Social perception is the way that people observe and come to conclusions about their understanding of the people around them (Kassin, Fein, & Markus, 2008). Everyone uses social perception everyday while in the classroom, in the workplace, and in every imaginable social situation. We make quick judgments of others by the way that they look and dress, their body movements, and many other factors.
I like to think of myself as a good social perceiver; I think I’m usually pretty good at understanding people just by watching them and being around them for a short period of time. I can usually judge pretty quickly whether someone is honest and responsible or if they are someone that I don’t trust. When I judge someone as being honest and responsible, my impression turns out to be right most of the time. However, when I judge someone as being a person that I can’t trust, I am proven wrong occasionally. When someone proves me wrong it is very hard for me to change my first impression of him or her. This is known as belief perseverance. Belief Perseverance is the tendency to hold personal beliefs even after those beliefs have been disproved (Kassin, Fein, & Markus, 2008).
Unfortunately, I recently demonstrated belief perseverance after judging someone on my soccer team. This person was someone that I had a bad feeling about from day one. I thought they were arrogant and cocky and I let them know that. I don’t know what it was about them, but I could not force myself to like them. Everything that they said I judged through the impression that I had already formed in my head. No matter what they did I could not change my impression of them. Eventually, I ended up getting stuck next to the person on a plane on one of our trips and was forced to talk to them. I started to realize that I actually had a lot in common with this person, and I slowly changed my mind about them. However, it took me a long time to really learn to like them. Looking back on it, I can see that there were many times when my first impression of the person should have been changed, but because my beliefs persevered so strongly it took a very long time to change my opinion of them.
Kassin, S., Fein, S., & Markus, H. R. (2008). Perceiving Persons. In Social Psychology (7th ed., pp. 93-127). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
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