Short Answer Chp. 4-6 Flashcards
Define social perception.
Social perception is a general term for the processes by which people come to understand one another.
Describe how the perception of other people can be influenced by their physical appearance.
skin colour, hair, tattoos…
People pre-judge one another by facial features.
People with baby faced features tend to be seen as warm, kind, naive, weak, honest and submissive. Adults with more mature features - smaller eyes, rougher skin- are seen as stronger and more dominant.
We sometimes infer attitudes that we assume the individual holds, just on the basis of their faces.
Attractive people are deemed to be more li
Define scripts. What are the functions of scripts in social perception?
Preset notions about certain types of situations that enable us to anticipate the goals, behaviors, and outcomes likely to occur in a particular setting.
Knowledge of social settings provides an important context for understanding other people’s verbal and nonverbal behaviour.
Scripts influence social perceptions in two ways: 1) We sometimes see what we expect to see in a particular situation. 2) People use what they know about social situations to explain the causes of human behaviour.
Identify the six “primary” emotions expressed by the face, regardless of culture.
Happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, disgust, fear
Describe how people use non-verbal cues such as body language, eye contact, and touch to judge others.
People form impressions of others based on how they walk.
People assume someone who avoids eye contact is evasive, cold, fearful and someone who stares is tense, angry and unfriendly.
First impressions we form of others may be influenced by the quality of our handshake.
Which channels of communication are most likely to reveal that someone is lying? Are these channels the same as the channels that perceivers use to detect deception?
The face can communicate emotion, but it is relatively easy for deceivers to control, unlike the nervous movements of the hands and feet.
Four channels of communication provide info: words, face, body, voice. The voice is the most telling channel; when people lie, they tend to hesitate, then speed up and raise the pitch of their voice.
Perceives tend to think that people avert their eyes, or fidget and squirm when lying. Research does not support this.
What are attribution theories?
A group of theories that describe how people explain the causes of behaviour.
Distinguish between personal and situational attributions.
Personal attribution is attribution to personal characteristics of an actor, such as ability, personality, mood, or effort.
Situational attribution is attribution to factors external to an actor, such as the task, other people, or luck.
Briefly describe Jones’s correspondent inference theory.
According to Jones and Davis, each of us tries to understand other people by observing and analyzing their behaviour. Their correspondent inference theory predicts that people try to infer from an action, whether the act itself corresponds to an enduring personal characteristic of the actor. Is the person who donates money altruistic? Is the aggressive person a beast? People answer these questions based on 3 factors:
1) The person’s degree of choice. Behaviour that is freely chosen, is more informative about a person than behaviour that is coerced.
2) The expectedness of behaviour. An action tells us more about a person when it departs from the norm that when it is typical, part of a societal role, or otherwise expected under the circumstances. Therefore, people think they know more about a person, when that person acts outside the norm.
3) People consider the intended effects, or consequences of someone’s behaviour. Acts that produce many desirable outcomes do not reveal a person’s specific motives as clearly as acts that produce only a single desireable outcome.
Briefly describe Kelley’s covariation theory.
According to Kelley, people make attributions by using the covariation principle: In order for something to be the cause of a behaviour, it must be present when the behaviour occurs and absent when it does not. Three kinds of covariation info are particularly useful: consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency.
What are cognitive heuristics (in general)?
Info-processing rules of thumb that enable us to think in ways that are quick and easy but that frequently lead to error.
Define the availability heuristic, and give a personal example.
Availability Heuristic is the tendency to estimate the likelihood that an event will occur by how easily instances of it come to mind.
Ex: People from Sudbury that listen to heavy metal.
Define the false-consensus effect and the base-rate fallacy. Explain how the availability heuristic can give rise to the false-consensus effect and the base-rate fallacy.
False-consensus effect: The tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which others share their opinions, attributes, and behaviours.
Base-rate fallacy: The finding that people are relatively insensitive to consensus info presented in the form of numerical base rates and are instead influenced by dramatic, graphic events.
We tend to associate with others who are like us in important ways, so we are more likely to notice and recall instances of similar rather than dissimilar behaviour.
Also, social perceptions are influenced more by one vivid life story than by hard statistics.
Define counter-factural thinking. When is counter-factural thinking likely to occur?
Counterfactual thinking is the tendency to imagine alternative events or outcomes that might have occurred but did not.
People’s top three regrets center on education, career and romance, in that order.
Define the fundamental attribution error.
The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to focus on the role of personal causes and underestimate the impact of situations on other people’s behaviour, this error is sometimes called correspondence bias.
Summarize the two-step process model that explains the occurrence of the fundamental attribution error. What factors make the fundamental attribution error less likely to occur?
Automatic first step: we identify the behaviour and make a quick personal attribution.
Second: We adjust or correct that inference to account for situational influences.
Define the actor-observer effect. How is this attribution bias different from the fundamental attribution error?
The tendency to attribute our own behaviour to situational causes and the behaviour of others to personal factors.
What is the “belief in a just world”? What function does this belief serve?
The belief that individuals get what they deserve in life, an orientation that leads people to disparage victims.
It helps people cope and acts as a buffer against stress.
Describe the summation model and the averaging model of impression formation. Illustrate each model with an example.
Impression formation: The process of integrating info about a person to form a coherent impression.
The summation model of impression formation: the more positive traits there are, the better.
Averaging model: The higher the average value of all the various traits, the better.
Describe information integration theory. How do characteristics of the perceiver influence impression formation? How do characteristics of the target influence impression formation?
Information integration theory is the theory that impressions are based on perceiver dispositions and a weighted average of a target person’s traits.
We tend to use ourselves as a standard, or frame of reference, when evaluating others. People also tend to see their own traits and skills as particularly desirable for others to have.
A perceiver’s current, mood can also influence the impressions formed of others.
Social perceivers are more likely to agree in their judgments of a target’s extroversion, that is, the extent to which he or she is sociable, friendly, outgoing and adventurous. This characteristic is easy to spot.
The valence of a trait- whether it is considered socially desirable- also affects its impact on our final impressions. Research shows that people exhibit a trait negativity bias- the tendency for negative info to weigh more heavily than positive info
Describe the implicit personality theory, and explain how it affects a person’s impression of other people.
Implicit personality theory: a network of assumptions that we hold about relationships among various types of people, traits and behaviours. Knowing that someone has one trait, leads us to infer that she has other traits as well.
What are central traits? How do central traits affect a person’s impression of other people?
Central traits imply the presence of certain other traits and exert a powerful influence on final impressions.
What is the primacy effect with respect to impression formation? Provide two main explanations for the primary effect.
Primacy effect: the tendency for info presented early in a sequence to have more impact on impressions than info presented later.
Two reasons:
Once perceivers think they have formed an accurate impression of someone, they tend to pay less attention to subsequent info, especially when tired or under pressure.
Change of meaning hypothesis: Once people have formed an impression, they start to interpret inconsistent info in light of that impression.
