Social Psych Ch. 4 - Social Perception

Nonverbal communication

How people communicated without words, including via facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, body position, movement, touch, and gaze

Encoding Facial Expressions

Expressing emotions in the same way

Decoding Facial Expressions

Interpreting facial expressions in the same way

Affect Blends

Facial expressions in which part of the face registers one emotion while another part registers a different emotion

Display Rules

Culturally determined rules about which nonverbal behaviors are appropriate to display

Emblems

Nonverbal gestures that have well-understood definitions within a given culture, usually having direct verbal translations

Thin-Slicing

Drawing meaningful conclusions about another person’s personality or skills based on an extremely brief sample of behavior

Attribution Theory

The way in which people explain the causes of their own and other people’s behavior

Internal Attribution

The inference that a person is behaving a certain way because of something about the person, such as attitude, character, or personality

External Attribution

The inference that a person is behaving in a certain way because of something about the situation they’re in, with the assumption that most people would respond the same way in that situation

Covariation Model

A theory that states that to form an attribution about what caused a person’s behavior, we note the pattern between the the behavior occurs and the presence or absence of possible casual factors

Consensus Information

The extent to which other people behave the same way toward the same stimulus as the actor does

Distinctiveness Information

The extent to which one particular actor behaves in the same way to different stimuli

Consistency Information

The fréquence with which the observed behavior between the same person and the same stimulus occurs across time and circumstances

Perceptual Salience

The seeming importance of information that other people are paying attention to

Two Step Attribution Process

1. Make an automatic internal attribution

2. Then thinking about the possible situational reasons

Self-serving attributions

People’s tendency to take credit for their successes by making internal attribution but to blame the station or others for their failures by making external attributions

Belief in a Just World

A defensive attribution wherein people assume that bad things happen to bad people and good things to good people

Bias Blind Spot

The tendency t o think that others are more susceptible to attributional biases than we are