The Social Psychology of Person Perception and the Experience of Valued Relationships

Accuracy, bias, self-fulfilling prophecies, and scientific self-correction

Behavioral and Brain Sciences ◽

10.1017/s0140525x16000339 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 40 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Lee Jussim

Keyword(s):

Social Psychology ◽

Social Science ◽

Social Perception ◽

Person Perception ◽

Scientific Literature ◽

Social Reality ◽

Social Perceptions ◽

Expectancy Effects ◽

The Social

AbstractIn my Précis of Social Perception and Social Reality (Jussim 2012, henceforth abbreviated as SPSR), I argued that the social science scholarship on social perception and interpersonal expectancies was characterized by a tripartite pattern: (1) Errors, biases, and self-fulfilling prophecies in person perception were generally weak, fragile, and fleeting; (2) Social perceptions were often quite accurate; and (3) Conclusions appearing throughout the social psychology scientific literature routinely overstated the power and pervasiveness of expectancy effects, and ignored evidence of accuracy. Most commentators concurred with the validity of these conclusions. Two, however, strongly disagreed with the conclusion that the evidence consistently has shown that stereotypes are moderately to highly accurate. Several others, while agreeing with most of the specifics, also suggested that those arguments did not necessarily apply to contexts outside of those covered in SPSR. In this response, I consider all these aspects: the limitations to the tripartite pattern, the role of politics and confirmation biases in distorting scientific conclusions, common obstructions to effective scientific self-correction, and how to limit them.

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Solving the Emotion Paradox: Categorization and the Experience of Emotion

Personality and Social Psychology Review ◽

10.1207/s15327957pspr1001_2 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

pp. 20-46 ◽

Cited By ~ 540

Author(s):

Lisa Feldman Barrett

Keyword(s):

Social Psychology ◽

Conceptual Knowledge ◽

Person Perception ◽

Embodied Knowledge ◽

Discrete Events ◽

Social Psychological ◽

Psychological Literature ◽

Emotion Experience ◽

The Social

In this article, I introduce an emotion paradox: People believe that they know an emotion when they see it, and as a consequence assume that emotions are discrete events that can be recognized with some degree of accuracy, but scientists have yet to produce a set of clear and consistent criteria for indicating when an emotion is present and when it is not. I propose one solution to this paradox: People experience an emotion when they conceptualize an instance of affective feeling. In this view, the experience of emotion is an act of categorization, guided by embodied knowledge about emotion. The result is a model of emotion experience that has much in common with the social psychological literature on person perception and with literature on embodied conceptual knowledge as it has recently been applied to social psychology.

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