Do you know how we generate social expectations and how they affect us?

Every day we deal with a multitude of people, some of whom are well known and others not. And we have a concept of the personality of each of them, inferred through the interactions we have had with those people. Which leads us to generate a series of social expectations about the behavior of each of them.

Social psychology has been widely concerned with the study of expectations. Thanks to this, we know that they are closely related to the impressions we have of others. So, first of all, let’s talk about our social perception.

Social perception

The human being, being born lacking the resources to be independent, needs complex social relationships. Thus, Our brain is prepared to perceive our social environment and evaluate it. A very important part of controlling our relationships is knowing what the people who make up our social environment are like. And this is where social perception comes in.

A simple and interesting model to explain this phenomenon is Fiske’s model of social perception.. According to this model, as soon as we meet a person we will put them into a category. And this will stay in that category, unless we delve deeper into the relationship and discover something that invites us to change it.

Furthermore, if we have that interest, we will check if their behavior adapts to that category; If not, we will adapt or change the category until we have that person categorized or conceptualized.

This is a very important process, think that without it the task of managing our relationships would be much more complicated. Now, it is important to keep in mind that It is a quick and useful process, but not precise. People have a complex personality in strong interaction with the context, which can hardly be included within categories. However, this little “mental shortcut” is useful for us to know how to treat the people in our environment.

Once we have our social environment categorized and we have formed concepts of each of these people, we will begin to generate expectations. But what exactly are expectations?

Social expectations

Social expectations are ideas we have about how a person in our social environment is going to behave in the future or in a given situation. When we generate an impression about a person, associated with the image we generate, these expectations appear. This helps us imagine how we should behave and anticipate their behavior.

This behavior of generating expectations about our relationships fulfills an adaptive function. It is quite easy to intuit what it is: in an artificial environment, based on complex societies like the ones most of us live in, anticipating the behavior of others allows us to adapt our behaviors, and thus benefit greatly from social interactions. Although it is not a precise process, being able to make an anticipation and sometimes be wrong is better than not making it or never getting it right.

It is important to know that these social expectations or the behavior of others greatly affect our behavior. We do not treat all people the same, and we do not treat the same person the same in different situations. We can observe this in many everyday situations.

Besides, We will try to make others meet our expectations, either by indirectly forcing them or by altering our perception of what others do.. Furthermore, this process does not occur only in this direction: because we are also aware of the expectations that others have of us, we will also adapt our behavior to satisfy the ideas of others.

A little reflection

Our lives are full of social expectations, both from us on others and from others on us. . In this sense, for our relationships to be comfortable, we tend to meet these expectations, since breaking with them can generate a space of uncertainty, and therefore, anxiety. Now, we must keep in mind that this is not a precise process, and therefore many times these expectations will not be met.

The error in attributing an expectation leads to three situations: (a) the person who receives the expectation changes his behavior to adapt to it, (b) the person who generates the expectation changes his perception to believe that it adapts to his expectations, and (c) the correlation between expectation is broken and conduct, and is assumed to be an error.

Although the first two options avoid social conflict and initially manage to maintain any relationship, the truth is that they can also lead to big problems in the long term. This is because in the first option the person changes their behavior to satisfy another person, which leads the other person to generate an erroneous idea of ​​what they really are like. And in the case of the second option, the person who generates the expectation is unconsciously deceiving himself about what the other person is like.

The third option is the one that causes the greatest anxiety, due to the lack of control over what happened. Despite this, if the relationship overcomes or assumes this anxiety, a more stable relationship will be created. It is possible that in momentary relationships (for example, a neighbor), the first two options are correct, since there is no long-term relationship or close bond with them. However, it would be a great negligence to behave this way with our deepest relationships.

Now, how do you think you behave in relation to your expectations? And how would you like to behave?

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