social inference + attributions

social cognition

mental processing of information and social construction of knowledge

social inference

going beyond what we see / hear + using clues to understand what is happenig / what someone is feeling

attribution theory

how individuals perceive and interpret the causes of events + behaviours

types of attribution

personal/dispositional, disposition about other person, situational

heuristics

automatic mental shortcut processes that help people make social inferences rapidly with minimal effort

7 types of heuristics

affect, anchoring + adjustment, availability, effort, representativeness, scarcity, simulation

affect heuristics

using emotion to influence decisions

anchoring + adjustment heuristic

relying more heavily on the first piece of information given to you when making decisions

availability heuristic

making judgements about the probability of events happening based on how easily examples of that event come to mind

effort heuristic

people tend to judge the value of an object based on the amount of effort put into the production of the object

representativeness heuristic

the tendency to evaluate something based on how similar it is to a stereotype that already exists in the mind of the perceiver

scarcity heuristic

perceive something as more valuable / desirable simply because it is limited in availability

stimulation heuristic

people judge the likelihood of something happening based on how easy they can imagine / stimulate it in their minds

schema activation

the mental process through which pre-existing knowledge structures (schemas) are accessed + utilised to comprehend new information

regression

individual cases / instances often more extreme than the average of the population they were drawn from

law of large numbers

extreme examples often seen as overly representative but rarely representative of larger populations

primacy bias

the tendency to more easily recall information that we encounter first

fundamental attribution error

tendency to overestimate the impact of dispositional factors + underestimate situational factors when making attributions for behaviours

self serving bias

attributing our success to our efforts + qualities whilst attributing our failures to external factors

3 dimensions for success / failure

locus, stability + controllability

who talks about covariation model of attribution

kelley

3 sources of information used to produce internal / external attribution

consistency information, distinctiveness information, consensus information