Social psych chapter 4

Display rules

Cultural norms about which emotions are appropriate to show

Social scripts

Present notions about how a situation will turn out

Belief perseverance

Tendency to stick with original beliefs even after contradictory evidence

Primacy effect

People are more influenced by the first information they hear

Thin slicing

Making judgements about someone based on brief exposure

Mind perception

People attribute human like mental states to inanimate objects

Agency

Target’s ability to plan and execute behavior

Experience

Target’s capacity to feel pleasure, pain, other sensations

Anger superiority effect

People are quicker to spot angry faces in a crowd

Eye contact effect

Eye contact hold our attention and increases arousal

Dispositions

Stable characteristics such as personality traits, attitudes, and abilities

Attribution theory

How we explain the causes of behavior

Correspondent inference theory

People try to infer from an action whether the act corresponds to an enduring personal trait of the other

Degree of choice

Freely chosen behavior is more telling about a person

Expectedness of behavior

Action tells more about a person when it strays from the norm

Covariation principle

Examines consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency to attribute behavior

Internal attribution

High consistency, low distinctiveness and consensus

External attribution

High consistency, distinctiveness, and consensus

Cognitive heuristics

Quick, easy info processing rules that can lead to mistakes

Availability heuristic

Tendency to estimate odds of an event by how easily instances of it come to mind

False consensus effect

Tendency to overestimate extent to which others share opinions

Base rate fallacy

People are more influenced by dramatic events than by statistics

Counterfactual thinking

Tendency to imagine alternative outcomes that did not happen

Fundamental attribution error

Tendency to overestimate personal factors and underestimate contextual factors

Bias blind spot

Belief that we are less biased than others

Self serving attribution

We blame our successes on internal factors, failure on external factors

Ingroup advantage

We are 9% more accurate in judging faces of our own group

Relational mobility

How much freedom a society gives individuals to form new social ties and shed old ones

Wishful seeing

We tend to see what we want to see

Belief in a just world

Belief that we get what we deserve and deserve what we get

Summation model

Impression formation model where the more positive traits the better

Averaging model

Impression formation model where the higher average value of traits the better

Trait negativity bias

Tendency for negative info to weigh more heavily on impressions than positive info

Innuendo effect

Praising only warmth or competence can imply weakness in other traits

Implicit personality theory

Assumption that certain behaviors or traits are linked together

Central traits

Trats that powerfully shape overall impressions

Attention decrement

We pay less attention to later information

Change of meaning

Early info changes how later info is perceived

Change of meaning hypothesis

When we have formed an impression, we interpret inconsistent information in light of impression

Confirmation bias

Tendency to interpret and seek information that confirms current beliefs

Confirmatory hypothesis testing

We ask questions that confirm what we already believe

Self fulfilling prophecy

Perceivers’s expectations can lead to actions

Information integration theory

Impressions of others are formed by personal dispositions and weighted average of target person’s characteristics

According to Ara Norenzayan and Richard Nisbett, what do Western cultures emphasize in terms of attribution?

Individual persons and their attributes

According to Linda Skitka and colleagues’ study, what did conservatives attribute the parole of a prisoner to?

Overcrowding in the facility (situational attribution)