psy 230 chapter 4

Culture Specific Scripts

-Bolivia: dinner guests are expected to fully clean their plates to prove they enjoyed the meal -India: guests leave some food on the plate to show the host they had enough to eat.

History of physical appearance and social perception

-Pythagras looked into the eyes of students to see if they were gifted -Hippocrates used facial features to make diagnoses of life and death -Franz Gall introduced phrenology -William Sheldon concluded from flawed studies that there is a strong link between physique and personality.

Perceiver Characteristics

-We differ in the impressions we form of others: we use ourselves as a standard or frame of reference to compare to -Our current, temporary mood can affect the impressions we form -Embodiment effects in social perception -priming effects

Two consequences of the availability heuristic

1. false-consensus effect 2. base-rate fallacy

Two steps of social perception

1. identify the behaioir and make a quick personal attribution 2. correct or adjust that inference to account for situational influences.

kahneman's two systems of thought

1. intuitive: quick, easy, and automatic -determining which of two objects is more distant, detecting anger in a face, add 2 12, and understanding a simple sentence are the kinds of automatic activities engaged by this system 2. reasoned: slow, controlled, and requires attention and effort. -looking for a specific face in a crowd, parking in a narrow space, counting the number of letters on a page, figuring out how a magic trick works, filling out taxes, etc.

Three step process of self fulfilling prophecy

1. perceiver forms an impression of a target person, which may be based on interactions with the target or on other info 2. the perceiver behaves in a manner that is consistent with that first impression 3. the target person unwittingly adjusts their behavior to the perceiver's actions net result is behavioral confirmation of the first impression

3 sources of social perception

1. persons 2. situations 3. behaviors

Two ways social perceivers differ

1. we vary in tje extent to which we believe that human behaviors are caused by personal traits that are fixed or by characteristics that are malleable -"everyone is a certain kind of person that can't really be changed" vs. "people can change even their most basic qualities" 2. some are more likely than others to process new information in ways that are colored by self serving motives

Types of Motivational biases

1. wishful seeing 2. need for self esteem 3. belief in a just world

People are only about ____ accurate in judging truth and deception.

54%

belief in a just world

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

Zebrowitz

Believes that we associate babyish features with helplessness traits and then overgeneralize this expectation to baby faced adults. -found that frontal brain region activated by pictures of babies' faces was also activated by pictures of baby-faced men.

Hot or iced coffee experiment

Lawrence Williams and John Bargh

Kelley's Covariation Theory

People make attributions using the covariation principle

self-fulfilling prophecy

The process by which one's expectations about a person eventually lead that person to behave in ways that confirm those expectations. -Robert Merton

information integration theory

The theory that impressions are based on (1) perceiver dispositions and (2) a weighted average of a target person's traits.

Aldert Vrij and Anders Granhag

Theorized that lying is harder to do and requires more thinking than telling the truth, so we should both induce and focus on behavioral cues that betray cognitive effort.

At least in _______ cultures, people commit the fundamental attribution error when observing others, overestimating the role of a person's dispositions and underestimating the impact of the situation they are in.

Western

Physical Appearance Study

Willis and Todorov in 2006 -showed college students pictures of unfamiliar faces for either .1 sec, .5 sec, or 1 sec, or no time limit -students judged faces for how attractive, likable, competent, trustworthy, or aggressive they were -all the ratings that were quick were highly correlated with judgments that other observers made without time limits.

Attribution Theory

a group of theories that describe how people explain the causes of behavior.

need for self esteem

a motive that can lead us to make favorable, self serving, and one sided attributions for our own behavior. -people tend to take more credit for success than they do blame for fialure.

implicit personality theory

a network of assumptions about the relationships among various types of people, traits, and behaviors. Knowing that someone has one trait leads us to infer that they have other traits as well. -someone who is unpredictable may also be dangerous

Insula

a structure of the brain activated when sniffing a disgusting odor or watching others sniff it.

situational attribution

attribution to factors external to an actor, such as the task, other people, or luck

personal attribution

attribution to internal characteristics of an actor, such as ability, personality, mood, or effort

Although we tend to form impressions of other by mentally _________ their various traits, a number of biases come into play---for example, some traits are more _______ to the overall impressions we form than others.

averaging, central

Lying cues not supported by research

averting the eyes, squirming, stuttering, fidgeting, and touching themselves -it's not that people look at the wrong cues, but that none of the behavioral cues they look for are very telling as to whether someone is telling the truth or lying.

