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Psychology, Social Psychology > Chapter 4, Social Perception > Flashcards

Chapter 4, Social Perception Flashcards

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1
Q

What is Social Perception?

A

The study of how we form impressions of other people and make inferences about them.

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2
Q

What sources of information are used to create social perception?

A
  • Physical Appearance
  • Situations & Scripts
  • Behaviour
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3
Q

What is Non-verbal Communication?

A

The way in which people communicate, intentionally or unintentionally, without words.

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4
Q

What can Non-verbal Behaviour include?

A
  • Facial Expressions
  • Tone of voice
  • Gestures
  • Body Position and movement
  • Touch
  • Gaze
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5
Q

What is physical appearance in relation to Social Perception?

A

It is usually the 1st source of information that we have about a person

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6
Q

What is the “Beautiful is Good” effect?

A

Our tendency is to infer that people who are more attractive than average have higher levels of other positive attributes as well.

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7
Q

What has “Baby Faces” been perceived as?

A

They are seen as warm, kind, naive, honest, submissive.

This is compared to mature-faced people.

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8
Q

What are some reasons why “Baby Faces” have been perceived as they are?

A
  • Evolutionary responses to infantile features
  • Generalizations from babies
  • “Kernal of truth”
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9
Q

What is the importance of facial expressions in Non-verbal communication?

A

It is the most significant channel of Non-Verbal Communication.

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10
Q

What did Charles Darwin Believe about facial expressions?

A

He believed that the primary emotions conveyed by the face are universal in that:

  • All humans encode emotions in the same way
  • All humans can decode emotions with equal accuracy
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11
Q

What have researchers theorized about facial expressions and emotions?

A

That some facial expressions of emotions are universal.

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12
Q

What is the Anger Superiority Effect?

A

The tendency for people to be especially adept at picking out angry faces in a crowd.

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13
Q

How did Hansen and Hansen test the Anger Superiority Effect?

A
  • Showed participants photographs of crowds. There was one discrepant facial expression and no discrepant facial expression.
  • The discrepant facial expression varied (angry, neutral, happy)
  • Participants were asked to indicate whether discrepant faces had been present
  • Participants responded more quickly & made fewer errors when the discrepant face was angry.
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14
Q

Are facial expressions an accurate way to determine emotion?

A

It can be difficult to interpret accurately based on facial expressions:

  • People may try to appear less emotional than they are
  • People may display blends of multiple affects simultaneously
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15
Q

What is the Affect Blend?

A

It is a facial expression in which one part of the face is registering one emotion and another part of the face is registering a different emotion.

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16
Q

What are the aspects of Cultural Psychology?

A
  • Individualistic Cultures
  • Eastern Cultures
  • Collectivistic Cultures
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17
Q

What are Individualistic Cultures?

A

It is when people tend to think of themselves as distinct social entities, tied to each other by voluntary bonds of affection and organizational memberships but essentially separate from other people.

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18
Q

What are Eastern Cultures?

A

They are collectivism and interdependence

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19
Q

What are Collectivistic Cultures?

A

They are when people tend to define themselves as part of a collective, inextricably tied to others in their group and having relatively little individual freedom or personal control over their lives but not necessarily wanting or needing these things.

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20
Q

What are Emblems?

A

Nonverbal gestures that have well-understood definitions within a given culture

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21
Q

What is an important part of situations?

A

Scripts

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22
Q

What are scripts?

A

Preconceptions about the sequence of events that is likely to occur in a particular kind of situation.

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23
Q

How did Pryor & Merluzzi test situations?

A
  • Generated “1st date” script, with 16 discrete steps
  • Randomized steps
  • Asked participants to arrange them in proper order
  • “Daters” performed tasks more quickly than “non-daters”
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24
Q

How do Scripts influence Social Perception?

A
  • They affect what we see in a situation

- They affect our interpretation (and the information value) of behavior.

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25
Q

What is Non-Verbal Behaviour?

A

Behaviors that reveal a person’s thoughts and feelings without words.

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26
Q

How do we derive meaning from observations of behavior?

A

You divide the behaviors continuous stream into discrete units.

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27
Q

How can divided behavior influence perception in important ways?

A
  • The memorability of Behavior

- Feelings of familiarity with the individual

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28
Q

How do you distinguish truth from perception?

A

Channels of communication differ in terms of control:

  • Face is relatively easier for deceivers to control
  • Nervous movements of our body are harder to control
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29
Q

Why is there difficulty detecting lies?

