Chapter 4 - Social Perception Flashcards
What is social perception?
Social perception is the study of how we form impressions of and make inferences about other people.
What is nonverbal communication?
The way in which people communicate, intentionally or unintentionally, without words.
What are the most frequently used and most revealing channels of nonverbal communication?
Facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, body positions and movement, the use of touch, and eye gaze.
What is Darwin’s stance on emotions?
That they are universal, species-specific and not culture-specific.
Which facial emotions seem to be culture-independent?
Anger, Surprise, Disgust, Happiness, Fear and Sadness.
Newer research also suggests: contempt, pride
The process of conveying an emotion into a nonverbal expression is called
Encoding.
The process of interpreting nonverbal cues is called
decoding
Mention two reasons why decoding facial expressions can be difficult
- They can be complicated by the person displaying affect blends.
- Cultural differences.
What are emblems?
Well-understood, but not universal, gestures. Like the thumbs-up gesture. It means “Ok” in europe, “boyfriend” in Japan, and in Sardinia and Iran it’s obscene.
What is an implicit personality theory?
A type of schema people use to group various kinds of personality traits together, for example, many people believe that someone who is kind is generous as well.
What is attribution theory?
A description of the way in which people explain the causes of their own and other people’s behavior.
Who is credited as being the father of attribution theory?
Fritz Heider (1958)
What is an internal attribution?
The inference that a pereson is behaving in a certain way because of something about the person, such as attitude, character, or personality.
What is an external attribution?
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.
What does the covariation model say?
To form an attribution about what caused a person’s behavior, we systematically note the pattern between the presence or absence of possible causal factors and whether or not the behavior occurs.
When we are forming an attribution, what kinds of information, according to Kelley (1967), do we examine for covariation?
- Consensus
- Distinctiveness
- Consistency
What is consensus information?
Information about the extent to which toher people behave the same way toward the same stimulus as the actor does.
What is distincitveness information?
Information about the extent to which one particular actor behaves in the same way to different stimuli.
What is consistency information?
Information about the extent to which the behavior between one actor and one stimulus is the same across time and circumstances.
What type of attribution is most likely when the consensus and distinctiveness of the act are low, but its consistency is high?
Interal attribution.
What type of attribution is most likely when consensus, distinctiveness and consistency is high?
External attribution.
What is perceptual salience?
The seeming importance of information that is the focus of people’s attention.
Aka, when we try to explain someone else’s behavior, our focus of attention is usually on the person and not the surrounding environment - this is one explanation of why we make the fundamental attribution error.
Shelley Taylor and Susan Fiske (1975) manipulated perceptual salience in a study. Explain its design and conclusion.
Two male students engaged in a “get acquainted” conversation (both actors) were being observed six observers who were sat at different places (two on each side of the actor, and two behind each actor). They were then to judge whether Actor A or Actor B had the most impact in the conversation - the tendency was to assign the actor they could see the biggest impact. Those who saw both equally well rated the impact as pretty even.
Gilbert (1989, 1991, 1993) and Krull (1993) both mention a two-step process when making attributions. What are these two steps?
Making an automatic internal attribtuion and only then thinking about possible situational reasons for the behavior, after which one may adjust the original internal attribution.
