Hockenbury Discovering Psychology 5th txtbk

460 CHAPTER 11 Social Psychology© The New Yorker Collection 2004 Robert Leighton from Cartoonbank.com.All rights reserved.“Goodbye everybody.”other people that seem to be relevant to your goal, ignoring detailsthat are unrelated to it (Hilton, 1998). After all, you’re not lookingfor a date for Saturday night, a plumber, or a chemistry lab partner. Ifyou were, you’d focus on very different aspects of the other people inthe situation (Goodwin & others, 2002).Principle 4. In every situation, you evaluate people partly in terms ofhow you expect them to act in that situation. Whether you’re in a classroom,restaurant, or public restroom, your behavior is governed bysocial norms—the “rules,” or expectations, for appropriate behavior inthat social situation. Riding a subway is no exception to this principle(Milgram, 1992). For example, you don’t sit next to someone else whenempty seats are available, you don’t try to borrow your seatmate’s newspaper,and you avoid eye contact with others.These “subway rules” aren’t posted anywhere, of course. Nevertheless,violating these social norms will draw attention from others andprobably make them uneasy. So as you size up your fellow subway passengers,you’re partly evaluating their behavior in terms of howpeople-riding-the-subway-at-night-in-a-big-city should behave.What these four guiding principles demonstrate is that person perception is not aone-way process in which we objectively survey other people and then logically evaluatetheir characteristics. Instead, the perceptions we have of others, our self-perceptionsand goals, and the specific context all interact. Each component plays a role inthe split-second judgments we form of complete strangers.In the subway example, like other transient situations, it’s unlikely that you’ll everbe able to verify the accuracy of those first impressions. But in situations that involvelong-term relationships with other people, such as in a classroom or at work, we finetuneour impressions as we acquire additional information about the people we cometo know (Smith & Collins, 2009).social normsThe “rules,” or expectations, for appropriatebehavior in a particular social situation.social categorizationThe mental process of categorizing peopleinto groups (or social categories) on thebasis of their shared characteristics.explicit cognitionDeliberate, conscious mental processesinvolved in perceptions, judgments,decisions, and reasoning.implicit cognitionAutomatic, nonconscious mental processesthat influence perceptions, judgments,decisions, and reasoning.Social CategorizationUsing Mental Shortcuts in Person PerceptionAlong with person perception, the subway scenario illustrates our natural tendencyto group people into categories. Social categorization is the mental process of classifyingpeople into groups on the basis of common characteristics. In many socialsituations, you’re consciously aware of the mental processes you go through informing impressions of and categorizing other people. Social psychologists use theterm explicit cognition to refer to deliberate, conscious mental processes involvedin perceptions, judgments, decisions, and reasoning.So how do you socially categorize people who are complete strangers, such as theother passengers in the subway car? To a certain extent, you consciously focus oneasily observable features, such as the other person’s gender, age, race, clothing, andother physical features (Fiske, 1993; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990; Miron &Branscomben, 2008). So you glance at a person, then socially categorize him as“Asian male, 20-something, backpack next to him on the seat, iPod, reading book,probably a college student.”However, your social perceptions and evaluations are not always completelyconscious and deliberate considerations. In many situations, you react to anotherperson with spontaneous and automatic social perceptions, categorizations, and attitudes.At least initially, these automatic evaluations tend to occur implicitly oroutside of your conscious awareness. Social psychologists use the term implicitcognition to describe the mental processes associated with automatic, nonconscioussocial evaluations (see Krueger & others, 2008; McConnell & others, 2008).What triggers such automatic, implicit evaluations of other people? People oftenevaluate others without thinking based on the social category they automatically associatewith the other person (see Castelli & others, 2004; McConnell & others, 2008).