Social Psychology and Personality Study Notes

Overview of Social Psychology and Personality

Person Perception

  • Person Perception: the process of forming impressions of others.

  • Dispositional attributions: ascribe the causes of behavior to personal traits, abilities, and feelings

  • Situational attributions: ascribe the causes of behavior to demands of the time/place (environmental constraints)

  • Attribution Theory: states that we explain other person's behavior by crediting either the situation or the person's disposition

  • Fundamental Attribution Error: underestimate the situation and overestimate the person's disposition

Social Comparison

  • Evaluating ourselves against others can boost or harm self-esteem.

  • Online platforms often amplify comparisons negatively.

Prejudice

  • Definition: Unjustifiable negative attitudes towards a group, comprised of negative feelings, beliefs, and biases.

  • Explicit vs Implicit Prejudice:

    • Explicit: Conscious and deliberately expressed.

    • Implicit: Unconscious attitudes that influence behavior unknowingly.

Explanatory style

  • person's tendency to explain the causes of events in their life

  • Pessimistic explanatory style: tend to view setbacks as personal, permanent, and perceived.

  • Optimistic explanatory style: tend to view setbacks as temporary and isolated, and blame them on outside forces.

Biases of Behavior

  • Actor-Observer Bias: a cognitive bias where people tend to attribute their own action to external factors (situational influences) while attributing others’ actions to internal factors (personality traits) for example, if you are late, you may blame traffic, but if someone else is late, you might assume they re irresponsible

  • Self Serving Bias: A tendency to attribute one's successes to internal factors (like ability or effort) and failures to external factors (like luck or difficulty of the task). This bias helps maintain self-esteem.

Other influences on the Person Perception:

  • Mere exposure effect: the phenomenon that repeated exposure to novel stimuli increases liking of them

  • Self-fulfilling proficiency: a phenomenon in which a belief in spanthing causes it to come true

  • Social comparison: the process of evaluating oneself by comparing with others. It can be upward (comparing with someone better) or downward (comparing with someone worse), affecting self-esteem and motivation.

  • Relative Depravation: the perception that one is worse off than those with whom one compares themself to.