Chapter 3: Perceiving Individuals Flashcards
mere exposure
Exposure to a stimulus without any external reward, which creates familiarity with the stimulus and generally makes people feel more positively about it.
salience
The ability of a cue to attract attention in its context.
automatic
Refers to processes that operate spontaneously (without the perceiver’s deliberate intent) and often efficiently and without awareness.
mental representations
A body of knowledge that an individual has stored in memory.
associated
A link between two or more mental representations.
accessibility
The ease and speed with which information comes to mind and is used.
priming
The activation of a mental representation to increase its accessibility and thus the likelihood that it will be used.
subliminal
Presentation of stimuli in such a way (usually with a very brief duration) that perceivers are not consciously aware of them.
superficial processing
Relying on accessible information to make inferences or judgments, while expending little effort in processing.
correspondent inference
The process of characterizing someone as having a personality trait that corresponds to his or her observed behavior.
correspondence bias
The tendency to infer an actor’s personal characteristics from observed behaviors, even when the inference is unjustified because other possible causes of the behavior exist.
systematic processing
Giving thorough, effortful consideration to a wide range of information relevant to a judgment.
causal attributions
A judgment about the cause of a behavior or other event.
primacy effect
A pattern in which early-encountered information has a greater impact than subsequent information; an example of the principle of cognitive conservatism.
perseverance bias
The tendency for information to have a persisting effect on our judgements even after it has been discredited.
