Knowledge by one person of another is always accompanied by an emotional assessment of a partner, an attempt to understand his actions, a forecast of changes in his behavior and modeling of his own behavior. Since at least two people are involved in this process and each of them is an active subject, in building an interaction strategy, each should take into account not only the motives and needs of the other, but also his understanding of the motives and needs of the partner. The process of interpersonal perception is also called social perception.
The mechanism of interpersonal perception is the way in which a person interprets and evaluates another. There can be quite a few such ways. Today we will consider the main mechanisms of interpersonal perception: identification, empathy, egocentrism, attraction, reflection, stereotype and causal attribution.
Identification
The first and main mechanism of interpersonal perception is the identification of a person by a person. From the point of view of social psychology, it confirms the fact that the easiest way to understand a partner is to liken yourself to him.
In general, identification hasmultiple interpretations:
- Identification with another individual based on emotional connection.
- Learning the values, roles and morals of another person.
- Copying the thoughts, feelings or actions of another person.
The most capacious definition of identification is as follows. Identification is an understanding of a partner through his conscious or unconscious identification with himself, an attempt to feel his condition, mood and attitude to the world, putting himself in his place.
Empathy
The second mechanism of interpersonal perception is closely related to the first. Empathy is called the emotional desire to respond to the problems tormenting another person, to sympathize with him and empathize.
Empathy is also interpreted as:
- Comprehension of the states of another individual.
- A mental process aimed at identifying other people's experiences.
- An act that helps an individual build communication in a particular way.
- The ability to penetrate the mental state of another person.
The ability to empathize increases in case of similarity of interlocutors, as well as when an individual gains life experience. The higher the empathy, the more colorful the person imagines the impact of the same event on the lives of different people, and the more he is aware of the fact that there are different views on life.
An empathic individual can be recognized by the following features:
- Tolerance for other people's emotions.
- The ability to delve into the interlocutor's inner world without revealingat the same time their worldview.
- Adapting your worldview to the worldview of another person in order to achieve mutual understanding.
Empathy is similar to identification
The mechanism of empathy has some similarities with the mechanism of identification. In both cases, there is a person's ability to see things from another person's point of view. However, empathy, unlike identification, does not involve identifying oneself with the interlocutor. By identifying himself with a partner, a person accepts his model of behavior and builds a similar one. When showing empathy, the individual simply takes into account the line of behavior of the interlocutor, while continuing to build his behavior independently of him.
Empathy is considered one of the most important professional skills of a psychologist, doctor, teacher and leader. Empathic attention (listening), according to K. Rogers, is a special relationship to a partner based on the synthesis of identification and empathy. Inclusion in another person, allowing to achieve openness of contact is an identification function. Such “immersion in the interlocutor” in its purest form has negative consequences - the psychologist “connects” with the client’s difficulties and begins to suffer from his problems himself. Here the empathic component comes to the rescue - the ability to detach from the state of the partner. Thus, the combination of such mechanisms as identification of a person by a person and empathy allows a psychologist to provide real help to clients.
Types of empathy
Empathic experiences can be adequate andinadequate. For example, someone else's grief causes sadness for one, and joy for another.
Also, empathy can be:
- Emotional. Based on the mechanism of projection and imitation of the effective and motor reactions of the interlocutor.
- Cognitive. Based on intelligent processes.
- Predicative. Expresses a person's ability to predict the reactions of the interlocutor in a given situation.
An important form of empathy is empathy - the experience by one individual of the feelings, emotions and states experienced by another. This happens through identification with the interlocutor and sympathy for him.
Egocentrism
The third mechanism of interpersonal perception, unlike the two previous ones, complicates the knowledge of each other by individuals, and does not facilitate it. Egocentrism is a person's focus on his personal experiences and interests, which leads to the fact that he loses the ability to understand people with a different worldview.
Egocentrism happens:
- Informative. Manifested in the process of thinking and perception.
- Moral. Illustrates the inability of a person to understand the reasons for the behavior of others.
- Communicative. It is expressed with disrespect for the semantic concepts of the interlocutor.
Interpersonal attraction
Attraction is the attraction or attraction of one person to another, due to mutual interest. In psychology, interpersonal attraction means friendly relations between people and the expression of sympathy for each other. Developmentattachment of one subject to another arises as a result of an emotional relationship, the evaluation of which evokes a number of feelings and is expressed as a social attitude towards another person.
Reflection
Considering the psychological mechanisms of interpersonal perception, one cannot fail to mention reflection. Reflection is a person's awareness of how he is evaluated and perceived by other individuals. That is, this is a person’s idea of what the interlocutor thinks about him. This element of social cognition, on the one hand, means a person's knowledge of the interlocutor through what he thinks about him, and on the other hand, knowledge of himself through this. Thus, the wider an individual's social circle, the more ideas about how others perceive him, and the more a person knows about himself and others.
Stereotype
This is a very important and rather capacious mechanism of interpersonal perception. A stereotype in the context of interpersonal attraction is the process of forming an opinion about a person based on personal prejudices (stereotypes).
In 1922, to denote ideas associated with inaccuracy and lies, V. Limpan introduced the term "social stereotype". As a rule, the formation of stable patterns of any social object occurs imperceptibly even for the individual himself.
There is an opinion that it is precisely because of the weak meaningfulness that stereotypes are firmly entrenched in the form of stable standards and have gained power over people. A stereotype arises in conditions of a lack of information or is the result of a generalization of one's own experience.individual. Experience is often supplemented with information obtained from cinema, literature and other sources.
