Person Perception and Social Attributions

These flashcards cover key terms related to person perception and social attributions from psychology.

Person Perception

The processes by which people think about, appraise, and evaluate other people.

Impression Formation

The process in which an individual develops a schema of some person or group.

Primacy Effect

The tendency to weigh information learned first more heavily than information learned later.

Recency Effect

The tendency to give more weight to the most recently obtained information.

Dispositional Attribution

An inference that a person's behavior is caused primarily by personal factors.

Situational Attribution

An inference that a person's behavior is caused primarily by situational factors.

Central Traits

Traits that influence perceptions more strongly than others, such as 'warm' and 'cold'.

Causal Attribution

Inferences about the cause of an event.

Self-Serving Bias

The tendency to attribute successes to internal factors and failures to external factors.

Actor-Observer Difference

The tendency to make personal attributions for others' behavior and situational attributions for one's own behavior.

Nonverbal Behavior

Any type of communication that does not involve speech content, such as facial expressions and body language.

Covariation Principle

The idea that a behavior is more likely caused by a situation if it changes across different situations.

Collectivism

Cultural orientation that emphasizes group goals and situational attributions.

Individualism

Cultural orientation that emphasizes personal goals and dispositional attributions.

Looking Glass Self

The concept that our self-image is shaped by how others perceive us.