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 some are 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 extensively 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, at birth devoid of the resources to be independent, needs complex social relationships. Therefore, 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 into the relationship and discover something that invites us to change it.

In addition, if we have that interest, we will check if their behavior fits into that category; otherwise, 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 note 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 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 that 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 to imagine how we have to behave and to anticipate their behavior.

This behavior of generating expectations about our relationships fulfills an adaptive function. It is quite easy to guess what it is: in an artificial environment, based on complex societies such as those in which most of us live, 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 anticipate and be wrong at times is better than not doing 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 don’t treat everyone the same, and we don’t treat the same person the same in different situations. We can observe this in a multitude of everyday situations.

In addition, we will try to make others meet our expectations, either by indirectly forcing them or by altering our perception of what others are doing. In addition, 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 thought

Our life is full of social expectations, both of us about others and of others about 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. However, it must be borne in mind that this is not a precise process, and therefore many times these expectations are not going to be met.

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

Although the first two options avoid social conflict and manage to maintain any relationship at first, the truth is that they can also lead to big problems in the long term. This is due to the fact that in the first option the person changes their behavior to satisfy another, which leads the other person to generate a wrong idea of ​​how they really are. 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 most 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 the correct ones, since there is no long-term relationship or a close bond with them. However, it would be grossly negligent to behave like this with our deepest relationships.

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