Chapter 6 Flashcards
What is person perception
the process of learning about other people
What is social perception
how we use social cues to make judgements about social roles, rules, relationships, etc
What is thin slicing?
Conclusions about people based on extremely brief snippets of behaviour
Drawing conclusion from a small amount of info
Little time
What were the results of the experiment in which students were asked to rate teachers based only on short clips of them?
undergrads asked to evaluate teachers based on short clips of them and ratings were compared with students who spent whole semester with those teachers
Ø Students were surprisingly accurate in their judgements of others with the short clips, we do not need a lot of time to develop impressions about others
What is nonverbal behaviours
Any type of communication that does not involve speaking, including facial expressions, body language, touching, voice patterns, and interpersonal distance
What are the primary uses of nonverbal behaviour?
Expressing emotion
Conveying attitudes
Communicating personality
Substitution for verbal messages
Nonverbal behaviours are influenced by what? give examples
Social norms:
• Distance between people (South America = close, North = far)
• Touching people
• More or less hand gestures
• Eye contact (Japan = not well perceived)
What are emblems? give example
nonverbal gestures that have well-understood definitions within a given culture
Ex: Thumbs up
What has the experiment about spotting happy/angry faces in a crowd demonstrated?
Negative information about someone draws more attention (more salient) - elicits more responses
spotting angry faces in a happy crowd is easier than spotting happy faces in an angry crowd
Are we good at detecting lies? Why?
We do not really expect to be lied to; the lie detection rate of people is slightly above chance but not much more.
What is information integration?
- We add up the importance of various personal traits to determine if we like a person or not
- Different people give different importance to certain traits
What maths do we unconsciously do with people’s traits?
We either add or average the traits about a person (most often we will average)
Which type of traits about a person have more importance/weight when assessing people?
- Negative info weighs more than positive
* Warm is more positive than cold - can change our judgement entirely
What were the results of the experiment with a teacher rated as warm or cold?
teacher rated as cold or warm in a text - influenced student’s participation and changed their ratings of the teacher after a class (warm was rated more positively)
What are central traits (example)?
• Lead us to make inferences about other traits that might not have been mentioned
• Central traits colour the perception of other traits around them
ex: warm and cold
what is the primacy effect?
Information that we learn first is weighted more heavily than is information that comes later
What were the conclusions of the list of traits read in opposite order?
list of traits presented in inverse order lead people to form different impression on people
○ Positive traits 1st = more positive impression
Because the traits mentionned in the beginning matter most
What are recency effects?
info that comes last can be the most influential (less common than primacy effects)
Why are primacy effects dominant over recency effects?
- We are cognitive misers - we spend less attention to info the more we consume it
- Once a schema/expectancy is formed about a person we stop adding info
What is a casual attribution?
process of trying to determine the causes of people’s behaviour
What is a personnal (internal/dispositional) attribution?
we decide that the behaviour was caused primarily by the person
What is a situational (external) attribution?
we decide that the behaviour was caused primarily by the situation
What is the attribution theory stating?
how we explain the cause of our own behaviour and of other people’s behaviours
What was the experiment about the man making a video interview?
half of the participants viewed the video of a man who was applying to work in a submarine (extroversion was a quality) and half an astronaut (introversion was a quality)
• The man also gave statements that would suggest he was rather an introvert or extrovert
○ When statements matched the ideal quality for the job, people had a harder time assessing the man’s true underlying personality as when it did not fit the required quality for the job
What are the attributional tendencies in satisfied relationships?
Internal attribution for positive behaviour and external attribution for negative behaviour
What are the attributional tendencies in troubled relationships?
Internal attribution for negative behaviour and external attribution for positive behaviour
What is the covariation principle?
a given behaviour is more likely to have been caused by the situation if that behaviour covaries (changes) across situations
What are the 3 info we use when assessing others according to Kelley’s covariation Model?
Consistency information
Distinctiveness information
Consensus information
What is consistency information?
a situation might be the cause of a behaviour if it ALWAYS causes the behaviour
○ Ex: I always cry at weddings
What is distinctiveness information?
