Arguably, social psychology is a study that is mostly concern on how feelings, behaviors, as well as thoughts of people are influenced by imagined, inferred, and real behavior of other people in the society. In fact, most of the research concentrates on social action, attitudes, social influence, and social cognition.
What are the different ways in which we evaluate people?
Certainly, some of the various ways which we evaluate individuals, include attributions, impression formation and interpersonal attraction. As a matter of fact, when developing impressions, we actually depend on beliefs, schemata, and expectations. First impressions are mostly the core information that we receive and use it to evaluate, (Sanderson, 2007). Some of the factors include gender, gestures, clothing, and language. Stereotypes base their evaluation on the physical appearance.
Additionally, evaluation by attributions puts more of its analysis on consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency. In this case, individuals seek out to comprehend others based on judgments on to why individuals behave in a certain manner. Based, on interpersonal attraction individuals are attracted to each other when they come recurrently come in contact. Furthermore, we also like others because of their attractiveness, similarity, values, and interests.
How do these factors play a role in our expectations of other people?
Perhaps, evaluating individuals in different ways plays a role on what we expect of such people. In fact when we evaluate we convince our minds that they are actually what we evaluate them to be, (Myers, 2005). For example, in most cases we draw conclusions on job, personality, and wealth basing it on dress code, language, appearance, gesture, and gender. Actually, most of the assumptions and expectations are true but others totally conflict.
What are the disadvantages of these expectations?
In real life our expectations affect us and the people around us, either negatively or positively. Our expectations can be incorrect and bias, in this case when we expect and evaluate people on their appearance we might hurt them. More so we may lead to discrimination, intolerance and unfavourism, (Myers, 2005). This expectation changes our entire attitudes on someone.
For example if we evaluate someone to be wealth, we will always be respecting them and giving them credit even if they don’t deserve. As human beings we may associate a person speaking in high tone with arrogance, rudeness and violence, but all this perceptions does not make him a criminal. Therefore, we should not depend on our own evaluation but rather depend on facts.
References
Myers, D. (2005). Social Psychology. California: McGraw-Hill.
Sanderson, C. (2007). Social Psychology. London: John Wiley & Sons.
