Chapter 4 Flashcards
A group of theories that describe how people explain the causes of behaviour.
Attribution theory.
The tendency to estimate that likelihood that an event will occur by how easily instances of it come to mind.
Availability heurisitic.
The finding that people are relatively insensitive to consensus information presented in the form of numerical base rates.
Base rate fallacy.
The belief that individuals get what they deserve in life, an orientation that leads people to disparage victims.
Belief in a just world.
The tendency to maintain beliefs even after thay have been discredited.
Belief perserverance.
Traits that exert a power influence on overall impressions.
Central traits.
The tendency to seek, interpret, and create information that verifies existing beliefs.
Confirmation bias.
The tendency to imagine alternative events or outcomes that might have occurred but did not.
Counterfactual thinking.
A principle of attribtuion theory that holds that people attribute behavior to factors that are present when a behavior occurs and are absent when it does not.
Covariation principle.
The tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which others share their opinions, attributes, and behaviors.
False consensus effect.
The tendency to focus on the role of personal causes and underestimate the impact of situations on other people’s behavior.
Fundemental attribtuion error.
The process of integrating information about a person to form a coherent impression.
Impression formation.
The theory that impressions are based on (1) perceiver dispositions and (2) a weighted average of a target person’s traits.
Information integration theory.
The process by which people attribute human-like mental states to various animate and inanimate objects, including other people.
Mind perception.
Behavior that reveals a person’s feelings without words through facial expressions, body language, and vocal cues.
Nonverbal behavior.
Attribution to internal characteristics of an actor, such as ability, personality, mood, or effort.
Personal attribution.
The tendency for information presented early in a sequence to have more impact on impressions than information presented later.
Primacy effect.
The tendency for recently used or perceived words or ideas to come to mind easily and influence the interpratation of new information.
Priming.
The process by which one’s expectations about a person eventually lead that person to behave in ways that confirm those expectations.
Self fulfilling prophecy.
Attribution to factors external to an actor, such as the task, other people, or luck.
Situational attribution.
A general term for the processes by which people come to understand one another.
Social perception.
A social perceiver comes to know others by relying on three indirect clues - what are they?
Persons, situations, and behaviors.
True/ false: The impressions we form of others are influenced by superficial aspects of their appearance.
True.
The part of the brain that is activated not only when someone smells something disgusting, but also when they watch others smell something disgusting is called the?
Insula.
True/ False: Police detectives, judges, psychiatrists, custom inspectors, and those who administer lie detector tests for the CIA, FBI, and military are highly prone to making errors in judgement when it comes to lie detection.
True.
Stable characteristics such as personality traits, attitudes, and abilities.
Dispositions.
To Heider, we are all scientists of a sort. 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 _________________, and the theory that describes the process is called ___________________ ________________.
Attributions; attribution theory.
Heider found it particularly useful to group the causal attribtuions people give into two categories - what are they?
Personal and situational .
Jones and Davis’s ________________ ____________________ ______________ predicts that people try to infer from an action whether the act corresponds to an enduring personal trait of the actor.
Correspondent inference theory.
Jones’s correspondent inference theory has three factors - what are they?
- Choice.
- Expectedness.
- Effects.
Jones’s correspondent inference theory: The first factor is a persons degree of _____________. Behavior that is freely chosen in more informative about a person that behavior that is coerced by the situation.
Choice.
Jones’s correspondent inference theory: The second factor that leads us to make dispositional inferences is the _____________ of behavior. An action tells us more about a person when it departs from the norm than when it is typical, part of a social role, or otherwise expected under the circumstances.
Expectedness.
Jones’s correspondent inference theory: The third factor perceivers take into account the intended ________________ or consequences of someone’s behavior. 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.
Effects.
Daniel Kahneman won a nobel prize in economics for explaining what two system process of thinking?
Fast and slow thinking. System 1 fast in one might consider the mind intuitive. And system 2 slow and controlled which requires attention and effort.
Information processing rules of thumb that enable us to think in ways that are quick and easy but that often lead to error.
Cogntive heuristics.
The tendency to estimate the odds that an event will occur by how easily instances of it pop to mind.
Availability heuristic.
A tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which others share their opinions, attributes, and behaviors.
False consensus effect.
The availability heuristic leads us astray in two ways - what are they?
- Gives rise to the “false consensus effect.” a tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which others share their opinions, attributes, and behaviors.
- Social perceptions are influenced more by one vivid life story than be hard statistical facts. The “base rate fallacy.”
The fact that people are relatively insensitive to numercial base rates, or probabilities, they are influence more by graphic, dramatic events, such as the sight of a multi million dollar lottery winner celelbrating on TV or a photograph of bodies being pulled form the wreckage of a plane crash.
Base rate fallacy.
A tendency to imagine alternative outcomes that might have occurred but did not.
Counterfactual thinking.
What is one cardinal lesson of social psychology?
People are profoundly influenced by the situational contexts of thier behavior.
The tendency to focus on the role of personal causes and underestimate the impact of situations on other people’s behavior.
Fundemental attribution error.
Social perception is a two step process - describe the two steps?
- First, we identify the behavior and make a quick personal attribution, then we correct or adjust that inference to account for situational influences.
- Requires attention, thought, and effort.
True/ False: Like social psychologitsts, people are sensitive to situational causes when explaining the behavior of others.
False.
Refers to how much freedom and opportunity a society affords individuals to form new social ties and break old ones based on personal preference.
Relational mobility.
What three things can shape our own attributions?
- Relational mobility.
- Religious beliefs.
- Social class.
The belief that individuals get what they deserve in life, an orientation that leads people to disparage victims.
Belief in a just world.
The process of integrating information about a person to form a coherent impression.
Impression formation.
The theory that impressions are based on (1) perceiver dispositions and (2) a weighted average of a target persons traits.
Information integration theory.
The tendency for recently used or perceived words or ideas to come to mind easily and influence the interpretation of new information.
Priming.
The tendency for negative information to weight more heavily on our impressions that positive information.
Trait negativity bias.
A network of assumptions about the relationships among various types of people, traits, and behaviors.
Implicit personality theory.
The tendency for information presented early in a sequence to have more impact on impressions than information presented later.
Primacy effect.
The tendency to seek, interpret, and create information that verifies existing beliefs.
Conformation bias.
True/ False: People are slow to change their first impressions on the basis of new information.
True.