The behaviour occurs when the situation is present but not when it is not present indicates that the situation is most likely the cause of the behaviour
○ Ex: I never cry, except at weddings
What is consensus information?
If the situation creates the same behaviour in most people then it is likely that the situation is the cause of the behaviour
Ex: Many people also cry at weddings
What are the critiques of Kelley’s covariation model?
- People don’t use consensus info as much
- People mostly rely on consistency/distinctiveness
- People do not always have all the info needed to evaluate all 3 aspects
What is locus in the process of attributing successes/failures?
attributions to either the person or the situation (internal or external, personal or situational)
What is stability in the process of attributing successes/failures?
Whether the situation is likely to remain the same over time (stable or unstable)
What is the fundamental attribution error? How is it also called?
• We are too quick to associate the trait to the person rather than to the situation
Correspondence bias
What was the experiment with the quizmaster?
story about quizmaster who got to choose the questions and contestant who struggled to answer (quizmaster was rated as significantly more intelligent even though the situation made him seem more intelligent)
What is perceptual salience?
the information that is the focus of people’s attention (we focus on the people and not necessarily the situation)
What is the 2 steps process when making an attribution?
○ Automatically make an internal attribution
○ Adjusting the initial attribution to take the situation into account
What are the possible consequences of the fundamental attribution error?
○ Blaming the victim
○ People tend to see dispositional factors as the reason for misfortune, even after that are made aware of the situational factors
What is the actor observer difference?
• We tend to make more personal attributions for the behaviour of others than we do for ourselves and to make more situational attributions for our own behaviour than for the behaviour of others.
What are self-serving attributions?
Attributions that help us meet our desires to see ourselves positively
Take personal credit for one’s own successes and blame others or the situation for one’s own failures
What are defensive attributions?
explanations what help us avoid feelings of vulnerability and mortality
What is the “belief in a just world”?
Assumption that people get what they deserve
What are the functions of just-world beliefs?
- Maintain motivation and plan for future
- Believing that our long-term efforts and investments will be rewarded
- Assure ourselves that bad things will not happen to us
How can we deal with threats to our beliefs in a just world?
- Derogate and distance ourselves from the victim
- Good things will happen to even out the score
- Convince ourselves that there is a higher power in charge
Name 3 personal characteristics that influence the perceptions we make of other people?
• Cognitive accessibility of a given person characteristic (schema)
• How carefully one processes info about others (need for cognition - tendency to think carefully about social situations)
• Entity theorists: people who believe that people’s traits are fundamentally stable and incapable of change
VS
• Incremental theorists: believe that personalities change a lot over time and therefore are + likely to make situational attributions for events
What are the western tendencies in person perception?
oriented towards individualism, tendency to think about self as different from others, analytic thinking
• Fundamental attribution error is more present
• Tend towards the self-serving bias
What are the eastern tendencies in person perception?
collectivistic, relationships between individuals is emphasized, holistic thinking
• Spiritual concept of karma
Where are just-world attributions more present?
In cultures with extremes or wealth or poverty
Do cross-cultural differences in social perception seem to be inborn?
no
What are attributional styles?
the type of attributions that we tend to make for the events that occur to us
• Can be to our own characteristics (internal)
• Or to the situation (external)
What are stable vs unstable attributions?
- Stable attributions: relatively permanent
* Unstable: not permanent
What are global vs specific attributions?
Global attributions: We feel like they apply broadly
Specific: we associate them with specific events
Describe the negative attributional style
make negative attributions about events they experience
• Explain events by referring to their own internal, stable and global qualities
• Related to mental illnesses (depression)
• Extremely negative attribution styles are related to learned helplessness
What is self-handicapping?
when we make statements or engage in behaviours that help us create a convenient external attribution for potential failure
What is unrealistic optimism?
tendency to be overly positive about the likelihood that negative things will occur to us and that we will be able to effectively cope with them if they do.
What were the results of the self-handicapping intelligence test experiment?
choosing to take a self-handicapping or self-enhancing drug to pass an intelligence test, men chose the self-handicapping one because it provided them with an excuse for bad results
