Chapter 4

Question 1

Social Perception

Answer 1

term for the processes by which people come to understand one another

Question 2

mind perception

Answer 2

process by which people attribute humanlike mental states to various animate and inanimate objects

Question 3

nonverbal behavior

Answer 3

behavior that reveals a person’s feelings through facial expressions, body language, and vocal cues

Question 4

attribution theory

Answer 4

group of theories that describe how people explain the causes of behavior

Question 5

personal attribution

Answer 5

ascription to internal characteristics of an actor

Question 6

situational attribution

Answer 6

ascription to factors external to an actor

Question 7

covariation principle

Answer 7

idea that for something to cause behavior, it must be present when the behavior occurs

Question 8

counterfactual thinking

Answer 8

tendency to imagine alternative events or outcomes that might have occurred but did not

Question 9

fundamental attribution error

Answer 9

tendency to judge others’ behaviors by overestimating the role of personal factors

Question 10

belief in a just world

Answer 10

belief that individuals get what they deserve in life, leading people to disparage victims

Question 11

information integration theory

Answer 11

idea that impressions are based on perceiver dispositions and a weighted average of personal traits

Question 12

impression formation

Answer 12

process of integrating information about a person to form a coherent impression

Question 13

priming

Answer 13

tendency for frequently or recently used concepts to influence information interpretation

Question 14

central trait

Answer 14

characteristic that exerts a powerful influence on overall impressions

Question 15

confirmation bias

Answer 15

tendency to seek, interpret, and create information that verifies existing beliefs

Question 16

belief perseverance

Answer 16

tendency to maintain beliefs even after they have been discredited

Question 17

Primacy effect

Answer 17

tendency for information presented early to have more impact than information presented later

Question 18

self-fulfilling prophecy

Answer 18

idea that a perceiver’s expectation can actually lead to its own realization

Question 19

availability heuristic

Answer 19

estimation of the possibility of an event by how easily instances of it come to mind

Question 20

false-consensus effect

Answer 20

overestimation of the extent to which other people share one’s own opinions, attributes, and behaviors

Question 21

base-rate fallacy

Answer 21

finding that people are relatively insensitive to consensus information presented in numerical base rates