Social Perception

Flashcards on Social Perception, covering topics like impression formation, cues, biases, stereotypes, and attributions. Key concepts include schemas, selective attention, temporal extension, and various evaluative biases.

Social Perception/ Social Cognition

How we think about the people, events, and things around us.

Object Perception

Attaching meanings to stimulus objects.

Person Perception

How we come to know about other people’s intentions, attitudes, emotions, ideas, and possible behavior.

Schemas

Mental representations of objects or categories which contain the central features of the object / category and assumptions about how the object or category works.

Selective Attention

Focusing on salient aspects.

Temporal Extension

A momentary characteristic is regarded as an enduring attribute.

Forming Impressions

Integrating and organizing various sources of information and inferences about someone into a consistent meaningful whole / an overall judgment.

Cues in Impression Formation

Other person’s behavior or characteristics, characteristics of the perceiver, and situational context.

Evaluation (in Impression Formation)

Liking or disliking that tend to be parts of an overall warm, lukewarm, cool or cold response. The favorable response extends to all other situations and sometimes unrelated characteristics.

Consistency (in Impression Formation)

How are the traits we perceive in other people in harmony with one another or with our overall impression?

Additive Model

The positive impression increases when more positive attitudes are added. The negative impression becomes increasingly unfavorable when more negative impressions are added.

Averaging Model

Involves considering all available information about the person and regarding each one as equally important in forming an impression.

Central Traits Effect

Traits that carry a higher weight in influencing people’s overall impressions and causing them to assume the presence of other traits.

Weighted Averaging Model

Traits carry weight depending on their importance to overall impression.

Positive Halo Effect

Once an angel, always an angel

Negative Halo Effect / Forked tail effect

The black sheep of the family will always be bad regardless of whether or not he has some redeeming qualities.

Assumed Similarity

People assume that others are similar to them especially when they have similar demographic features.

Positivity Bias / Leniency Effect

A general tendency to express positive evaluations of people more often than negative evaluations.

Negativity Bias

People give more weight to unfavorable attributes / traits.

False Consensus Error

Characteristics / interests of others are similar to ours. We feel that there is a consensus about our experiences where there is none.

Belief Perseverance

Initial beliefs persist even when the original basis has been completely disconfirmed as we invent additional reasons to support our cherished beliefs.

Cognitive Confirmatory Bias

We look for information that fits our preexisting thoughts and beliefs.

Behavioral Confirmatory Bias / Self-fulfilling Prophecy

Act in ways that will elicit the behavior that seems to match (fulfill) our expectations (prophecies). We are unopen to new information.

Overconfidence Bias

We overestimate the correctness of our beliefs.

Hindsight Bias

When we look back, we remember our past judgments as having been more accurate than they really were.

Stereotyping

The assigning of generalized and value laden impressions that people of one group use to characterize those of another group. They are fixed social beliefs that put people into categories and do not allow for individual differences.

Attribution

The process by which we use dispositional and / or situational contexts to describe the causes of behaviors or events.

Dispositional Attribution

Saying that a person’s behaviors is a result of internal factors like personality traits, moods, attitudes, abilities or effort.

Situational Attribution

Saying that a person’s behavior is determined by external factors like luck, other people’s actions, social pressure or the nature of the situation.

Fundamental Attribution Error

The tendency of people to attribute the person’s actions to personal characteristics and to underestimate the role of environmental factors.

Actor-Observer Effect

When we explain the behaviors of others, we say it’s because of their dispositions (fundamental attribution). But when it’s time to explain our own behavior, we tend to talk about external causes or situational factors while that of others to internal or dispositional factors.

Motivational Attribution Error / Self-Serving Bias

When we are successful, we take credit for positive outcomes or behaviors. But when we fail or demonstrate negative behaviors, we blame other people or external circumstances.