Chapter 4 - Social Perception

Question 1

What is social perception?

Answer 1

Social perception is the study of how we form impressions of and make inferences about other people.

Question 2

What is nonverbal communication?

Answer 2

The way in which people communicate, intentionally or unintentionally, without words.

Question 3

What are the most frequently used and most revealing channels of nonverbal communication?

Answer 3

Facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, body positions and movement, the use of touch, and eye gaze.

Question 4

What is Darwin’s stance on emotions?

Answer 4

That they are universal, species-specific and not culture-specific.

Question 5

Which facial emotions seem to be culture-independent?

Answer 5

Anger, Surprise, Disgust, Happiness, Fear and Sadness.

Newer research also suggests: contempt, pride

Question 6

The process of conveying an emotion into a nonverbal expression is called

Answer 6

Encoding.

Question 7

The process of interpreting nonverbal cues is called

Answer 7

decoding

Question 8

Mention two reasons why decoding facial expressions can be difficult

Answer 8

1. They can be complicated by the person displaying affect blends.
2. Cultural differences.

Question 9

What are emblems?

Answer 9

Well-understood, but not universal, gestures. Like the thumbs-up gesture. It means “Ok” in europe, “boyfriend” in Japan, and in Sardinia and Iran it’s obscene.

Question 10

What is an implicit personality theory?

Answer 10

A type of schema people use to group various kinds of personality traits together, for example, many people believe that someone who is kind is generous as well.

Question 11

What is attribution theory?

Answer 11

A description of the way in which people explain the causes of their own and other people’s behavior.

Question 12

Who is credited as being the father of attribution theory?

Answer 12

Fritz Heider (1958)

Question 13

What is an internal attribution?

Answer 13

The inference that a pereson is behaving in a certain way because of something about the person, such as attitude, character, or personality.

Question 14

What is an external attribution?

Answer 14

The inference that a person is behaving a certain way because of something about the situation he or she is in; the assumption is that most people would respond the same way in that situation.

Question 15

What does the covariation model say?

Answer 15

To form an attribution about what caused a person’s behavior, we systematically note the pattern between the presence or absence of possible causal factors and whether or not the behavior occurs.

Question 16

When we are forming an attribution, what kinds of information, according to Kelley (1967), do we examine for covariation?

Answer 16

• Consensus
• Distinctiveness
• Consistency

Question 17

What is consensus information?

Answer 17

Information about the extent to which toher people behave the same way toward the same stimulus as the actor does.

Question 18

What is distincitveness information?

Answer 18

Information about the extent to which one particular actor behaves in the same way to different stimuli.

Question 19

What is consistency information?

Answer 19

Information about the extent to which the behavior between one actor and one stimulus is the same across time and circumstances.

Question 20

What type of attribution is most likely when the consensus and distinctiveness of the act are low, but its consistency is high?

Answer 20

Interal attribution.

Question 21

What type of attribution is most likely when consensus, distinctiveness and consistency is high?

Answer 21

External attribution.

Question 22

What is perceptual salience?

Answer 22

The seeming importance of information that is the focus of people’s attention.
Aka, when we try to explain someone else’s behavior, our focus of attention is usually on the person and not the surrounding environment - this is one explanation of why we make the fundamental attribution error.

Question 23

Shelley Taylor and Susan Fiske (1975) manipulated perceptual salience in a study. Explain its design and conclusion.

Answer 23

Two male students engaged in a “get acquainted” conversation (both actors) were being observed six observers who were sat at different places (two on each side of the actor, and two behind each actor). They were then to judge whether Actor A or Actor B had the most impact in the conversation - the tendency was to assign the actor they could see the biggest impact. Those who saw both equally well rated the impact as pretty even.

Question 24

Gilbert (1989, 1991, 1993) and Krull (1993) both mention a two-step process when making attributions. What are these two steps?

Answer 24

Making an automatic internal attribtuion and only then thinking about possible situational reasons for the behavior, after which one may adjust the original internal attribution.

Question 25

When are we most likely, according to the Two-Step process of Attribution, to go through both steps?

Answer 25

When we consciously slow down and think carefully before reaching the judgment (attribution).

Question 26

Combining what we know about western and east asian thinking styles with our knowledge of the ways that we make attributions (the two-step process, the fundamental error etc.), what conclusion can we reach?

Answer 26

Everyone appears to start off at the same point, making dispositional attributions (internal) about other people. What happens next is that people in collectivistic cultures look to the situation; they revise and correct their first impressions, taking the situation into account. Westerners tend to avoid this second sted. Their first impression, the dispositional attribution, sticks.

Question 27

What is a Self-Serving Attribution?

Answer 27

Self-Serving Attributions refer to the tendency to credit one’s success with internal, dispositional factors; and one’s failures with external situational factors.

Question 28

What are defensive attributions?

Answer 28

Explanations for behavior that avoid feelings of vulnerability and mortality.
“They probably got cancer because they were living an unhealthy lifestyle, unlike me”.

Question 29

Mention a type of defensive attribution studied by Melvin Lerner.

Answer 29

Melvin Lerner (1980,1998) studied the "belief in a just world" - an assumption that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get.
 "She was sexually assaulted because of the way she dresses. I don't dress like that, and won't be sexually assaulted. She asked for it.

Question 30

Social psychology students who read a lot about the fundamental attribution error might become victims of …

Answer 30

The Bias Blind Spot!

Question 31

What is the Bias Blind Spot?

Answer 31

The tendency to think that other people are more susceptible to attributional biases in their thinking than they are.