Profs & Pints San Francisco: Untangling Perception and Prejudice

Profs and Pints San Francisco presents: “Untangling Perception and Prejudice,” on research exploring the complex relationship between our biases and our impressions of others with Jeff Sherman professor of psychology and principal investigator in the Social Cognition Lab at the University of California Davis.

Just about anyone who has ever brought a friend to a party has witnessed firsthand how complex our social judgments can be. The two of you can interact with the same people and walk away with strikingly different impressions of who is likable or off-putting trustworthy or sketchy well-intentioned or up to no good.

Jeff Sherman of UC-Davis has devoted much of his scholarly career to studying the cognitive processes that determine how we perceive others and ourselves. His research focuses on how we acquire stereotypes and prejudices how having them affects our perceptions and memories of other people how we can control them and how our perceptions of the attributes of individual people factor into the mix.

Join Dr. Sherman at San Francisco’s Bartlett Hall for a fascinating talk likely to leave you much more aware of what is goes on in your own head when you encounter or think about other people.

He’ll show you how our thought processes in regard to other people are a lot more complicated than you might assume. Stereotypes for example don’t blind us to the distinguishing features of other individuals so much as distort how we take them into account in making social judgments. And our biases and stereotypes change over time with awareness of them making them less automatic and more within our control.

You’ll emerge from the talk with an understanding of how to fine-tune your thinking to more clearly perceive others. (Tickets available only online. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17 or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A Manhattan Street as photographed by Kevin Case / Creative Commons.

Host or Publisher peter schmidt