CHAPTER 4: Percieving Persons

Question 1

True or False: People are more accurate at judging the personalities of friends and acquaintances than of strangers

Answer 1

True: people generally form erroneous impressions of strangers, but tend to be more accurate in their judgements of friends and acquaintances

Question 2

What is attribution theory, and why kinds of attributes can one make?

Answer 2

Attribution theory is a group of theories that explain the causes of their behavior. There are two different types of attributes one can make: personal and situational.
A personal attribute is using the person’s internal character traits to justify their behavior, such as personality, mood, ability, or effort.
A situational attribute is an attribution to an external actor, such as task, other people, or luck.

Question 3

What is fundamental attribution error? Give an example of it.

Answer 3

Funamental attribution error is the tendency to focus on the role of personal causes and underestimate the impact of situation’s on other people’s behavior. An example of FAE is blaming a coworker for being late due to being unreliable, rather than them getting stuck in traffic or their car not starting.

Question 4

Daphne loves her psychology class and believes that everyone else in the class feels the same. However, Anna hates it and strongly believes that everyone else hates it as well. What concept do these distorted perceptions illustrate?

Answer 4

The False-Consensus effect is causing these distorted perceptions, as the false-consensus effect causes a tendency to overestimate the degree to which others share our beliefs and opinions.

Question 5

Explain base-rate fallacy

Answer 5

base-rate fallacy is the finding that people are relatively insensitive to consensus information presented in the form of numerical base rates. People tend to ignore the base rate (general prevalence) in favour of information pertaining to a specific case.