Perceiving People: First Impressions

Question 1

What are impressions

Answer 1

Perceptual and cognitive shortcuts

Question 2

What are the cues for first impressions

Answer 2

• behaviour
• physical appearance
• non verbal communication
• familiarity
• environments

Question 3

Walster, Aronson, Abrahams and Rottman 1966

Answer 3

• classic study for impressions formed from physical appearance
• found the best predictor for people to being dating after the first date was physical attractiveness

Question 4

What is salience and why can people be this

Answer 4

• salient :attention capturing stimuli
• people can be this if they are novel or behave in ways that don’t fit with prior expectations, and so you are told to pay attention to them

Question 5

Higgins, Rholes and Jones 1977

Answer 5

Found that priming influenced descriptions and positivity of ratings

Question 6

Asch’s configurable model 1946

Answer 6

• the impact of thoughts that are in our minds when we interpret cues
  Results:
• central traits influenced impression formation and peripheral did not

Question 7

What is the mere exposure effect

Answer 7

People grow to like others the more they see them even if they’ve never interacted with them

Question 8

What are correspondent inferences

Answer 8

• how people infer that a person’s behaviour correlates to an underlying trait
• they depend on 3 factors: was there a free choice?, was the behaviour normal or expected in the situation, did they intend the action to achieve something

Question 9

What is cognitive representation

Answer 9

A body of knowledge that one has stored in memory

Question 10

What is correspondence bias

Answer 10

The tendency to infer an actor’s personal characteristics from observed behaviours even when the inference is unjustified because other possible causes of the behaviour exists

Question 11

What is superficial processing

Answer 11

Unwilling or unable to devote much time or effort to thinking

Question 12

What is the naive scientist approach

Answer 12

People who seek explanations for complex things in its simplest form

Question 13

What is the covariation model (Kelley 1967)

Answer 13

• People attribute the cause of a behaviour to a factor that covaries most clearly with the behaviour
• 3 main dimensions: consensus, distinctiveness, consistency
• assumes that people will be content with covariation alone and is not specific about the causal attributions people make

Question 14

What are the famous errors in attribution

Answer 14

Correspondence bias or fundamental attribution error and actor-observer bias

Question 15

What is actor observer bias

Answer 15

Tendency for actors to attribute their own behaviours to the situation and for observers to explain behaviour in terms of personality traits

Question 16

Applications of the attribution theory

Answer 16

• academic performance: attributional retraining can boost achievement by motivation to learn
• aggression: these people are prone to hostile attribution bias which is seeing innocent or ambiguous behaviours by other people as deliberate acts of provocation

Question 17

What are the 3 key heuristics (cognitive shortcuts) use to guide everyday decision making

Answer 17

1. Representativeness heuristic
2. Availability heuristic
3. Anchoring and adjustment heuristic

Question 18

What is the representativeness heuristic

Answer 18

Deciding which social categories people belong to based on their attributes that seem similar to other members of that group

Question 19

What is the availability heuristic

Answer 19

Based on how available certain knowledge is to us when we make judgements

Question 20

What is the anchoring and adjustment heuristic

Answer 20

Cognitive shortcuts where inferences are influenced by little initial info

Question 21

What is confirmation bias

Answer 21

Tendency to search for info that confirms ones beliefs and ignore info that doesnt

Question 22

What is hindsight bias

Answer 22

Tendency for people to exaggerate how much they could have predicted an outcome after it happened

Question 23

What are the 4 factors that show whether a psychological process is automatic or controlled

Answer 23

1. Awareness
2. Intention
3. Controllability
4. Efficiency