How does perception differ from person to person

Some of the studies reported took place at the Science Museum in London where members of the public took their tests. For example, Museum visitors were given the 'subitizing' test. The same people were also took part in a change detection task. They were presented with pictures of busy scenes for example London streets arranged in pairs of images identical to each other, except for one change.

The task was to spot the change. The results showed that change detection ability could be predicted from the 'subitizing' test. Another method of self-handicapping is to behave in ways that make success less likely, which can be an effective way of coping with failure, particularly in circumstances where we feel the task may ordinarily be too difficult. For instance, in research by Berglas and Jones , participants first performed an intelligence test on which they did very well.

It was then explained to them that the researchers were testing the effects of different drugs on performance and that they would be asked to take a similar but potentially more difficult intelligence test while they were under the influence of one of two different drugs. The participants were then given a choice—they could take a pill that was supposed to facilitate performance on the intelligence task making it easier for them to perform or a pill that was supposed to inhibit performance on the intelligence task, thereby making the task harder to perform no drugs were actually administered.

Berglas found that men—but not women—engaged in self-handicapping: they preferred to take the performance-inhibiting rather than the performance-enhancing drug, choosing the drug that provided a convenient external attribution for potential failure. This finding is consistent with the general gender differences we have talked about in many places in this book: on average, men are more concerned than women about using this type of self-enhancement to boost their self-esteem and social status in the eyes of themselves and others.

You can see that there are some benefits but also, of course, some costs of self-handicapping. If we fail after we self-handicap, we simply blame the failure on the external factor. But if we succeed despite the handicap that we have created for ourselves, we can make clear internal attributions for our success. Engaging in behaviors that create self-handicapping can be costly because doing so makes it harder for us to succeed.

Although self-handicapping would seem to be useful for insulating our feelings from failure, it is not a good tack to take in the long run. They also tend to set goals that they believe they can attain, and to regularly make some progress toward reaching them. As the saying goes, being on the journey is often more important than reaching the destination. Abramson, L. Learned helplessness in humans: Critique and reformulation.

Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 87 1 , 49—74;. Alloy, L. Do negative cognitive styles confer vulnerability to depression? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 8 4 , — Atkinson, D. Etiology beliefs, preferences for counseling orientations, and counseling effectiveness. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 38, Berglas, S. Drug choice as a self-handicapping strategy in response to noncontingent success.

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Sex Roles, 29, Park, B. Some people first notice how attractive someone is because they care a lot about physical appearance—for them, appearance is a highly accessible characteristic. You can see that these differences in accessibility will influence the kinds of impressions that we form about others because they influence what we focus on and how we think about them.

If someone cares a lot about fashion, that person will describe friends on that dimension, whereas if someone else cares about athletic skills, he or she will tend to describe friends on the basis of those qualities. These differences reflect the emphasis that we as observers place on the characteristics of others rather than the real differences between those people.

Our view of others may sometimes be more informative about us than it is about them. People also differ in terms of how carefully they process information about others. Some people have a strong need to think about and understand others. People with a strong need for cognition tend to process information more thoughtfully and therefore may make more causal attributions overall.

In contrast, people without a strong need for cognition tend to be more impulsive and impatient and may make attributions more quickly and spontaneously Sargent, In terms of attributional differences, there is some evidence that people higher in need for cognition may take more situational factors into account when considering the behaviors of others.

Although the need for cognition refers to a tendency to think carefully and fully about any topic, there are also individual differences in the tendency to be interested in people more specifically. For instance, Fletcher, Danilovics, Fernandez, Peterson, and Reeder found that psychology majors were more curious about people than were natural science majors.

In turn, the types of attributions they tend to make about behavior may be different. As we have seen in this chapter, how we make attributions about other people has a big influence on our reactions to them. But we also make attributions for our own behaviors. Social psychologists have discovered that there are important individual differences in the attributions that people make to the negative events that they experience and that these attributions can have a big influence on how they feel about and respond to them.

The same negative event can create anxiety and depression in one individual but have virtually no effect on someone else. A major determinant of how we react to perceived threats is the type of attribution that we make to them. Attributional style refers to the type of attributions that we tend to make for the events that occur to us. You may know some people who tend to make negative or pessimistic attributions to negative events that they experience. We say that these people have a negative attributional style.

People with a negative attributional style say things such as the following:. Indeed, Alloy, Abramson, and Francis found that college students who indicated that they had negative attributional styles when they first came to college were more likely than those who had a more positive style to experience an episode of depression within the next few months.

Thus people with a positive attributional style are likely to say things such as the following:. In sum, we can say that people who make more positive attributions toward the negative events that they experience will persist longer at tasks and that this persistence can help them.

Abramson, L. Learned helplessness in humans: Critique and reformulation. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 87 1 , 49—74;. Alloy, L. Do negative cognitive styles confer vulnerability to depression? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 8 4 , —