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.
