Chapter 3 Vocab Flashcards
Perception:
The active process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting people, objects, situations, and activities
Inattention blindness
The tendency, after concentrating on a task, not to see what is right in front of one.
Muller-Lyer illusion
Perceptual illusion in which lines that are actually identical in length appear to be of different lengths.
Cultures
Beliefs, understandings, practices, and ways to interpret experience that are shared by a group of people.
Prototype
Knowledge structures that define the clearest or most representative examples of some category.
Constructivism
The theory that we organize and interpret experience by applying cognitive structures called schemata.
Personal construct
Bipolar mental yardsticks by which we measure people and situations along specific dimensions of judgment.
Stereotype
Predictive generalizations about people and situations.
Interpretation
The subjective process of evaluating and explaining perceptions.
Script
A definition of expected or appropriate sequences of action in a particular setting. Scripts are one of the four cognitive schemata; not the same as an identity script.
Attribution
Subjective account of why something happens or why someone acted a certain way.
Self-serving bias
The tendency to attribute our positive actions and successes to stable, global, internal influences under our control, and to attribute our negative actions and failures to unstable, specific, external influences beyond our control.
Fundamental attribution error
Overestimating the internal causes of others’ behavior and underestimating the external causes.
Standpoint
The knowledge and perspective shaped by the material, symbolic, and social conditions common to members of a social group.
Cognitive complexity
In our interpretation of experience, the number of constructs used, how abstract they are, and how elaborately they interact to create perceptions.
