Forming, Maintaining & Changing Impressions

Flashcards about forming, maintaining, and changing impressions.

Mental representation

A body of knowledge that an individual has stored in memory.

Function of Impressions

Impressions guide our actions in ways that meet our needs

Bases of Impressions

Observed behavior (attribution), physical appearance (personal & environment), nonverbal communication & familiarity.

Attractiveness

The idea that 'what is beautiful is good', leading us to expect attractive people to be more interesting, warm, outgoing, and socially skilled.

Baby-face

Facial features that lead to the perception of someone as being more naive, honest, kind, and warm.

Nonverbal communication

Includes behaviors like orienting bodies towards others (facing, leaning, nodding), and dilated pupils, which can indicate interest and attention.

Mere exposure

Exposure to a stimulus without any external reward, which creates familiarity with the stimulus and generally makes people feel more positively about it.

Implicit personality theories

Integration of multiple traits and behaviors that represent the same trait are linked into associated clusters in memory.

Halo effect

A cognitive bias where our overall impression of a person influences how we feel and think about their character.

Negativity bias

The negative counts more than the positive when integrating multiple traits to have complex impressions.

Superficial Processing

Using a Single Attribute. Reliance on one element of the impression, not on the underlying evidence.

Systematic Processing

Integrating Multiple Factors. Instead of evaluating each attribute independently, they may attempt to fit the information together into a meaningful whole and one item may subtly change the meaning of others

Primacy effect

A pattern in which early encountered information has a greater impact than subsequent information; an example of the principle of cognitive conservatism.

Perseverance bias

The tendency for information to have a persisting effect on our judgments even after it has been discredited

Self-fulfilling prophecy

The process by which one person’s expectations about another become reality by eliciting behaviors that confirm the expectations.

Strategic attribution

Explaining away inconsistent information.