1 Psychology and human development1.10 Social psychology
1.10.1.2 Interpersonal issues
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Written by Resident Doctor Committee · Published
Impression formation
The halo effect (Thorndike, 1920) is a favourable impression on one salient attribute spreading to judgements of other, unrelated attributes, as in the "beautiful is good" assumption.
The horn effect is the negative mirror image: one unfavourable trait spreads to unrelated judgements, as when poor self-care is taken to mean low credibility.
The Pygmalion (Rosenthal) effect is a self-fulfilling prophecy: an authority figure's raised expectation, conveyed through their own behaviour, produces a real improvement in the other person's performance.
Rosenthal and Jacobson told teachers that randomly selected pupils would improve markedly, and those pupils then made real gains.
Attraction and friendship
Affiliation is the motive to seek company. Threat and transition increase it, and isolation predicts poorer health.
Factor | What it does |
|---|---|
Proximity (propinquity) | With familiarity, the strongest early predictor of friendship, through repeated incidental contact; among Newcomb's factors it outranks similarity, reciprocity and complementarity |
Familiarity | Zajonc's mere exposure effect: liking rises with repeated exposure alone, without interaction, but dislike becomes entrenched if the first reaction was negative |
Physical attractiveness | Encourages initial approach |
Similarity | Shared attitudes, values, background and life stage |
Reciprocity | Liking is returned and disclosure matched in depth and pace; disclosure that is too fast or not returned derails a friendship |
Festinger found that friendship in student housing was better predicted by which way a door faced than by who lived behind it.
Proximity drives the formation of relationships, but similarity of attitudes and values decides which ones last.
Theory | Authors | Claim |
|---|---|---|
Matching hypothesis | People form relationships with partners of similar physical attractiveness to themselves, even when they would prefer a more attractive one | |
Reinforcement-affect model | Byrne and Clore | People like those associated with positive feelings, through conditioning, even if they did not cause the mood |
Filter theory of mate selection | Kerckhoff and Davis | Partners are screened in sequence: social background, then similar attitudes and values, then complementary needs |
Maintaining relationships
Theory | Authors | Claim |
|---|---|---|
Social exchange theory | Thibaut and Kelley | A relationship continues while perceived rewards exceed costs and beat the available alternatives (the comparison level for alternatives) |
Equity theory | Walster, Berscheid and Walster | Distress follows when rewards are out of proportion to inputs: the under-benefited partner feels anger, the over-benefited one guilt |
Attribution
Attribution is everyday causal explanation (Heider's naive psychology). Dispositional causes are traits or motives, while situational causes are circumstances: a missed appointment may be put down to disregard or to disabling anxiety.
The fundamental attribution error
The fundamental attribution error is over-weighting disposition and under-weighting situation when explaining another person's behaviour, even when a situational cause is known.
Jones and Harris found that people still took essay positions assigned by chance as the writers' real beliefs.
Correspondence bias is the specific step of inferring an enduring trait that matches the behaviour despite a strong, known situational cause; the fundamental attribution error is the broader tendency.
The error arises because people are more visible than their constraints, and dispositional explanations take less effort.
It is weaker in collectivist cultures than in individualist (Western) ones.
Other biases
Bias | What happens |
|---|---|
Actor-observer bias | One's own behaviour is explained by the situation, another person's identical behaviour by disposition |
Self-serving bias | One's own successes are credited to internal causes and failures blamed on external ones |
Hostile attribution bias | An ambiguous or accidental social act is read as deliberately hostile |
False consensus effect | People overestimate how widely others share their beliefs, choices and reactions |
False uniqueness | The mirror image of false consensus |
Depressive attribution explains failure as internal, stable and global.
In Bentall's model, persecutory delusions are linked to an externalising attributional bias, in which negative events are blamed on outside agents rather than the self.
Clinicians should consider illness, fear, pain and ward conditions before putting behaviour down to personality.
Social interaction
Norms are shared expectations, and roles attach expectations to positions.
Goffman distinguished public "front region" self-presentation from "back region" preparation.
Hall's Western personal space zones are intimate below 0.5 m, personal 0.5 to 1.2 m, social 1.2 to 3.6 m and public beyond.
Gaze is reduced in depression, social anxiety and autism, and some cultures treat lowered gaze as respectful rather than evasive.
Theory of mind
Theory of mind is representing others' beliefs, knowledge, intentions and feelings as possibly different from one's own or from reality.
Its cognitive part (what someone thinks or intends) and affective part (what someone feels) can dissociate.
In the Sally-Anne task, children must predict where Sally will look for a marble moved in her absence; they typically pass at around four years.
Baron-Cohen, Leslie and Frith proposed atypical mental-state inference to account for autistic communication difficulties, though many autistic people pass standard tasks.
In borderline presentations, mentalising may fail under emotional or attachment stress; Fonagy and Bateman built mentalisation-based treatment on this account.
Levels of language
Level | Concerns | When impaired |
|---|---|---|
Phonology | The sound system: phonemes and the rules for combining them | Speech sounds are produced wrongly while grammar, word structure, meaning and social use are intact |
Syntax | How words are combined and ordered into grammatical phrases and sentences, including inflection | Agrammatism in expressive aphasia, with word meaning preserved |
Semantics | The meaning carried by words and sentences | Word-finding difficulty and semantic paraphasia |
Pragmatics | The social use of language in context, including meaning beyond the literal | In autism and right hemisphere lesions, vocabulary, grammar and speech sounds are intact, but speech is taken literally and the speaker's intention misread |
Prosody is intonation, stress, rhythm and loudness; it flattens in Parkinson's disease and negative symptom states.
Grice's cooperative maxims are quantity (enough information), quality (truthfulness), relation (relevance) and manner (clarity), and apparent violations imply meaning.
Automatic and controlled processing (Shiffrin and Schneider)
Processing | Features |
|---|---|
Automatic | Parallel and effortless; after consistent practice it is unaffected by display size |
Controlled | Slow, serial and effortful |