Social and Cross-Cultural Psy (Subject) / Chapter 3 (Lesson)

This lesson was created by HuberthErbse.

Learn lesson

back  |  next 1 / 1

• social perception the process of collecting and interpreting information about another person's individual characteristics
• central trait a dispositional characteristic viewed by social perceivers as integral to the organization of personality
• peripheral trait a trait whose perceived presence does not significantly change the overall interpreation of a person's personality
• primacy effect the tendency for earlier information to be more influential in social perception and interpretation
• summation perceivers add together pieces of information about a person; when other information is stongly positive, additional mildly positive information yields a more positive impression
• implicit personality theory an integrated set of ideas held by a social perceiver about how different traits tend to be organized within a person
• configural model a holistic approach to impression formation, implying that social perceivers actively construct deeper meanings out of the bits of information that they receive about other people
• cognitive algebra a proposed process for averaging or summing trait information when forming impressions of other people
• averaging perceivers compute the (weighted or unweighted) mean value of pieces of information about a person; when other information is strongly positive, additional mildly positive information yields a less positive impression
• self-fulfilling prophecy when an originally false expectation leads to its own confirmation. The social perceiver's initially incorrect beliefs about a target cause that target to act in ways that objectively confirm those beliefs
• Advertisement
• causal attribution the process whereby social perceivers arrive at conclusions about the causes of another person's behaviour
• correspondent inference theory proposes that observers infer correspondent intentions and dispositions for observed intentional behaviour under certain circumstances
• analysis of non-common effects observers infer intentions behind actions by comparing the consequences of the behavioural options that were open to the actor and identifying distinctive outcomes
• correspondence bias the proposed tendency to infer a personal disposition corresponding to observed behaviour even when the behaviour was determined by the situation
• covariation theory proposes that observers work out the causes of behaviour by collecting data about comparison cases. Causality is attributed to the person, entity or situation depending on which of the factors covaries with the observed effect
• distinctiveness information evidence relating to how an actor responds to different objects (or 'entities') under similar circumstances
• consistency information evidence relating to how an actor's behaviour towards an object varies across different situations and times
• consensus inforamtion evidence relating to how different actors behave towards the same object
• causal schema knowledge structure shaping attributions: causal schemas may be either abstract representations of general causal principles (e.g. multiple necessary and multiple sufficient causes schemas), or domain specific ideas about cause and effect
• discounting principle the presence of a causal factor working towards an observed effect implies that other potential factors are less influential. The converse of the aumenting principle
• augmenting principle the assumption that causal factors need to be stronger if an inhibitory influence on an observed effect is present. The converse of the discounting principle
• causal power an intrinsic property of an object or event that enables it to exert influence on some other object or event
• probabilistic contrast comparison of the frequency of an effect in the presence of a potential cause with its frequency in the absence of that cause
• learned helplessness theory the proposal that depression results from learning that outcomes are not contigent on one's behaviour
• depressive realism the idea that depressed people's interpretations of reality are more accurate than those of non-depressed people
• attributional bias systematic distortions in the sampling or processing of information about the causes of behaviour
• false consensus bias the assumption that other people generally share one's own personal attitudes and opinions
• salience attention-grabbing property of objects or events depending on perceptual features such as vividness, perceiver sensivity or some combination of the two
• actor-observer difference proposed general tendency for people to explain their own behaviour in more situational terms, but other people's behaviour in more dispositional terms
• self-serving attributional biases motivated distortions of attribution that function to maintain or increase self-esteem
• Advertisement
• naive scientist model a metaphor for how social information is processed that likens social perceivers to academic researchers who formulate theories and use data to test hypotheses in order to predict and control behaviour

back  |  next 1 / 1