Social Perception (Ch. 4)

social perception

how we understand and make predictions about others

decoding non-verbal behavior

picking up on body language, facial expressions - this seems to be universal

implicit personality theories

applying pre-existing schemas about what a ‘type of person’ looks/acts like to judge new people

attribution theory

the way we describe ours or others’ actions impacts how we behave

locus of causality

internal or external cause for behavior?

target of attribution

the person/thing who’s behavior the attribution explains

stability of attribution

can it change easily vs will not change

pervasiveness of attribution

global (affects many aspects of targets life) vs specific (only affects 1 or 2 aspects of targets life)

Kelley’s Covariation model

explains the cognitive process used to decide to attribute something internally or externally. includes: consistency(does this always happen?), distinctiveness(is it different than normal?), consensus(do others behave like this)

spontaneous trait inference

automatic inference about a trait after exposure to one behavior

fundamental attribution error

tendency to overestimate how much a behavior is due to traits and not external effects

perceptual salience

importance of information is the focus of people’s attention

actor/observer difference

attribute our own behaviors to situational cause and others to internal cause

egocentric bias

perceiving our own work as more important/better than others in a group

self-serving bias

perceive success as internal credit and failure as external credit

self-serving bias study

studied if players and coaches exhibit more self-serving bias in sports articles than the writers, found that they do for wins but not for losses

unrealistic optimism

think that good things are more likely to happen to us and bad things are less likely to

defensive attributions

an attribution created to defend us from feeling vulnerable to a bad thing that happened to someone else

‘just world’ belief

the belief that people will get what they deserve

bias blind spot

people think they are much less susceptible to various biases than others