Systems 1 and 2 are both active when people are _____. System 1 runs automatically and guides us until it runs into difficulty, as when something unexpected happens. At that point the more effortful System 2 is activated.

awake

nonverbal behavior

behavior that reveals a person's feelings without words, through facial expressions, body language, and vocal cues

Although we often form accurate impressions based on other people's ________, research shows that we are not ________ at knowing when someone else is telling the truth or lying.

behavior, accurate

Alexander Todorov

believes that social perceivers overgeneralize in making snap judgments. -found people perceive unfamiliar faces as more or less trustworthy by focusing on features that resemble the expressions of happiness and anger -trustworthy face: u-shaped mouth and raised eyebrows/smiliing/happy -untrustworthy face: mouth curls down and eyebrows form a v/frowning/angry

People are more likely to commit the fundamental attribution error when they are ___________ busy, or distracted, as they observe the target person than when they pay full attention.

cognitively

In forming impressions of other people, three sets of traits loom as particularly important: how _________ the person is, how ____, and how _____.

competent, warm, moral

thin slicing

drawing meaningful conclusions about another person's personality or skills based on an extremely brief sample of behavior -created by Ambady and Rosenthal

5 Target Traits that distinguish individuals from one another

extroversion, emotional stability, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness -social perceivers are most likely to agree in therir judgments of a target's extroversion: the extent to which they are sociable, friendly, fun loving, outgoing, and adventurous

Ideological motives

found that even though participants in general made personal attributions, as Westerners reflexively tend to do, they corrected for situational factors when ideologically motivated to do so. To explain why a prisoner was paroled, conservatives were more likely to believe that the facility was overcrowded (a situational attribution) than that the prisoner had reformed (a personal attribution); to explain why a man lost his job, liberals were more likely to blame the company's finances (a situational attribution) than the worker's poor performance (a personal attribution).

covariation principle

in order for something to be the cause of a behavior, it must be present when the behavior occurs and absent when it does not. There are 3 kinds of covariation information: 1. consensus: see how different persons react to the same stimulus 2. distinctiveness: see how the same person reacts to different stimuli -if a person is generally critical of other movies, then the target behavior (raving about the great movie) is high in distinctiveness and is attributed to the stimulus. If the person raves about everything they see, then the behavior is low in distinctiveness and is attributed to the person 3. consistency: see what happens to the behavior at another time when the person and the stimulus both remain the same

cognitive heuristics

information-processing rules of thumb that enable us to think in ways that are quick and easy but that may often lead to error

people make moral judgments about others _________ and intuitively without intention, thought, or awareness.

instantly

In Anderson's study of traits, the ________ traits diluted from rather than added to the impact of the highly positive and negative traits.

moderate

_____ traits such as courageous, fair, principled, just, honest, trustworthy, and loyal proved more important than ____ traits such as warm, sociable, happy, agreeable, enthusiastic, easygoing, fun and playful.

moral, warm

change of meaning hypothesis

once people have formed an impression, they start to interpret inconsistent information in light of that impression. When people are told that a kind person is calm, they assume that they are gentle, peaceful, and serene. When a cruel person is said to be calm, the same word is interpreted to mean cool, shrewd, and calculating

anger superiority effect

people are quicker to spot and slower to look away from angry faces in a crowd

wishful seeing

people have a tendency to see what they want to see

rejection prophecy

people who are insecure are fearful of rejection, which makes them tense and awkward in the social situations. Their resulting behavior is off putting to others which increases the likelihood of rejection and reinforces their initial insecurity

Babyfacedness

people who have large, round eyes, high eyebrows, round cheeks, a large forehead, smooth skin, and a rounded chin tend to be seen as warm, kind, naive, weak, honest, and submissive. -in small claims court judges are more likely to favor baby faced defendants who are accused of intentional wrongdoing but rule against them when accused of negligence.

Mature faced people

people who have small eyes, low brows, a small forehead, wrinkled skin, and an angular chin are seen as stronger, more dominant, and more competent.

eye contact effect

people who look us straight in the eye quickly draw and hold our attention, increase arousal, and activate key social areas of the brain. -this sensitivity is present at birth and even when the other person's gazing eyes are hidden behind dark sunglasses.

The processes of social perception

perceiver-> observation -> persons, situations, behavior -> 1. snap judgments -> impressions -> confirmation or 2. attribution -> dispositions -> integration -> impressions

embodiment effects

perceptions of others impacted by our physical positions, orientations, sensations, and movements -warm personality or cold shoulder

scripts

preset notions we have about certain types of situations that enable us to anticipate the goals, behaviors, and outcomes likely to occur in a particular setting -based on past experience, people can easily imagine the sequences of events likely to unfold in a typical greeting or at the mall, the dinner table, or a tennis match. The more experience you have in a given situation, the more detail your _______ will contain.

Once we form an impression of someone, we become ____ to change that impression when faced with new information that is nonsupportive or even contradictory.

slow

People often make ____ judgments about other people based on superficial cues such as physical appearance nonverbal demeanor.

snap

Rosenberg's universal dimensions of social cognition

social (warmth) and intellectual (competence) people differentiate each other first in terms of their warmth and second in terms of their competence

Dispositions

stable characteristics such as personality traits, attitudes, and abilities that we infer indirectly from what a person says and does.

