Social perception and Attribution (1)

Key concepts and definitions

Pareidolia

a vague or random stimulus pattern that is perceived as significant and meaningful

Illusory face perception

a tendency to see human-liked faces where none are actually present (such as in objects or artefacts)

Social perception

the process of collecting and interpreting information about another person’s individual characteristics

Zero acquaintance

a situation which requires a perceiver to make a judgement about a target with whom the perceiver has had no prior social interaction

Thin slices of behaviour

extremely small samples of behaviour upon which people are able to base relatively accurate judgements about others

First impression

one’s intital perception of another person, typically involving a positive or negative evaluation as well as a sense of physical and psychological characteristics

Babfacedness

the atribute of having an adult face with configural features resembling those of an infant (that is, large eyes, full cheeks, a round shape, a protruding forehead, and a small nose and chin)

Fusiform face area

a face-sensitive brain region involved in high-level visual processing. the FFA is believed to speicalise in face recognition and is associated with seeing human features in objects

Overgeneralisation

the process of extending something beyond the circumstances to which it actually applies. e.g. social judgmenets of babies are overgeneralised to people with resembling features

Self-fulfilling prophecy

a belief of expecation that helps to bring about its own fulfillment

Self-defeating behaviour

repetitive actions by an individual that invite failure or misfortune and thus prevent him or her from attaining goals or fulfilling desires

Social attribution

an inference regarding the cause of a person’s behaviour or an interpersonal event

Base-rate

the naturally occurring frequency of a phenomenon in a population

Primacy effect

the tendency for facts, impressions, or items that are presented first to be better learned or remembered than material presented later in the sequence

Attention bias/decrement

the tendency for people to pay less attention to stimuli coming later in a sequential occurrence or presentation and thus to remember them less well

Confirmation Bias

the tendency to gather evidence that confirms preexisting expectations, typically by emphasising or pursuing supporting evidence while dismissing or failing to seek contradictory evidence

Causal attribution

see social attribution

Fundamental attribution error

the tendency to overestimate the degree to which an individual’s behaviour is determined by his or her abiding personal charactersitcs, attitudes, or beliefs and correspondingly, to minimise the influence of the surrounding situation on that behaviour

Correspondence bias

see fundamental attribution error

Sleeper effect

the discounting cue (e.g. situational inform) weakens the intitial impact of the message, but if the cue and the arguments in the message are not well integrated in memory, the cue (situational info) may gradually be forgotten

Actor-observer difference

the tendency for individuals acting in a situation to attribute the causes of their behaviour to external or situational factors, such as social pressure, but for obersvers to attribute the same behaviour to internal or dispositional factors such as personality

Cogntive load

the relative demand imposed by a particular task, in terms of mental resources required

Inflated categorisation

knowledge of the situation inflates the extent to which the person is seen as casual

Covariation theory (Kelly 1967)

proposes that observers work out the causes of behaviour by collecting data about comparison cases. Causality is attributed to the person, entity or situation, depending on which of these factors covaries with the observed effect

Consensus information

evidence relating to how different actors behave towards the same object

Consistency information

evidence relating to how an actor’s behaviour towards an object varies across different situations and times

Distinctiveness information

evidence relating to how an actor responds to different objects (or ‘entities’) under similar circumstances