Question 1

whats interpersonal perception?

Accepted Answer

the perceptions and beliefs that we hold about other people Also referred to as social perception Although it could be argued that this is a poorly defined area of social psychology

Question 2

Baron et al (2006) what main processes are involved in interpersonal perception?

Accepted Answer

Non-verbal communication Attributions Impression formation Impression management

Question 3

Non verbal communications (NVC)

Accepted Answer

Includes body language, eye contact and facial expressions

NVC can be used to complement or replace speech, and to signal attitudes and emotions

NVC is often discussed in relation to deception detection, which is of course an important part of social perception
Microexpressions
Interchannel discrepancies
Eye contact
Exaggerated facial expressions

Question 4

What are attributions?

Accepted Answer

Refer to the explanations that we give for other people’s behaviour

early work by Jones and Davis (1965) focussed on correspondent inference – how we infer what traits other people have by observing their behavior
Including whether these traits are stable
Is this an effective strategy?It is easy to make mistakes – consider the case of Clever Hans
Or the attributions made to geometric shapes in the animations created by Heider and Simmel (1944

Question 5

what do Jones and Davis argue about hoe we identify which behaviours are most indicative of someone's personality?

Accepted Answer

Focus on behaviours that appear to arise from free choice

Focus on behaviours that are noncommon – that is behaviours which only have one specific explanation

Focus on the social desirability of the behaviour, with behaviours that are low in social desirability being taken as a stronger sign of individual traits

Question 6

whats kellys theory of causal attributions?

Accepted Answer

Kelley argues that we also try to work out why people around us behave as they do (Kelly, 1972) For example, if some people you know do not invite you to join them at an event

Question 7

what 3 areas does kelly argue we focus on when finding an explanation for behavior of others.

Accepted Answer

Cosensus – do other people not invite me to things?Consistency – has this happened before with this group? Distinctiveness – have I not been invited to other, different events?

Question 8

what else does kelly say?

Accepted Answer

states that we are more likely to attribute another’s behaviour to internal causes when consensus and distinctiveness are low but consistency is high

So in our example we may conclude that the particular group in question just don’t like you much

Alternatively if consensus, consistency and distinctiveness are all high then we are more likely to attribute the behaviour to external causes

So it may be that they assumed for some reason that you would not be available, or that you would not like that specific event

Question 9

what about situations where there appear to be conflicting explanations for a behaviour?

Imagine someone tells you how nice a person they think you are and then the next day asks you to sponsor them for a charity event
Did they say you are a nice person because that is genuinely what they think or was it because they were planning all along to ask you for a donation

Accepted Answer

In these kind of situation we may engage in what is knows as discounting, in which we view our initial explanation (attribution) as less likely, because of what happened afterwards

Question 10

or alternatively...

Accepted Answer

he person who tells us how nice they think we are might not be the kind of person to usually make this type of comment

In this instance the fact that they have behaved unusually might add weight to their comment – in other words we are more likely to believe that they genuinely mean what they said
This is known as augmenting

Overall therefore we can use both discounting and augmenting to try to help us attribute explanations of other’s behaviour in situations where more than one explanation is possible

Question 11

whats attribution bias

Accepted Answer

attributions may be prone to error Failing to fully understand others can also have serious consequences

Question 12

attribution bias-whats corresponding bias, or the fundamental attribution error ?(Gilbert and Malone, 1995)

Accepted Answer

As commented we tend to ignore possible external causes for behaviour (even when strong situational cues are present) and assume that behaviours are due to internal dispositions

or as Baron et al (2006) says

we tend to assume that people are behaving a certain way because they are ‘that kind of person’ and tend not to think about the external factors that may be the actual reason why they behave in that way

Question 13

why might we focus on the person’s immediate behaviour and think less about the wider context? - gilbert and malone (1995)

Accepted Answer

argue that we actually use a two step process, in which we base our initial judgement on the behaviour of the person (an internal cause) and then look for evidence of external causes that should be taken into account

However research suggests that we tend to underestimate these external factors (Chaiken and Trope, 1999)

Although we also tend to assume that we are more understanding about external factors than other people (Van Boven et al, 2003

Question 14

additional sources of attrubition bias - whats the actor-observer effect? (Jones and Nisbett 1972)

Accepted Answer

We are more likely to attribute our own behavior to external factors
For exampleI stalled the car because this is the first time I’ve driven wearing these shoes’ versus ‘that person probably stalled their car because they are a bad driver’

Question 15

additional sources of attrubition bias - whats self serving bias? (Olson and Ross 1988)

Accepted Answer

we are more likely to attribute positive outcomes to internal factors and negative outcomes to external factors
For example ‘I got a good mark because I worked hard’ versus ‘I got a bad mark because the lecturer is horrible’

Interpersonal perception Flashcards