Perceiving Individuals Flashcards
Why do we form and remember impressions of individuals? (4)
- 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
Who believes we form impressions to give the social world meaning? (2)
Fiske and taylor, 1991.
Gross, 2012.
What are considered perceptual and cognitive shortcuts (cognitive heuristic)?
Impressions.
What is an impression?
A cognitive (mental) representation.
Where are impressions stored?
In memory.
How do we form first impressions? What are the cues? (5)
- Impressions from behaviour
- physical appearance (attractiveness, height)
- nonverbal communication and body language.
- impressions from familiarity
- impressions from environments
How long did Carney et al., 2007 believe assessments of personality take?
around 60 seconds
What did Ambady et al, 2006 state about salespeople?
assessments of likelihood someone would be an effective salesperson took around 30 seconds.
Accuracy in determining traits based on a head/shoulders photograph include: (2)
- intelligence (Zebrowitz et al, 2002)
- extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism (Shelvin et al, 2003)
Impressions from physical appearance (Dion et al, 1972)
Attractive people rated as having a more socially desirable personality, greater martial competence and higher occupational status.
What is salience?
attention-capturing stimuli
people are salient because (3)
- they are novel
- behave in ways that do not fit with prior expectations
- you are told to pay attention to them.
Zajonc’s mere exposure effect (1968)
Individuals grow to like people the more they see them, even if they’ve never interacted with the people before.
why does Heider, 1958 state that ‘we are all naive psychologists’? (3)
- we look for causes and reasons for people’s behaviour
- we construct causal theories
- we distinguish between internal (dispositional) and external (situational) attributions
what is correspondence bias
people attach trait to the person even when not justified by these criteria.
what is systematic processing (3)
- To go beyond a first impression, people think more deeply, taking a wider range of information into account
- integrate several attributes
- combine ‘algebraically’
what two factors does systematic processing require
- motivation (you have to care about the issue)
- ability (freedom from distraction, time to think, adequate knowledge about the issue)
what is a causal attribution
judgements about the cause of an event or behaviour
what does Kelly’s covariation model of attribution explain
how we use social perception to attribute behaviour to internal (personality) vs external (situational) factors.
self fulfilling prophecy, Rosenthal et al, 1968
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
what is cognitive representation
a body of knowledge that an individual has stored in memory
what is salience
the ability of a cue to attract attention in its context
what is association
a link between two or more cognitive representations
what is accessibility
the processing principle that the information that is most readily available generally has the most impact on thoughts, feelings and behaviour
