ch 4 Flashcards
Snap Judgements
Inferring personality from physical appearance
How are judgements correlated with one another
1)positive-negative dimension
2)power dimension
1)positive-negative dimension
(trustworthy vs untrustworthy
2)power dimension
(confident,dominant, submissive)
How well do snap judgements(impressions based on brief exposure to other people’s behavior) predict more considered consensus opinion
YES
The Process of Causal Attribution:
Determining whether actions are product of internal or external causes requires assessments of what most people are like and what most people are likely to do
-Ie: becoming a guitarist for the love of playing guitar is internal while becoming a guitarist for fame is external bc most people want to be famous
covariation principle:
we try to determine what causes-internal or external, characteristic of the person in question or applicable to nearly everyone-”covary” with what we’re trying to explain
One type of covariation:
consensus
refers to what most people would do in a given situation
distinctiveness(part of covariation)
what an individual does in different situations
Situational attribution
when consensus and distinctiveness are both high
-(when everyone else in your friend’s statistics class like it too, and when your friend likes few other math classes, there is something special about that class)
Dispositional attribution
consensus and distinctiveness are both low(ie:when no one like the statistics class and when your friend likes all math courses, her likeness for the course must reflect something about them)
discounting principle
our confidence that a particular cause is responsible for a given outcome will be reduced if there are other plausible causes that might have produced the same outcome
counterfactual thinking:
considerations of what might have, could have, or should have happened “if only” a few minor things were done differently
Emotional amplification
emotional reaction tends to be more intense if the event almost didn’t happen
Self serving attributional bias
people are inclined to attribute their failures to external circumstances but to attribute their successes and other good events to themselves
Fundamental attribution error:
tendency to see the behavior of others as a reflection of kind of people they are rather than as a result of the situation they find themselves
Actor-observer difference:
In the role of “actor” you’re usually more interested in determining what kind of situation you’re dealing with than assessing what kind of person you are
In the role of “observer”, you’re often primarily interested in determining what kind of person you’re dealing with
Why are people prone to fundamental attribution error?
Features of the environment that more readily capture our attention are more likely to be seen as potential causes of an observed effect
East asians are more inclined than westerners to attribute an actor’s behavior to the situation rather than to the person’s dispositions
East asians pay more attention to context than westerners
Gender and Attribution
Men are more likely than women and girls to attribute their failures to lack of effort, whereas women are more likely than men to attribute their failures to lack of ability
Order Effects
primacy,recency,and framing
Framing effect:
the way information is presented including the order of presentation can frame the way it’s presented and understood
Spin framing
form of framing that varies the content, not just the order of what is presented
Positive and Negative Reframing
The nature of most things can be described or framed in ways that emphasize the good or the bad with predictable effects on people’s judgements
-ie:75% lean meat sounds better than 25% fat
Temporal Framing
The key is to recognize that we think about actions and events within a particular time perspective(temporal frame) belonging to the past,present, immediate future..etc
construal level theory
the relationship between temporal distance and abstract or concrete thinking;Psychologically distant actions and events are thought about in abstract terms; actions and events that are close at hand are thought about in concrete terms
motivated confirmation bias
viewing information that might be ambiguous (has no meaning) as supporting our preferences
confirmation bias
tendency to test a proposition by searching for evidence in support of it
top down
bottom up
schemas
patterns of thinking and behavior that shape how we interpret the world
attention
attention is selective, our schemas guide our attention
memory
schema influence memory; we remember things that captured our attention
construal
schemas influence how we interpret information
priming
certain types of behavior are elicited automatically when people are exposed to stimuli in the immediate environment that bring to mind a particular action or schema
subliminal stimuli
stimuli presented outside of conscious awareness–can prime a schema su fficiently to inf uence subseq uent information processing
we dont need to be conscious to be primed to a given schema
recent activation
schema brought to mind recently tend to be more accessible
expectations
expectations influence information processing by priming the schema, the schema is readily applied at the slightest hint that it’s applicable
in parallel
the intuitive system operates quickly and automatically, is based on associations, and performs many of its operations simultaneously
serially
rational system is slower and more controlled and performs its operations one at a time, based on rules and deductions
sometimes rational system can override intuitive system
heuristics
Intuitive mental operations, performed quickly and automatically, that provide e fficient answers to common problems
of judgment.
availability heuristic
the process whereby judgments of fre uency or probability are based on how readily pertinent instances come to mind.
-example:car crash vs plane crash
representativeness heuristic
categorize something by judging how similar it is to their conception of the typical member of a category or when trying to make causal attributions by assessing how similar an e ffect is to a possible cause
-Example: you meet someone at a party who likes art,travels, and likes wine, are they more likely to be a lawyer or a museum curator?
fluency
th e feeling of ease (or di ffculty) associated with processing information.
base-rate information
illusory correlation
the belief that two variables are correlated when in fact they are not.
thin slicing
tendency to make quick inferences about the state or characteristics of people/situation
first impressions
