in that lecture. Jordan stays alert in his other classes.
Consistency is high (always), consensus is high (most students), and distinctiveness is high (only this class). All three point to a situational attribution: something about this lecture. If instead Jordan were the only one asleep and he slept in every class, consensus and distinctiveness would both be low, pointing to a dispositional cause.
Attribution biases and culture
The fundamental attribution error (overweighting dispositional causes for others' behavior) is stronger in individualist cultures. People from more collectivist cultures more often consider situational and relational causes, though they are not immune to the error. Related biases are the actor-observer bias (situational explanations for our own behavior, dispositional for others') and the self-serving bias (internal attributions for our successes, external for our failures).
In-Groups, Out-Groups and Categorization
People automatically sort others into categories, including in-groups (groups we belong to) and out-groups. This produces predictable biases:
- In-group favoritism
- Evaluating and treating in-group members more positively.
- Out-group homogeneity effect
- Seeing out-group members as more alike than in-group members (they are all the same; we are diverse).
- Ultimate attribution error
- Explaining an out-group member's negative behavior by disposition and positive behavior by luck or special circumstances, while doing the reverse for the in-group.
Ethnocentrism is judging other cultures by the standards of one's own and seeing one's own as superior. Cultural relativism is understanding another culture's practices on its own terms. Cultural relativism is a method of understanding; it does not require approving of every practice.
Stereotypes, Prejudice and Discrimination
| Term | Component | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Stereotype | Cognitive: a generalized belief about a group | Believing that older adults are bad with technology |
| Prejudice | Affective: a negative (or positive) attitude or feeling toward a group | Feeling impatient and dismissive toward older adults |
| Discrimination | Behavioral: unequal treatment of people because of group membership | Not hiring an older applicant for a technical job |
These components can occur independently. A person can hold a stereotype without prejudice, and discrimination can occur without individual prejudice at all.
- Explicit bias
- Consciously held and reportable attitudes.
- Implicit bias
- Automatic associations that may conflict with stated beliefs. Measured with reaction-time tasks such as the Implicit Association Test, which compares how quickly people pair group categories with positive vs negative words. How well such scores predict individual behavior is debated.
- Individual discrimination
- Unfair treatment by one person or a small group.
- Institutional discrimination
- Unequal treatment built into the policies and practices of organizations or institutions, which can persist without any individual intending harm. Example: requirements that disproportionately exclude a group without being related to job performance.
Sociologists link prejudice to power (the ability to control resources and outcomes), prestige (social respect attached to a status) and class. Groups with more power can define which differences count and can embed their preferences into institutions.
Where Prejudice Comes From
| Theory | Core idea | Classic evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Realistic conflict theory | Competition between groups for scarce resources produces hostility | Boys at a summer camp, split into two groups and made to compete for prizes, became hostile to each other |
| Social identity theory | Part of self-esteem comes from group memberships, so people favor their in-group to feel good about themselves | Minimal group studies: people assigned to groups on trivial grounds (preferring one painter) still favor their own group |
| Scapegoating | Frustration is displaced onto a less powerful group | Hostility toward minorities rising in periods of economic hardship |
| Social learning | Prejudice is learned from parents, peers and media | Children's attitudes correlating with their parents' |
| Cognitive economy | Stereotypes are mental shortcuts that save effort, used more under time pressure or fatigue | Greater stereotype use when people are rushed or distracted |
Because the test is the same and only the framing differs, the design isolates the effect of the situation. The proposed mechanism is that worry consumes working memory. Replications show the effect is real but often smaller than early studies suggested.
A self-fulfilling prophecy occurs when an expectation leads to behavior that makes the expectation come true. In a classroom study, teachers were told that certain randomly chosen students were about to show unusual intellectual growth. Those students later showed larger gains on some measures, likely because teachers gave them more attention, warmth and feedback. This is also called the Pygmalion effect.
This is closely related to experimenter expectancy effects, which is why researchers use double-blind designs in which neither participants nor the people collecting data know who is in which condition.
Reducing Prejudice
Simple contact between groups is not enough and can even increase hostility. The contact hypothesis holds that contact reduces prejudice under specific conditions:
- Equal status within the situation.
- Common goals that require cooperation (superordinate goals).
- Institutional support from authorities, laws or customs.
- Opportunities for personal acquaintance beyond superficial interaction.
In the summer camp study, hostility fell only after the groups had to work together on problems neither could solve alone, such as fixing the camp's water supply. The jigsaw classroom applies the same principle: each student holds one piece of a lesson, so the group must rely on every member. Other approaches include recategorizing groups into a common in-group identity and perspective-taking exercises.
Worked MCQs
5 MCQs in the style of the Psych/Soc section, several built around a study design.
Q1. Maria laughs loudly at a comedian's show. Almost no one else in the audience laughs, and Maria laughs loudly at every comedian she sees. She has laughed at this comedian every time she has seen him. Kelley's model predicts that observers will attribute her laughter to:
Low consensus (no one else laughs), low distinctiveness (she laughs at every comedian), and high consistency (she laughs every time) together point to a dispositional attribution: something about Maria.
Q2. A hospital's policy requires interpreters to be scheduled 48 hours in advance, and patients who speak limited English are therefore more often seen without one. No staff member intends to treat these patients differently. This is best described as:
Unequal treatment that results from organizational policies and practices, without requiring individual intent, is institutional discrimination. Prejudice is an attitude, and individual discrimination involves a specific person's actions.
Q3. Researchers give the same math test to two groups of women. One group is told the test shows gender differences in ability; the other is told it does not. The first group scores lower. The independent variable is:
The researchers manipulated the description of the test (whether it was framed as revealing gender differences). Math score is the dependent variable, and gender is held constant because all participants are women.
Q4. Two groups of campers who had been competing for prizes became less hostile only after they had to work together to repair a broken water supply. This finding best supports:
Cooperating on a shared goal that neither group could reach alone (a superordinate goal) reduced hostility. This is one of the conditions under which intergroup contact reduces prejudice.
Q5. Participants are assigned to groups based on which of two abstract paintings they prefer. They then divide money between an anonymous member of their own group and one of the other group, and they favor their own group. This result is most directly explained by:
Favoring an in-group defined on trivial grounds, with no history of competition or interaction, supports social identity theory: group membership itself contributes to self-esteem and motivates in-group favoritism. Realistic conflict theory requires prior competition over resources.
Quick Recap
- Impressions: primacy, recency, halo effect, implicit personality theory, just-world hypothesis.
- Kelley: low consensus + high consistency + low distinctiveness = dispositional; all high = situational.
- FAE is stronger in individualist cultures; actor-observer and self-serving biases.
- In-group favoritism, out-group homogeneity, ultimate attribution error; ethnocentrism vs cultural relativism.
- Stereotype (cognitive), prejudice (affective), discrimination (behavioral); implicit vs explicit; individual vs institutional.
- Origins: realistic conflict, social identity (minimal groups), scapegoating, social learning, cognitive shortcuts.
- Stereotype threat and self-fulfilling prophecy; double-blind designs control expectancy effects.
- Contact reduces prejudice with equal status, common goals, cooperation and institutional support.