Week 4 Social Perception Flashcards
What is social perception?
study of how we form impressions and make inferences about other people through observable behaviour, ie. expressions, talking, non-verbal behaviours, hand movements
What 3 things does non-verbal communication convey?
- Emotional states
- Personality traits (extroversion linked to broad gestures and frequence changes in voice pitch)
- Ironic/sarcastic information that contradicts verbal information
What are the 6 universal emotions found? - as young as 6 months/blind children (AHSFDS)
- Anger
- happiness
- surprise
- fear
- disgust
- sadness
What are some cultural examples of emotional expression?
- American norms: grief and crying are discouraged in men, but accepted in women
- American women are encouraged to smile widely, Japanese women hide their smile behind their hands
- Personal space
What are emblems?
Nonverbal gestures that have a well-understood meaning within a given culture and usually have direct verbal translations
Why are women better at encoding social cues but easier to deceive?
Probably because women have been socialised to be more polite, and become more susceptible to deceiving behaviour
What are the reasons Eagly thinks the division of labour by gender has produced differences in non-verbal behaviour?
Men and women are shoved into gender-role expectations, ie. women should be nurturing and sensitive, while men are strong, unexpressive, analytical.
- Therefore, men and women develop different skills based of experiences and treatment of being within a gendered role in society
- Thus, women are more likely to be more accommodating and polite compared to men, because they are less likely to occupy roles that are associated with masculine traits of power/influence
What is causal attribution?
a theory that we try to determine people’s behaviour in order to uncover the feelings/traits that are behind their actions
What are the 2 ways that we attribute people’s behaviour to? (Attribution Process, Heider)
- Internal dispositional attribution = the disposition, attitude, character, innate personality traits, unique to individual.
- External situational attribution = elements on the environment caused the behaviour, inference that most people would behave the same way in the same situation
What do people in healthy relationships do in the attribution process?
- Make internal attributions of their partner’s positive qualities, “they helped me because they are a good generous person”
- Make external attributions of their partners negative qualities, “they ignored my texts because they’re stressed from university”
Which way do we often attribute the behaviour of other people to?
Humans seem to have a bias to hold an internal attribution due to the complicated nature of the external environment
What’s an example of correspondence bias / fundamental attribution error ?
Correspondence bias is our tendency to make internal attributions about someone’s negative qualities, but make external attributions about our own negative qualities
Example - When someone gets angry, it’s because they are an angry person, but when you get angry, it’s because your life is stressful, etc.
What is the Actor / Observer Difference?
An amplification of the correspondence bias, where we attribute causes to behaviour
The tendency to see other people’s behaviour as dispositionally caused, and own own behaviour as situationally caused
How does the Covariation Model (Kelley) extend attribution theory?
In forming an attribution, we think about what caused this person’s behaviour, we note a pattern between the presence or absence of possible causal factors and if the behaviour occurs because of them
What 3 factors do we use in covariation model to attribute someone’s behaviour?
(C-D-C)
- Consensus - how many people act the same way?
- Distinctiveness - Do they do this in different situations?
- Consistency - Is it the same across time and circumstances, ie “Have they done this before?
