Perceiving Persons Flashcards
Part 2 (Social Perception) - Chapter 4 (16 cards)
What is social perception?
The process by which people come to understand one another.
What is personal attribution?
Attribution of internal characteristics tp someone, such as ability, personality, mood, or effort.
What is situational attribution?
The attribution of factors external to someone, such as the task, other people, or luck.
What is the covariation principle?
A principle of attribution theory that holds that people attribute behaviour to factors that are present when a behaviour occurs and are absent when it does not.
What is the fundamental attribution error?
The tendency to focus on the role of personal causes and underestimate the impact of situations on other people’s behaviour.
What is the false-consensus effect?
The tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which others share their opinions, attributes, and behaviours.
What is base-rate fallacy?
The finding that people are relatively insensitive to consensus information presented in the form of numerical base rates.
What is counterfactual thinking?
The tendency to imagine alternative events or outcomes that might have occurred but did not.
What is belief in a just world?
The belief that individuals get what they deserve in life, an orientation that leads people to disparage victims.
What is the information integration theory?
The theory that impressions are based on 1) perceiver dispositions and 2) a weighted average of a target person’s traits.
What is the primacy effect?
The tendency for information presented early in a sequence to have more impact on impressions than information presented later.
What is confirmation bias?
The tendency to seek, interpret, and create information that verifies existing beliefs.
What is a self-fulfilling prophecy?
The process by which one’s expectations about a person or themselves eventually lead them to behave in ways that confirm those expectations.
What are the three most important traits used in forming opinions of others?
How competent the person is, how warm they are, and how moral they are.
What is the availability heuristic?
A mental shortcut where people judge the frequency or likelihood of an event based on how easily examples come to mind.
What are central traits?
Traits that exert a powerful influence on overall impressions (i.e. warm or cold)