Behavior that is consistent is attributed to the ________ when consensus and distinctiveness are also high and to the ______ when consensus and distinctiveness are low. Behavior that is low in ___________ is attributed to transient circumstances, such as the temperature of the movie theater.

stimulus, person, consistency

6 universal emotions

surprise, joy, disgust, anger, fear, sadness

false-consensus effect

tendency for people to overestimate the number of people who agree with them, or share their attributes and behaviors

Need for closure

the desire to reduce ambiguity. People who are low in this regard are open-minded, deliberate, and even reluctant to draw firm conclusions about others. Those who are high in the need for closure tend to be impulsive and impatient and to form quick and lasting judgments.

base-rate fallacy

the finding that people are relatively insensitive to consensus information presented in the form of numerical base rates. They are influenced more by graphic, dramatic events -leads to various misperceptions of actual risk

averaging model of impression formation

the higher the average value of all the various traits, the better

Biased experience sampling

the increased likelihood of interaction with someone who made a positive first impression over that of a negative one -Meet someone who seems likable and you may interact with that person again. Then if he or she turns out to be twisted, dishonest, or self-centered, you'll be in a position to observe these traits and revise your impression. But if you meet someone you don't like, you will try to avoid that person in the future, cutting yourself off from new information and limiting the opportunity to revise your opinion. Attraction breeds interaction, which is why our negative first impressions in particular tend to persist.

summation model of impression formation

the more positive traits there are, the better

Mind perception

the process by which people attribute humanlike mental states to various animate and inanimate objects, including other people. -Heather Gray found that people perceive minds along two dimensions: 1. agency: a target's ability to plan and execute behavior. 2. experience: the capacity to feel pleasure, pain, and other sensations -the more "mind" respondents attributed to a character, the more they liked it, valued, wanted to make it happy, and wanted to rescue it from destruction

social perception

the process by which people come to understand one another.

impression formation

the process of integrating information about a person to form a coherent impression

primacy effect

the tendency for info presented early in a sequence to have more impact on impressions than info presented later.

trait negativity bias

the tendency for negative information to weigh more heavily on our impressions than positive information

priming

the tendency for recently used or perceived words or ideas to come to mind easily and influence the interpretation of new information

availability heuristic

the tendency to estimate the likelihood that an event will occur by how easily instances of it come to mind. -Which is more common, words that start with the letter r or words that contain r as the third letter? In actuality, the English language has many more words with r as the third letter than as the first. Yet most people guessed that more words begin with r. Why? Because it's easier to bring to mind words in which r appears first.

Fundamental Attribution Error

the tendency to focus on the role of personal causes and underestimate the impact of situations on other people's behavior

Counterfactual thinking

the tendency to imagine alternative events or outcomes that might have occurred but did not

Confirmation bias

the tendency to seek, interpret, and create information that verifies existing beliefs.

Apparently, the more __________ we feel by an apparent injustice, the greater is the need to protect ourselves from the dreadful implication that it could happen to us—an implication that we defend by disparaging the victim. Ironically, recent research shows that people may also satisfy their belief in a just world by _________ members of disadvantaged groups—for example, by inferring that poor people are happy and that obese people are sociable, both attributes that restore justice by compensation.

threatened, enhancing

Asch's central traits

traits that exert a powerful influence on overall impressions where they imply the presence of certain other traits. -warm and cold (central) compared to polite and blunt (not central)

We derive meaning from our observations by dividing the continuous stream of human behavior into discrete _____.

units -some perceivers break the behavior stream into a large number of fine units, whereas other break it into a small number of gross units

The _____ is the most telling channel to deception; when people lie, they tend to hesitate, then speed up and raise the pitch of their voice.

voice

Jones's Correspondent Inference Theory

A theory where people try to infer from an action whether the act itself corresponds to an enduring personal characteristic of the actor. There are three factors by which people make these inferences: 1. degree of choice: behavior that is freely chosen is more informative about a person than behavior that is coerced by the situation 2. expectedness of behavior: an action tells us more about a person when it departs from the norm than when it is typical -people think they know more about a person who wears a three piece suit to class 3. intended effects/consequences of someone's behavior: acts that produce many desirable outcomes do not reveal a person's specific motives as clearly as acts that produce only a single desirable outcome. -you are likely to be uncertain about exactly why a person stays on a job that is enjoyable, high paying, and in an attractive location—three highly desirable outcomes, each sufficient to explain the behavior. In contrast, you may feel more certain about why a person stays on a job that is tedious and low paying but is in an attractive location—only one desirable outcome.