Social Psych Ch. 4
Terms
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- social perception
- a general term for the process by which people come to understand one another
- nonverbal behavior
- behavior that reveals a person's feelings without words - through facial expressions, body language, and vocal cues
- attribution theory
- a group of theories that describe how people explain the causes of behavior
- personal attribution
- attribution to internal characteristics of an actor, such as ability, personality, mood, or effort
- situational situation
- attribution to factors external to an actor, such as the task, other people, or luck
- covariation prinicple
- a principle of attribution theory holding that people attribute behavior to factors that are present when a behavior occurs and absent when it does not
- availability heuristic
- the tendency to estimate the likelihood that an event will occur by how easily instances of it come to mind
- false-consensus effect
- the tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which others share their opinions, attributes, and behaviors
- base-rate fallacy
- the finding that people are relatively insensitive to consensus information presented in the form of numberical base rates
- counterfactual thinking
- a tendency to imagine alternative events or outcomes that might have occurred but did not
- fundamental attribution error
- the tendency to focus on the role of personal causes and underestimate the impact of situations on other people's behavior
- actor-observer effect
- the tendency to attribute our own behavior to situational causes and the behavior of others to personal factors
- belief in a just world
- the belief that individuals get what they deserve in life, an orientation that leads people to disparge victims
- impression formation
- the process of integrating information about a person to form a coherent impression
- information integration theory
- the theory that impressions are based on (1) perceiver dispositions and (2) a weighted average of a target person's traits
- priming
- the tendency for recently used words or ideas to come to mind easily and influence the interpretation of new information
- implicit personality theory
- a network of assumptions people make about the relationships among traits and behaviors
- central traits
- traits that exert a powerful influence on overall impressions
- primacy effect
- the tendency for information presented early in a sequence to have more impact on impressions than information presented later
- need for closure
- a desire to reduce cognitive uncertainty, which heightens the importance of first impressions
- confirmation bias
- the tendency to sek, interpret, and create information that verifies existing beliefs
- belief perseverence
- the tendency to maintain beliefs even after they have been discredited
- self-fulfilling prophecy
- the process by which one's expectations about a person eventually lead that person to behave in ways that confirm those expectations