Microsoft Word Chapter 1 done doc

5.0 OBJECTIVES :
Dear students! In the previous units you have studied 
about the field of social psychology and the process of social 
cognition. Just to refresh your memory social psychology 
incorporates the study of attitudes and perceptions, persuasion, 
and typical behaviors of people in their relationships with others. 
Social cognition is a mental process by which we attend to, store, 
remember, and use information about other people and the social 
world. In this unit you will be studying about the mental process 
called social perception which is one aspect of social cognition. 
After the completion of this unit you will be able to: 
1. Define social perception.
2. Identify the different channels of nonverbal communication.
3. Explain Darwin’s theory of universal facial expressions of 
emotion.
4. Identify the focus of attribution theory. 
5. Discuss the two-step process involved in making attributions
6. Describe the covariation model of Kelley and the process it 
attempts to describe.
7. Identify self-serving attributions for success and for failure.
8. Discuss the motives underlying defensive attributions.

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5.1 INTRODUCTION :
It is a well documented fact that human beings are social 
animals whose survival is contingent on their ability to interact with 
others.Naturally, human beings are predisposed to knowing about 
others’ personalities which enables them to deal with them 
amicably. Social psychology is the discipline that deals with a 
scientific analysis of human behavior. It tries to explain how the 
thoughts, feelings and behaviors of individuals are influenced by 
presence of others. It examines how our experience is understood 
in terms of the social influences and relationships vis-a-vis the 
cultural groups to which we belong.
When humans meander through the social mileu,they are 
constantly bombarded with variety of information through the 
various senses. Social perception is, that part of perception that 
allows us to understand the individuals and groups of our social 
world, and thus is an element of social cognition.