Chapter 3 - Lecture 3 Flashcards
What is social perception?
A general term for the processes by which people come to understand one another.
How does physical appearance play into social perception?
As children, we were told that we should not judge a book by its cover, yet as adults we can’t seem to help ourselves…Physical appearance plays a big role in social perception because we tend to form first impressions from faces and other aspects of a person’s appearance
How are individuals with baby faces perceived as?
Researchers have found that adults who have baby-faced features, such as large, round eyes; high eyebrows; round cheeks; a large forehead; smooth skin; and a rounded chin tend to be seen as warm, kind, naive, weak, honest, and submissive.
In contrast, adults who have mature
features—small eyes, low brows and a small forehead, wrinkled skin, and an angular chin are seen as stronger, more dominant, and more competent
Provide an example of a study conducted in relations to first impressions..
Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov (2006) showed college students photographs of unfamiliar faces for one- tenth of a second, half a second, or a full second. Whether the students judged the faces for how attractive, likeable, competent, trustworthy, or aggressive they were, their ratings even after the briefest exposure were quick and highly correlated with judgments that other observers made without time limits..
What are perceptions of situations?
In addition to the beliefs we hold about persons, we also have preset notions about certain types of situations/“scripts” that enable us to anticipate the goals, behaviours, and outcomes likely to occur in a particular setting, such as a date or driving the regular route to work
What is Nonverbal Behaviour?
Behaviour that reveals someone’s
feelings without words through things like facial expressions, body language, and vocal cues.
What are some non verbal cues?
Body language, eye contact,
touch
How does culture play a role in non verbal or verbal cues?
In different cultures there are different variations of greetings, social distance, goodbyes, or even rings.
In Zambia, a ring on the pinky means your single and ready to mingle
What is mind perception?
The process by which people attribute human-like
mental states to various animate and inanimate objects, including other people.
What did Ekman &
O’Sullivan observe in 1991 about truth and deception?
THE STUDY: One group of participants makes truthful or deceptive statements, while another group reads the transcripts, listens to audiotapes or watches videotapes, and then tries to judge the statements…results show that people are only about 54% accurate in judging truth and deception, in part because they too often accept what others say at face value
CONNECTION THAT EKMAN AND O’SULLIVAN MADE: Research shows that professionals who are specially trained and who make these kinds of judgments for a living— such as police detectives, judges, psychiatrists, customs inspectors, and those who administer lie-detector tests for the CIA, the FBI, and the military are also highly prone to error..
What is the best indicator that a person is lying?
Best indicator is voice: hesitate, speed up, raise pitch
What is Attribution theory?
A group of theories that describe
how people explain the causes of behaviour. Motivated to understand others well enough to manage our social lives, we observe, analyze, and explain their behavior. The explanations we come up with are called attribu- tions, and the theory that describes the process is called attribution theory.
What is Personal attribution?
A attribution to internal
characteristics of an actor (e.g., the actor’s personality, mood, ability)
What is Situational attribution?
A attribution to external
factors (e.g., the task at hand)
What is the goal of attribution theories?
The goal of attribution theories is to understand perceptions of causality, not actual causality
Correspondent Inference Theory??
How a behaviour might reflect an enduring personal trait (EX: Degree of choice, expectedness of behaviour, intended effects of behaviour)
**According to Edward Jones and Keith Davis (1965), each of us tries to understand other people by observing and analyzing their behaviour. Jones and Davis’s correspondent inference theory predicts that people try to infer from an action whether the act corresponds to an enduring personal trait of the actor.
What 3 factors are a part of the correspondent inference theory?
- The first factor is a person’s degree of choice. Behaviour that is freely chosen is more informative about a person than behaviour that is coerced by the situation.
- A second factor that leads us to make dispositional inferences is the expectedness of behaviour. As previously noted, an action tells us more about a person.
- Third, social perceivers take into account the intended effects or consequences of someone’s behaviour. Acts that produce many desirable outcomes do not reveal a person’s specific motives as clearly as acts that produce only a single desirable outcome
Kelley’s Covariation Theory??
If personal traits or environmental factors determine a behaviour..
What is the Covariation Principle?
A principle of attribution theory that holds that people attribute behaviour to factors that are present when a behaviour occurs and are absent when it does not.
What are the 3 kinds of covariation information?
- Consensus
- Distinctiveness
- Consistency
Who is Daniel Kahneman?
Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize in economics for work on the psychology of judgment and decision making. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman (2011) summarizes a lifetime of research showing that the human mind operates by two different systems of thought.
