Chapter 4 Flashcards
Social Perception
a general term for the processes by which people come to understand one another.
Facial “pop-out” effect
human faces really capture our attention
Overgeneralization Hypothesis
we infer personality characteristics based on similarity of one’s appearance with learned associations.
Baby Facedness
- seen a warm, kind, naive, weak, honest & submissive.
- we have urges to be caring and gentle.
Physiognomy
- the art of reading character from faces.
- More trustworthy = U-shaped mouth, raised brows.
- Less trustworthy = mouth curled down, eyebrows shape make a V-shape.
Scripts
preset notions about certain types of situations that enable us to anticipate the outcomes likely to occur in a particular setting.
Mature features
- stronger, more dominant, more competent.
Mind perception
the process by which people attribute human like mental states to various animate and inanimate objects, including other people.
- deals with belonging and sense-making.
Pareidolia
we see faces and attribute personality where no faces exist.
People perceive minds along 2 dimensions
- ) Agency
2. ) Experience
Agency
a target’s ability to plan & execute behaviour.
Experience
the capacity to feel pleasure, pain and other sensations.
Nonverbal behaviour
behaviour that reveals a person’s feelings without words, through facial expressions, body language, and vocal cues.
Primary Emotions
- ) happiness
- ) sadness
- ) fear
- ) anger
- ) surprise
- ) disgust
In group advantage
people are more accurate at judging faces from their own national, ethnic or regional groups.
Anger superiority effect (face in crowd effect)
people are quicker to spot and slower to look away from angry faces in a crowd.
Eye contact effect
Eye contact holds attention, increases arousal & activates brain areas.
Gage disengagement
people form negative impressions when someone can’t hold eye contact as if uninterested.
4 Channels of Communication
- ) spoken word
- ) the face
- ) the body
- ) the voice
Dispositions
stable characteristics such as personality traits, attitudes, abilities.
Attributions
the explanation we come up with.
Attribution Theory
a group of theories that describe how people explain the causes of behaviour.
2 Groups of Causal Attributions
- ) personal attributions: attributions to internal characteristics of an actor. (ex: mood, effort).
- ) situational attributions: attribution to external factors to an actor. (ex: other people, luck).
Covariation Principle
a principle of attribution theory that holds that people attribute behaviours to factors that are present when a behaviour occurs and are absent when it does not.
Consensus
see how different person’s react to the same stimulus.
Distinctiveness
see how the same person’s react to different stimuli.
Consistency
see what happens to the behaviour at another time when the person and stimulus both remain the same.
Cognitive heuristics
information processing rules of thumb that enable us to think in ways that are quick and easy but that often lead to error.
Availability heuristics
the tendency to estimate the likelihood that an event will occur by how easily instances of it come to mind.
False-consensus effect
the tendency to overestimate the extent to which others share their opinions, attributes and behaviours.
Base-rate fallacy
the finding that people are relatively insensitive to consensus information presented in the form of numerical base rates.
Counterfactual thinking
the tendency to imagine alternative events or outcomes that might have occurred but did not.
Fundamental Attribution Error
the tendency to focus on the role of personal causes and underestimate the impact of situations on other people’s behavior.
Social Perception is a Two Step Process
- ) identify behavior and make quick personal attribution.
2. ) adjust that inference to account for situational influences. (requires attention, thought, and effort).
Culture
- Western cultures emphasize individual person & attributes.
- East Asian cultures focus on background that surrounds individual.
Motivational Biases
our goals/beliefs influence how we perceive others.
ex: see B or 13 experiment –> B (orange juice) & #13 (gross juice), people reported seeing B.
Self Serving Bias
people tend to take more credit for success than they do blame for failure.
Positivity Bias
people seek more info about their strengths than they do their strengths than they do their weaknesses.
Belief in a Just World
the belief that individuals get what they deserve in life, an orientation that leads people to dismiss victims.
Impression Formation
the process of integrating information about a person to form a coherent impression.
Summation model of Impression Formation
the more positive traits there are, the better.
Averaging Model
the higher the average value of all traits, the better.
Information Integration Theory
theory that impressions are based on (1) perceiver dispositions and (2) a weighted average of a target person’s traits.
Perceiver Characteristics
Each of us differs in terms of the kinds of impressions we form. We tend to use ourselves as a frame of reference.
Embodiment Effects
- the way we view ourselves and others is affected by the physical position, orientation, sensations, and movements of our bodies.
- warm = physical sensation we relate to safety, shelter & trustworthy/friendly.
Priming
the tendency for recently used or perceived words to come to mind easily and influence the interpretation of new information.
Target Characteristics
Individuals can be distinguished along 5 broad traits;
- ) Extraversion
- ) Neuroticism
- ) Openness to experience
- ) Agreeableness
- )Conscientiousness
Valence
whether trait is considered good/bad.
The innuendo effect
if you describe a person either by their warmth or competence, but not both, perceivers tend to draw negative inferences about the dimension that was omitted.
Implicit personality traits
a network of assumptions about the relationships among various types of people, traits, and behaviors.
Central Traits
traits that exert a powerful influence an overall impressions. Ex: warm and cold.
Primacy Effect
the tendency for information presented early in a sequence to have more impact on impressions than information presented later.
Need for closure
the desire to reduce cognitive uncertainty, which heightens the importance of first impressions.
Change of meaning hypothesis
once people have formed on impression, they start to interpret inconsistent information in light of that impression.
Confirmation bias
the tendency to seek, interpret and create information that verifies existing beliefs.
Belief perseverance
the tendency to maintain beliefs even after they’ve been discredited.
Bias experience sampling
attraction breeds interaction, which is why our negative first impressions in particular tend to persist.
Self-fulfilling prophecy
the process by which one’s expectations about a person eventually lead that person to behave in ways that confirm those expectations.
Rejection prophecy
(1) people who are insecure are fearful or rejection which makes them tense & awkward in social situations
(2) their resulting behaviour is off-putting to others
(3) this increase the likelihood of rejection & reinforces their initial insecurity.
Confirmation hypothesis testing
Thinking someone has a certain trait, one engages in a one-sided search for information. In doing so, one creates a reality that ultimately supports their beliefs.
Negativity bias
we perceive negative information about a target as more diagnostic of their character than positive information.
Perceiver Factors
- ) motivation
- ) beliefs
- ) emotions
Correspondence bias
tendency to overlook the impact of a situation and attribute someone’s actions to his or her disposition.
Anthropomorphism
perceiving humanlike minds in non-human entities.
Truth bias
In general, people tend to believe others.
Deception detection
Mismatch between the behavioural cues that actually signal deception and those we use to detect deception.
Choice
behaviour that is freely chosen is more information about a person than behaviour that’s coerced by the situation.
Expectedness
an action tells us more about a person when it departs from the norm.
Effect
acts that produce many desirable outcomes don’t reveal a person’s specific motives as clearly as acts that produce only a single desirable outcome.