A
  • Mismatch between what we use, and what is useful
  • Four channels of communication provide relevant information:
    1. Words
    2. Faces
    3. Body
    4. Voice
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30
Q

What is Attribution?

A

Inference about the cause of someone’s behavior

31
Q

What is Attribution Theory?

A

The study of how people explain the causes of their own and other people’s behavior

32
Q

Who is the father of Attribution Theory?

A

Fritz Heider

33
Q

What was Fritz Heider’s view?

A
  • We are all like little scientists
  • Attributions can be either internal (something about the person) or external (something about the situation)
  • He wanted to know what our default was
34
Q

What are Internal Attributions?

A

The inference that a person is behaving in a certain way because of something about him or her, such as his or her attitude, character, or personality.

35
Q

What are External Attributions?

A

The inference that a person is behaving a certain way because of something about the situation he or she is in; the assumption is that most people would respond the same way in that situation.

36
Q

What is the Covariation Model?

A
  • A theory of how we make attributions
  • We look at three types of information:
    1. Consensus Information - information about the extent to which other people behave the same way the actor does towards the stimulus. (Do people do this?)
    2. Distinctiveness Information - Information about the extent to which the actor behaves in the same way to different stimuli. (does this person do this in other situations?)
    3. Consistency Information - Information about the extent to which the behavior between the actor and the stimulus is the same across time and circumstance. (does this person usually do this?)
37
Q

What is the Fundamental Attribution Error?

A

The overestimation of the role of personal causes in a person’s behavior, and the underestimation of situational causes.

38
Q

What was the Jones and Harris Castro essay study?

A
  • Had students read essays either supporting or opposing Fidel Castro’s rule in Cuba.
  • Told that the essay writer either had free choice of which side to take or no choice.
  • Later asked participants to estimate the writer’s true attitude.
39
Q

What was the experiment conducted by Ross, Amabile, & Steinmetz?

A
  • Participants were randomly assigned to play either a Questioner, Contestant, Observers
  • Questioners were instructed to write 10 challenging questions
  • Contestants answer 4/10 questions correctly
  • All participants rated the general knowledge of the Questioners and the Contestants.
40
Q

Why do we commit the Fundamental Attribution Error?

A
  • Perceptual salience explanation;
    1. What is more salient to us? The person or the situation?
    2. We begin with our reference point on the person, adjust to take the situation into account
41
Q

What was Taylor and Fiske’s (1975) Perceptual salience study?

A
  • Six participants watched two confederates have a conversation
  • Researchers manipulated perceptual salience by either making one speaker visible and one not, or made both speakers visible.
42
Q

What did Taylor and Fiske find in their study?

A
  • The person participants could see best was the one judged to have the most active role in the conversation
  • If participants could see both, they rated both as equally influential on the conversation.
43
Q

What is Gilbert’s Two-Step Process?

A

step 1: Initially make an internal attribution (automatic)

step 2: Adjust to take the situation into account (effortful)

44
Q

What is the Actor-Observer Effect?

A

We tend to make internal attributions for other people but external attributions for ourselves.

45
Q

Why does the Actor-Observer Effect occur?

A

It occurs due to Perceptual Salience.

-When making judgments about others, the person is most salient

It also occurs since there is more information available on us, thus it is the most salient when determining our own behavior.

-We have more information about ourselves than about other people, especially consistency and distinctiveness information

46
Q

What are the aspects of the Motivational Biases?

A
  • Self-serving Attributions

- Defensive Attributions

47
Q

What are Self-serving Attributions?

A

We tend to take credit for our successes and blame the situation for our failures. This can lead people to:

  • Believing their actions are rational and defensible
  • Believing that the actions of others are unreasonable and unjustified
  • Remember their own contributions to group work better than contributions of others
48
Q

What are Defensive Attributions?

A

Attributions that help us to avoid feeling vulnerable

49
Q

What is unrealistic Optimism?

A

We think good things are more likely to happen to us relative to our peers

50
Q

What was Weinstein’s Unrealistic Optimism study?

A

Participants were asked to estimate the likelihood that they would experience positive and negative events, compared to the average student at their college.

51
Q

What is Blaming the Victim?

A

When the fundamental attribution error leads us to blame victims of crimes for their plight

52
Q

Why do we blame victims?

A

Belief in a just world,

-we assume good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. This is because randomness is scary and it helps us plan for the future.

53
Q

What are the Cultural differences in Attributions?

