Perceiving Individuals

Question 1

Why do we form and remember impressions of individuals? (4)

Answer 1

• to understand and predict other(s) behaviour
• to give the social world meaning (Fiske and Taylor, 1991, Gross, 2012)
• to make sensory information in our world
• guide our behaviour

Question 2

Who believes we form impressions to give the social world meaning? (2)

Answer 2

Fiske and taylor, 1991.
Gross, 2012.

Question 3

What are considered perceptual and cognitive shortcuts (cognitive heuristic)?

Answer 3

Impressions.

Question 4

What is an impression?

Answer 4

A cognitive (mental) representation.

Question 5

Where are impressions stored?

Answer 5

In memory.

Question 6

How do we form first impressions? What are the cues? (5)

Answer 6

• Impressions from behaviour
• physical appearance (attractiveness, height)
• nonverbal communication and body language.
• impressions from familiarity
• impressions from environments

Question 7

How long did Carney et al., 2007 believe assessments of personality take?

Answer 7

around 60 seconds

Question 8

What did Ambady et al, 2006 state about salespeople?

Answer 8

assessments of likelihood someone would be an effective salesperson took around 30 seconds.

Question 9

Accuracy in determining traits based on a head/shoulders photograph include: (2)

Answer 9

• intelligence (Zebrowitz et al, 2002)
• extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism (Shelvin et al, 2003)

Question 10

Impressions from physical appearance (Dion et al, 1972)

Answer 10

Attractive people rated as having a more socially desirable personality, greater martial competence and higher occupational status.

Question 11

What is salience?

Answer 11

attention-capturing stimuli

Question 12

people are salient because (3)

Answer 12

• they are novel
• behave in ways that do not fit with prior expectations
• you are told to pay attention to them.

Question 13

Zajonc’s mere exposure effect (1968)

Answer 13

Individuals grow to like people the more they see them, even if they’ve never interacted with the people before.

Question 14

why does Heider, 1958 state that ‘we are all naive psychologists’? (3)

Answer 14

• we look for causes and reasons for people’s behaviour
• we construct causal theories
• we distinguish between internal (dispositional) and external (situational) attributions

Question 15

what is correspondence bias

Answer 15

people attach trait to the person even when not justified by these criteria.

Question 16

what is systematic processing (3)

Answer 16

• To go beyond a first impression, people think more deeply, taking a wider range of information into account
• integrate several attributes
• combine ‘algebraically’

Question 17

what two factors does systematic processing require

Answer 17

• motivation (you have to care about the issue)
• ability (freedom from distraction, time to think, adequate knowledge about the issue)

Question 18

what is a causal attribution

Answer 18

judgements about the cause of an event or behaviour

Question 19

what does Kelly’s covariation model of attribution explain

Answer 19

how we use social perception to attribute behaviour to internal (personality) vs external (situational) factors.

Question 20

self fulfilling prophecy, Rosenthal et al, 1968

Answer 20

those students identified as ‘bloomers’ at the beginning at the beginning did in fact perform better than their peers at the end of the semester.
the results have been attributed to the teachers high expectations of those students

Question 21

what is cognitive representation

Answer 21

a body of knowledge that an individual has stored in memory

Question 22

what is salience

Answer 22

the ability of a cue to attract attention in its context

Question 23

what is association

Answer 23

a link between two or more cognitive representations

Question 24

what is accessibility

Answer 24

the processing principle that the information that is most readily available generally has the most impact on thoughts, feelings and behaviour

Question 25

what is priming

Answer 25

the activation of a cognitive representation to increase its accessibility and thus the likelihood it will be used

Question 26

Kelleys attribution theory

Answer 26

people decide what attributions to make after considering the consistency, distinctiveness and consensus of a person’s behaviour

Question 27

correspondent inference

Answer 27

the process of characterising someone as having a personality trait that corresponds to his or her observed behaviour

Question 28

correspondence bias

Answer 28

the tendency to infer and actors personal characteristics from observed behaviours, even when the inference is unjustified because other possible causes of the behaviour exist

Question 29

fundamental attribution error

Answer 29

bias in attributing another’s behaviour more to internal than to situational causes

Question 30

superficial processing

Answer 30

relying on accessible information to make inferences our judgements while expending little effort in processing.

Question 31

systematic processing

Answer 31

giving thorough, effortful consideration to a wide range of information reverent to a judgement

Question 32

causal attribution

Answer 32

a judgement about the cause of a behaviour or other event

Question 33

self-fulfilling prophecy

Answer 33

the process by which one person’s expectations about another become reality by eliciting behaviours that confirm the expectations.