Chapter 4: Social Perception Flashcards
What are the dimensions of snap judgments?
Positive-negative dimension
Power dimension
What is the positive-negative dimension?
Whether someone looks trustworthy or untrustworthy, aggressive or not aggressive
What is the power dimension?
Whether someone seems confident or bashful, dominant or submissive
What is the accuracy of snap judgments?
Research indicates that when people make snap judgments, they tend to agree with one another to a remarkable degree. But consensus is not the same thing as accuracy.
What should you considerate when trying to figure out the causes of someone’s behavior?
Whether the behavior is internal or dispositional (a product of something within the person) or external or situational (reflection of something about the situation surrounding the behavior)
Covariation principle
The idea that behavior should be attributed to potential causes that occur along with the observed behavior
Consensus
A type of covariation information: whether most people would behave the same way or differently in a given situation
Distinctiveness
A type of covariation information: Refers to what an individual does in different situations
When is a situational attribution called for?
When consensus and distinctiveness are both high
When is a dispositional attribution called for?
When consensus and distinctiveness are both low
Discounting principle
The idea that people will assign reduced weight to a particular cause of behavior if other plausible causes might have produced the same behavior.
Counterfactual thinking
Thoughts of what might have, could have, or should have happened “if only” something had occurred differently
Emotional amplification
An increase in an emotional reaction to an event that is proportional to how easy it is to imagine the event not happening
Self-serving attributional bias
The tendency to attribute failure and other bad events to external circumstances and to attribute success and other good events to oneself.
Fundamental attribution error
The tendency to attribute people’s behavior to their character or personality, even when powerful situational forces are acting to produce that behavior
Ross, Amabile, and Steinmetz (1977) study
Aim: fundamental attribution error
Procedure: College students took part in a quiz-game competition. Half of them were assigned the role of questioner and the other half the role of contestant. The questioner’s job was to think of challenging, but not impossible, general knowledge
Actor-observer difference
A difference in attribution based on who is making the causal assessment: the actor (who is relatively inclined to make situational attributions) or the observer (who is relatively inclined to make dispositional attributions)
Nisbett et al. 1973 study
Aim: actor-observer difference
Procedures: Participants had to explain why they chose the college major that they did or why their best friends chose the major that they did. Findings: When the investigators
scored the participants’ explanations, they found that participants more often referred to characteristics of the person when explaining someone else’s choice than they did when explaining their own choice. They typically focused on the specifics of the major when explaining their own choice.
What are the cultural differences in attending to context?
Non-Westerners pay more attention to others and to the details of the situations they find themselves in compared to Westerners.
Kitayama et al. 2003 Study
Aim: the difference between non-western and Western cultures
Procedures: After examining a square with a line drawn at the bottom, the participants (Japanese and American participants) went to another part of the room and saw a square of a different size. Th ey then had to draw either a line of the same length as the original (absolute task) or a line having the same length in relation to the original square (relative task).
Findings: The Americans were better at the absolute judgment, which
re quired ignoring the context, whereas the Japanese were better at the relative judgment, which required paying attention to the context.
What is the difference between independent and interdependent culture?
Interdependent cultures take into consideration the situation more than independent cultures.
Thus, interdependent cultures are less prone to the fundamental attribution error but immune from it.
What are the differences in gender with attribution.
Women and girls are more likely than men and boys to attribute their failures to a lack of ability, especially in math and science.