Thanks to a stereotype, a person can quickly and, as a rule, reliably, simplify the social environment, arrange it into certain standards and categories, make it more understandable and predictable. The cognitive basis of stereotyping is formed by such processes as restriction, selection, and categorization of a large flow of social information. As for the motivational basis of this mechanism, it is formed by the processes of evaluative popularization in favor of a particular group, which give a person a sense of belonging and security.
Sterotype functions:
- Information selection.
- Formation and support of a positive image of "I".
- Creating and supporting a group ideology that justifies and explains group behavior.
- Formation and support of a positive image of "We".
Thus, stereotypes are the regulators of social relations. Their main features are: economy of thinking, justification of one's own behavior, satisfaction of aggressive tendencies, stability and release of group tension.
Classification of stereotypes
There are several classifications of stereotypes at once. According to V. Panferov's classification, stereotypes are: social, anthropological, and ethno-national.
Let's dwell in more detail on the classification of A. Rean, according to which stereotypes are:
- Anthropological. They appear whenassessment of the psychological qualities of a person and his personality depends on the features of appearance, that is, anthropological signs.
- Ethnonational. Relevant in the case when the psychological assessment of a person is influenced by his belonging to a particular ethnic group, race or nation.
- Social status. They take place in the event that the assessment of the personal qualities of an individual occurs depending on his social status.
- Social role-playing. In this case, personality assessment is subordinated to the social role and role functions of the individual.
- Expressive aesthetic. The psychological assessment of personality is mediated by the external attractiveness of a person.
- Verbal behavioral. The criterion for evaluating a personality is its external features: facial expressions, pantomime, language, and so on.
There are other classifications. In them, in addition to the previous ones, the following stereotypes are considered: professional (a generalized image of a representative of a particular profession), physiognomic (appearance features are associated with a personality), ethnic and others.
National stereotypes are considered the most studied. They illustrate the relationship of people to certain ethnic groups. Such stereotypes often serve as part of the mentality of the nation and its identity, and also have a clear connection with the national character.
The stereotyping that occurs in conditions of lack of information, as a mechanism of interpersonal perception, can play a conservative and even reactionary role, forming in people a misconception about others and deforming the processes of interpersonalinteraction and understanding. Therefore, it is necessary to determine the truth or fallacy of social stereotypes purely on the basis of an analysis of specific situations.
Causal attribution
Considering the mechanisms of social perception, one should not ignore such a fascinating phenomenon as causal attribution. Not knowing or insufficiently understanding the true motives of the behavior of another individual, people, finding themselves in conditions of information deficiency, can attribute unreliable reasons for behavior to him. In social psychology, this phenomenon is called “causal attribution.”
By looking at how people interpret the behavior of others, scientists have discovered what is known as the fundamental attribution error. It occurs because people overestimate the importance of the personality traits of others, and underestimate the impact of the situation. Other researchers have discovered the phenomenon of "egocentric attribution". It is based on the property of people to attribute success to themselves, and failure to other people.
G. Kelly identified three types of attribution:
- Personal. The cause is attributed to the one who did the deed.
- Objective. The reason is attributed to the object on which the action is directed.
- Attribution related to circumstance. The reason for what is happening is attributed to circumstances.
The observer usually makes personal attributions, while the participant tends to attribute everything to circumstance. This feature is clearly seen in the attribution of successes and failures.
An important issue in considering causal attribution is the questionthe attitude that accompanies the process of perceiving a person by a person, especially in the formation of an impression of an unknown person. This was revealed by A. Bodylev with the help of experiments in which different groups of people were shown a photo of the same person, accompanying him with characteristics such as "writer", "hero", "criminal" and so on. When the installation was triggered, the verbal portraits of the same person differed. It was revealed that there are people who are not amenable to stereotypical perception. They are called selectively stereotyped. Having considered the mechanisms of social perception, now let's talk briefly about its effects.
Effects of interpersonal perception
The effect of interpersonal perception is always based on stereotypes.
There are three effects in total:
- The halo effect. It is expressed when one person exaggerates the homogeneity of the personality of another, transferring the impression (favorable or not) about one of his qualities to all other qualities. During the formation of the first impression, the halo effect occurs when a general positive impression of a person leads to a positive assessment of all his qualities, and vice versa.
- Effect of primacy. Appears when evaluating a stranger. The role of the installation in this case is played by the information that was presented earlier.
- The effect of novelty. This effect of interpersonal perception operates when assessing a familiar person, when the latest information about him becomes the most significant.
The formation of an idea about the interlocutor always begins with an assessment and perception of himphysical appearance, appearance and demeanor. In the future, this information forms the basis for the perception and understanding of this person. It may depend on a number of factors: the individual characteristics of a person, his level of culture, his social experience, aesthetic preferences, and so on. An important issue is also the age characteristics of the person who perceives.
For example, a child who has just started going to kindergarten, in communicating with people, relies on the primary ideas about them, which he formed when communicating with his parents. Depending on how the child has developed relationships before, he shows irritability, distrust, obedience, compliance or stubbornness.
Conclusion
Summarizing the above, it is worth noting that the mechanisms of interpersonal perception include ways of interpreting and evaluating one person by another. The main ones are: identification, empathy, egocentrism, attraction, reflection, stereotype, and causal attribution. Different mechanisms and types of interpersonal perception, as a rule, work in tandem, complementing each other.
