Studied by 0 people
Social Psychology
The branch of psychology concerned with the way individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by others
Person Perspective
The process of forming impressions of others
Problems with the Person Perception
Subjectivity, illusory correlation, and evolutionary bias
Subjectivity
If a person’s behavior is ambiguous, people are likely to see it in a way that’s consistent with their expectations or stereotypes
Illusory Correlation
When people estimate that they have encountered more confirmations of an association between social traits than they have actually seen
Evolutionary Bias
Reproductive success, need to categorize
Attribute
A quality or feature regarded as a characteristic or inherent part of someone or something
Attribution Theory
States that we explain another person’s behavior by crediting either the situation or the person’s disposition
Internal/Disposition Attributions
Associates the causes of behavior to personal traits, abilities, and feelings
External/Situational Attributions
Associates the causes of behavior to demands of the time/place
Explanatory Style
A person’s tendency to explain the causes of events in their life. It’s also known as attributional style
Pessimistic Explanatory Style
People with this style tend to view setbacks as personal, permanent, and pervasive. They might blame themselves for negative events and believe they’ll continue indefinitely
Optimistic Explanatory Style
People with this style tend to view setbacks as temporary and isolated, and blame them on outside forces. They might attribute bad experiences to bad luck
Factors of Explanatory Style
Permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization
Permanence
How much a person attributes an event to permanent or temporary causes
Pervasiveness
How much a person applies the same explanation to other events
Personalization
How much a person internalizes or externalizes the causes of an event
Fundamental attribution error
The tendency for observers to, when analyzing another’s behavior, to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact of personal disposition
Actor-Observer Bias
A cognitive bias where people tend to attribute their own actions to external factors while attributing others’ actions to internal factors.
Self-serving bias
A tendency to attribute one’s success to internal factors and failures to external factors
Types of personal control
Internal locus of control, external locus of control
Internal locus of control
The perception that we control our own fate
External locus of control
The perception that chance or outside forces beyond our personal control determine our fate
Mere exposure effect
The phenomenon that repeated exposure to novel stimuli increases liking of them
Self-fulfilling prophecy
A phenomenon in which a belief in something causes it to come true
Social Comparison
The process if evaluating oneself by comparing with others. Upward-better, downward-worse
Relative Deprivation
The perception that one is worse off than those with whom one compared themself to
