Social Inference & Attribution Flashcards
What is social cognition?
How we perceive, store and recall information about other people and groups.
- How we make sense of ourselves in the social world.
What is social inference?
Going beyond the social data presented to us.
- Can be automatic, quick and unconscious.
What are the attribution theory assumptions for understanding the processes of social inference?
- We are all intuitive psychologists trying to make sense of why people behave in particular ways.
- It is a rational reflective process.
What are the types of attribution?
- Personal/dispositional attribution.
- Disposition about the other person.
- Situational attribution.
What are heuristics?
Automatic shortcut processes that we use to rapidly make social inferences with minimal effort.
- Allow us to function.
What are affect heuristics?
Using emotion to influence decisions.
What are anchoring and adjustment heuristics?
Relying more heavily on the first piece of information given to you when making decisions.
What are availability heuristics?
Making judgements about the probability of events happening by the ease of examples that come to mind.
What are effort heuristics?
The worth of an object is determined by the amount of effort put into the production of the object.
What are representativeness heuristics?
The tendency to evaluate something based on how similar it is to a prototype or a stereotype that already exists in the mind of the perciever.
What are scarcity heuristics?
A cognitive bias where people assign greater value to items or events that are perceived to be in limited supply.
What is simulation heuristics?
Where people determine the likelihood of something happening based on how easy it is to create a mental picture of it.
What is confirmation bias?
The tendency to seek information that fits our beliefs.
What is framing? (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981)
How information or decisions are presented can affect judgements.
What is schema activation?
The mental process through which our preexisting schemas are accessed and utilised to comprehend new information.
What is regression?
Where individual instances are often more extreme than the average population.
- Need to sample lots of data for an average, this may not always be possible.
Therefore, the number of instances may influence social inferencing.
What is primacy bias?
The robustness of the first impression.
- Disregard later information or assimilate it to earlier impressions.
How does bias occur from prior beliefs?
We take what information we want and disregard information that doesn’t support our beliefs.
What did Fritz Heider argue?
- We are all naïve psychologists.
- We have a natural motive to make sense of things in causal terms.
How do we explain things?
We distinguish between personal and environmental factors to explain things.
- Without any clear external factors, we are more likely to make dispositional attributions.
What is the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE)? (Ross, 1977)
The tendency to overestimate the impact of dispositional (internal) factors and underestimate the impact of situational (external) factors in making attributions for the behaviour of others.
What is the Actor Observer Effect?
A cognitive bias that causes people to make incorrect assumptions about the reasons for their own and others’ behaviour.
What is self-serving bias?
The tendency to attribute our successes to dispositional (internal) explanations and our failures to situational (external) factors.
What are Weiner’s dimensions?
Weiner believed that when making achievement attributions, we consider 3 dimensions:
1. Locus (internal/external).
2. Stability (stable/unstable).
3. Controllability (controllable/uncontrollable).
What is the covariation model of attribution? (Keeley, 1967)
Three sources of information explain how we use social perception to attribute behaviour to internal or external factors:
- Consistency information.
- Distinctiveness information.
- Consensus information.
