Social Cognition: Person Perception & Attributions

This set of vocabulary flashcards covers concepts from Social Cognition, specifically focusing on person perception, body language, social categorisation, and various attributional biases.

Social cognition

How we make sense of our social world, both consciously and unconsciously, especially regarding our social behaviours and the behaviours of others.

Cognition

A term referring to thinking processes.

Person Perception

The mental processes we use to form impressions and opinions about the personal characteristics of other people.

Schema

A pre-existing mental idea used to organise and interpret information.

Halo effect

A cognitive bias in which our overall positive impression of a person influences our beliefs and expectations about their other qualities.

Reverse Halo Effect

A bias where a positive quality indicates the presence of negative characteristics; for example, assuming attractive people are vain and manipulative.

Horn Effect

A bias where a negative quality indicates the presence of other negative characteristics, such as assuming unattractive people are lazy and rude.

Non-verbal communication

Communication via body language, including facial expressions, eye gaze, posture, and gestures, that enables quick judgements.

Salience

Any characteristic that is distinctive or noticeable compared to its surroundings, such as things that are bright, moving, new, or threatening.

Social Categorisation

The routine process of classifying other people into different groups based on common characteristics.

Ingroup

Any group that we belong to or identify with, which often leads to more positive opinions of its members based on shared similarities.

Outgroup

Any group that we do not belong to or identify with, often resulting in focusing on differences and having more negative opinions of those people.

Attribution

The process by which people explain the causes of their own and other people’s behaviour.

Internal attribution

An explanation of a person’s behaviour based on their personal characteristics, such as personality, ability, attitude, motivation, mood, or effort.

External attribution

An explanation of a person’s behaviour based on factors external to the person, such as another person, the environment, luck, or fate.

Fundamental Attribution Error

The tendency to overestimate the influence of personal factors and underestimate the impact of situational factors on other people’s behaviour.

Saliency Bias

A bias where we blame the individual because their behaviour is more noticeable than the situation in which it is occurring.

Just World Belief

A belief that the world is a just and fair place in which people generally get what they deserve and deserve what they get.

Actor-Observer Bias

The tendency to attribute our own behaviour to external causes but attribute the behaviour of others to internal factors.

Self-Serving Bias

The tendency to attribute our successes to internal factors but attribute our failures to external causes.