Social Psychology Flashcards
Impressions
- People form impressions about others through the process of person perception.
- People’s physical appearance strongly influences the way they are perceived by others.
- People are particularly influenced by physical attractiveness and baby-faced features.
Cognitive Schemas
• When people meet, they form impressions of each other based on their cognitive schemas. People use cognitive schemas to organize information about the world. Cognitive schemas help to access information quickly and easily
Social Schemas
mental models that represent and categorize social events and people. For example, certain social schemas tell people what it means to be a spectator at a baseball game. There are also social schemas for categories of people, such as yuppie or geek. These social schemas affect how people perceive events and others. Once a social schema is activated, it may be difficult to adjust a perception of a person or event.
Stereotypes
- Stereotypes are beliefs about people based on their membership in a particular group.
- Stereotypes tend to be difficult to change.
- Stereotyping has some important functions, but it can also distort reality in dangerous ways.
- Evolutionary psychologists believe that people evolved the tendency to stereotype because it gave their ancestors an adaptive advantage.
Prejudice
- A prejudice is a negative belief or feeling about a particular group of individuals.
- Prejudice is pervasive because it serves many social and psychological functions.
- Researchers find it difficult to measure prejudice. They often measure implicit rather than explicit prejudice.
- People who identify strongly with their ingroup are more likely to be prejudiced against people in outgroups.
Attributions
are inferences people make about the causes of events and behaviour.
Internal and external attributions
In an internal, or dispositional, attribution, people infer that an event or a person’s behaviour is due to personal factors such as traits, abilities, or feelings. In an external, or situational, attribution, people infer that a person’s behaviour is due to situational factors.
Stable and unstable attributions
When people make a stable attribution, they infer that an event or behaviour is due to stable, unchanging factors. When making an unstable attribution, they infer that an event or behaviour is due to unstable, temporary factors.
Attribution bias
When people make an attribution, they are guessing about the causes of events or behaviors. These guesses are often wrong. People have systematic biases, which lead them to make incorrect attributions. These biases include the fundamental attribution error, the self-serving bias, and the just world hypothesis.
The fundamental attribution error
the tendency to attribute other people’s behaviour to internal factors such as personality traits, abilities, and feelings. The fundamental attribution error is also called the correspondence bias, because it is assumed that other people’s behaviour corresponds to their personal attributes. When explaining their own behaviour, on the other hand, people tend to attribute it to situational factors.
The self-serving bias
the tendency to attribute successes to internal factors and failures to situational factors. This bias tends to increase as time passes after an event. Therefore, the further in the past an event is, the more likely people are to congratulate themselves for successes and to blame the situation for failures.
the just world hypothesis
the need to believe that the world is fair and that people get what they deserve. The just world hypothesis gives people a sense of security and helps them to find meaning in difficult circumstances.
Cultural values and norms
affect the way people make attributions
Attitudes
evaluations people make about objects, ideas, events, or other people. They can be explicit or implicit and can include beliefs, emotions, and behaviour.
The ABC Model of Attitudes
- Affective component
- Behavioural component
- Cognitive Component
Affective component
this involves a person’s feelings / emotions about the attitude object. For example: “I am scared of spiders”.
