self perception theory

1. SELF-PERCEPTION THEORY

2. PERCEPTION
•The way in which something is regarded,
understood, or interpreted.
SELF PERCEPTION
•The idea that you have about the kind of person
you are.

3. DARYL J.BEM
Born in June 1938.
Studied Physics at Reed College.
Studied social psychology at the University of
Michigan
 Received his PhD in 1964.
Taught at Stanford, Carnegie-Mellon, Harvard, and
Cornell.
Served as consulting editor for psychology-related
publications including Journal of Personality,
and Psychological Review.

4. THEORY
•Attitude follows behavior.
•It asserts that people develop their attitudes (when
there is no previous attitude-due to a lack of
experience, etc.—and the emotional response is
ambiguous) by observing their own behavior and
concluding what attitudes must have caused it.

5. •Traditional view about attitude:
-Behaviour follows attitude
•Bem’s view:
-Attitude follows behaviour

7. Intrinsic & Extrinsic Motivation
•Whether are behaviour is motivated by
intrinsic or extrinsic factors has far-reaching
implications.
•Intrinsic motivation is the desire to engage in
an activity because we enjoy it, or find it
interesting.
•Extrinsic motivation is the desire to engage in
an activity because of external rewards or
pressures.

8. Over justification Effect:
•An interesting sidelight to self-perception
theory is the over justification effect:
•Definition: minimal rewards lead to high
interest in a task; external rewards for
tasks lead to low interest in it.

9. Behavior: 9 year old Johnny plays baseball with
the neighborhood kids all day.
+
Environment: He receives no external reward
for doing this
=
Cause: he plays baseball because it is fun

10. Behavior: 25 year old Johnny is playing
baseball in the Major Leagues
+
Environment: he receives $5 million a year
to play baseball
=
Cause: he is playing for the money
(environmental cause) not for pleasure
(personal cause)

11. •The original purpose of self perception
theory was to explain phenomena
covered by cognitive dissonance theory,
without using an internal drive state
(dissonance) in the explanation

12. •Self perception theory argues that people
examine two things when making decisions
about the cause of their own behavior.
•First,
The behavior itself
•Second,
The environmental forces working on the
individual

13. Observed Behavior
+
Environmental Forces
=
Attributions for the Cause of the Behavior
(ATTITUDE)

14. Behavior: I told the guy that I liked the
experiment
+
Environment: I got $20 for it
=
I hated that experiment

15. •In the $20 case, the money is a strong
explanation for the behavior. Why should
I have to be offered so much money to
tell the guy that I liked the experiment?
Because I must dislike it.
•Strong environmental cause implies lack
of personal desire to perform the
behavior.

16. Behavior: I told the guy that I liked the
experiment
+
Environment: I got $1 for it
=
Cause: The experiment was okay

17. •Here, there is very little environmental
explanation for the behavior.
•So I must conclude that the cause for my
telling the guy that the experiment was fun
was personal – I said it was okay because it
was okay.
•Cogitive dissonance was not used in self-perception
theory to explain the behavior.
•All it took was examination of the behavior
and its circumstances.

18. • James Laird conducted two experiments on how
changes in facial expression can trigger changes in
emotion.
• Participants were asked to smile or frown
without awareness of the nature of their
expressions.
•They reported feeling more angry when frowning
and happier when smiling.

19. •They reported that cartoons viewed while they
were smiling were more humorous than cartoons
viewed while they were frowning.
• Laird interpreted these results as
a person’s facial expression can act as a cause of an
emotional state, rather than an effect.
•Instead of smiling because you feel happy, you can
make yourself feel happy by smiling.

20. APPLICATIONS
PSYCHOLOGICAL TREATMENT:
•Self-perception theory - people attribute their
inner feelings from their external behaviors.
•Treatment by guiding patients to firstly change
their behaviors and later the problems.
•One of the most famous therapies making use of
this concept is therapy for Heterosocial Anxiety.

21. MARKETING
•Foot-in-the-door technique.
•The initial commitment on the small request will
change ones self image, therefore giving reasons for
agreeing with the subsequent, larger request.
• It is because people observe their own behaviors
and thus infer they must have a preference for
those products.

22. MEDICINE
The Placebo effect
•PLACEBO:Simulated or ineffective treatment
•Patients given a placebo treatment will have a
perceived or actual improvement in a medical
condition

23. Challenges and criticisms
• Whether people experience attitude changes
as an effort to reduce dissonance or as a
result of self-perception processes.
• It does not hold that people experience a
"negative drive state" called "dissonance"
which they seek to relieve

24. • An early study on cognitive dissonance
theory shows that people indeed experience
arousal when their behavior is inconsistent
with their previous attitude.
• Waterman designed an experiment where
the cognitive dissonance theory is evident

25. • Difficulty is in finding an experiment.
• Anthony Greenwald -impossible to distinguish
between the two theories.
• Zanna and Cooper’s - against self perception
theory
• Fazio, Zanna, and Cooper in 1977- both cognitive
dissonance and self-perception could co-exist.
• Snyder-Ebbeson experiment - Self-perception
Theory is true.

26. CONCLUSION
• The cognitive dissonance theory accounts
attitude changes
-when peoples behaviors are inconsistent
-original attitudes are clear.
• The self-perception theory is used
-when those original attitudes are relatively
ambiguous and less important.

27. • In contrast to traditional belief, a large
proportion of peoples attitudes are weak
and vague.
• The self-perception theory is significant in
interpreting ones own attitudes, whether one
would cheat to achieve your goal.