Thin slices and first impressions. A balanced view of social perception.

Social perception is often influenced by: -Context effect. -Change blindness. -Confirmation biass. -Other psychollogical factors. A balanced view of social perception is that, on one hand, it can be distorted by all sort of factors, just as any other perception can be, but in the other hand it also operate with surprising efficiency. Examples of thin slices research: Thin slices are defined as brief excerpts of expressive behavior, sampled from the behavioral stream, that contain dynamic information and are less than 5 minutes long. -Social judgements can take place very rapidly, sometimes with surprising accuracy. -At the same time, they're prone to certain biases and distorsions, and once our judgement are formed,whether accurately or not, we tend to lock into them and search for confirming evidence rather than challenging the judgement we've already made.So first impressions matter. "you can't judge a book by its cover," or "There's never a second chance to make a first impression." Explanation The correct answer is "There's never a second chance to make a first impression." Contrary to the notion that "you can't judge a book by its cover," research has found that social judgments can be accurate when based on thin slices of behavior or even a single photograph of someone's face. On the other hand, it's true that there's never a second chance to make a first impression, because first impressions tend to guide and influence later impressions.

Confirmation Bias / Los prejuicios y su confirmación.

When individuals and groups interact with each other they usually have expectations and there's plenty of research that suggests that those expectation not always receive a fair test. Instead, people tend to seak out evidence that comfirms their expectations, and they give greater weight to that evidence than evidence that would disconfirm their expectations.Counter evidence it's even noticed at all, is usually very easy to explain away. That also operates when people have stereotypes about women, racial minorities or about professors. People focus mainly on confirming evidence and end up perpetuating the stereotypes or the preconceptions or social expectations that they have especially when they are not highly motivated to question those belief. So confirmation biases can have important consequences but they're only half of the equation. Social expectations not only lead us to seek out confirming evidence, they can have an effect on the person about whom we hold the expectations. In other words, social expectations affect not only the person who holds them but the other side as well. In fact in some cases our predictions and our expectations can lead to "self-fulfilling profecy" (Any positive or negative expectation about circumstances, events, or people that may affect a person's behavior toward them in a manner that causes those expectations to be fulfilled) ( es una predicción que, una vez hecha, es en sí misma la causa de que se haga realidad) An employer who, for example, expects the employees to be disloyal and shirkers, will likely treat them in a way that will elicit the very response he or she expects. Behavioural confirmation is a type of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby people's social expectations (based more on social beliefs than personal expectation) lead them to act in ways that cause others to confirm the expectation Behavioral confirmation involves a self-fulfilling prophecy in which a social expectation brings about the expected behavior. All cases of behavioral confirmation involve self-fulfilling prophecies, but not all self-fulfilling prophecies involve behavioral confirmation. For example, someone expecting to die young might smoke (believing that tobacco use won't matter) and end up dying young from smoking -- a self-fulfilling prophecy that didn't involve a social expectation. So, beliefs can literally create reality. Now think about the implication for a moment : For better or worse the beliefs that your friends, family members, teacher or coworkers hold about you may in some cases, continue to have and effect, even when these individuals aren't physically present,

Change blindness / Ceguera ante el cambio.

Once you see how blind many of us are to dramatic changes in our social environment, it's hard not to wonder what else we're missing when interacting with each other in daily life!