The Social Perceiever

Question 1

What is Lorenzo’s Halo effect?

Answer 1

What is beautiful is
good and more
accurately understood:
Physical attractiveness
and accuracy in first
impressions of
personality

Question 2

What is Heider’s attribution theory?

Answer 2

• Causal explanation of others’ behaviour
• Often when faced with unpleasant event

-Internal cause = something about person
- External cause = something about situation

Question 3

What is Kelley’s covariation theory?

Answer 3

Attributing events to conditions that tend to
be present when the event happens and
that are absent when it does not
o Distinctiveness, consistency, consensus

Question 4

What is actor-observer bias?

Answer 4

tendency for actors to attribute their own behaviours to the situation.
and for observers attribute behaviours to personality traits

Question 5

What are the impacts of attributions?

Answer 5

mental health:
- depression leads to a ‘pessimistic attributional style’
- attribute negative events to fixed, internal causes. (psychiatric techniques help to stop this way of thinking)

aggression:
- more prone to ‘hostile attribution bias’.

Close relationships:
- people who attribute partner’s behaviour to internal factors are less forgiving and less satisfied with their marriage.

educational achievement:
- training people to explain educational performance in terms of changeable factors leads to better results.

Question 6

What was Asch’s configural model of person perception?

Answer 6

How people form impressions based on traits

central traits significantly influence the perception of other traits (halo effect).

Peripheral traits have minimal impact on the interpretation of other characteristics.