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