A
  • People from western cultures are more likely to make the fundamental attribution error compared to people from Asian cultures.
  • People from Asia are less likely to show self-serving bias
  • People from Korea are less likely to show an actor-observer difference.
54
Q

What are Display Rules?

A

Culturally determined rules about which emotional expressions are appropriate to show

55
Q

What is Implicit Personality Theory?

A

A type of schema people use to group various kinds of personality traits together; for example, many people believe that if someone is kind, he or she is generous as well.

56
Q

What is Perceptual Salience?

A

Information that is the focus of people’s attention; people tend to overestimate the causal role of perceptually salient information.

57
Q

What is the difference between scripts and schema?

A

A script follows a specific order, while a schema is a general framework.

58
Q

Non-verbal communication is used to express what?

A

Nonverbal communication is used to express emotion, convey attitudes, and communicate personality traits.

59
Q

What are the issues with facial expressions and emotions?

A

Six major emotions are considered universal—encoded and decoded similarly by people around the world because they have evolutionary significance.

There is debate, however, over whether these six are basic and are perceived differently in different cultures.

There is an agreement, that cultures differ in terms of display rules—rules about which emotional expressions are appropriate to show.

Affect blends occur when one part of the face registers one emotion and another part shows a different emotion.

60
Q

What are other channels of Nonverbal Communication?

A

Other channels of nonverbal communication include eye gaze, touch, personal space, gesture, and tone of voice.

Emblems are gestures with well-defined meanings and are culturally determined.

61
Q

How are First Impressions quick and Long lasting?

A

People are quick to form impressions about what other people are like (e.g., their sexual orientation, social class) based on scant information, such as a photograph.

62
Q

What is the lingering Influence of Initial Impressions?

A

Once people have formed impressions of others, these impressions tend to persist.

For example, research on the “what is beautiful is good” stereotype shows that when a person is good-looking, we assume that person has a lot of positive qualities.

63
Q

What are implicit personality theories in regards to filling in the blanks of what is not known?

A

To understand other people, we observe their behavior, but we also infer their feelings, traits, and motives.

To do so, we use general notions or schemas about which personality traits go together in one person.

64
Q

Are Culture and implicit personality theories shared among other cultures?

A

Implicit personality theories, or schemas, are shared by people in a culture but not necessarily by people in other cultures.

65
Q

What is Causal Attribution in regards to answering the “why” question?

A

According to attribution theory, we try to determine why people do what they do to uncover the feelings and traits that are behind their actions.

This helps us understand and predict our social world.

66
Q

What is the Nature of the Attribution Process?

A

When trying to decide what causes people’s behavior, we can make one of two attributions: an internal (dispositional) attribution or an external (situational) attribution.

67
Q

What is the Covariation Model and how are the Internal attributions compared to the External Attributions?

A

The covariation model focuses on observations of behavior across time, place, actors, and targets of the behavior.

It examines how the perceiver chooses either an internal or an external attribution.

We make such choices by using consensus, distinctiveness, and consistent information.

68
Q

What is meant by the statement “People as Personality Psychologists”?

A

People also use various mental shortcuts when making attributions. One common shortcut is the fundamental attribution error: the tendency to believe that people’s behavior corresponds to (matches) their dispositions.

A reason for this bias is that a person’s behavior has greater perceptual salience than does the surrounding situation.

The two-step process of attribution states that the initial and automatic attribution tends to be dispositional, but it can be altered by situational information at the second step.

Although we tend to see other people’s behavior as dispositionally caused, we tend to our own behavior as situationally caused. This is known as the actor/observer effect.

69
Q

What are Self-Serving Attributions?

A

People’s attributions are also influenced by their personal needs. Self-serving attributions occur when people make internal attributions for their successes and external attributions for their failures.

70
Q

What are Defensive Attributions?

A

These are explanations for behavior that help people avoid feelings of vulnerability.

One type of defensive attribution is the belief in a just world, in which we believe that bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people.

Such attributions can cause us to blame victims for their plight.

71
Q

What are the six major Emotions?

A
  • Anger
  • Fear
  • Disgust
  • Sadness
  • Surprise
  • Happiness
72
Q

What other emotions were added to the six major ones?

A
  • Contempt
  • Embarrassment
  • Heroism, humor/amusement, love, peace, and wonder
  • Pride and shame
  • Pain
73
Q

What are display rules?

A

Culturally determined rules about which emotional expressions are appropriate to show.

Psychology, Social Psychology (5 decks)

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