1. PERSON PERCEPTION Forming Impressions of Others

2. Effects of Physical Appearance Judgments of other’s personalities are swayed by their appearance Those who are determined to be more good looking are judged to be more sociable, friendly, poised, warm and well adjusted. In reality there is no correlation between attractiveness and personality

3. Cognitive Schemas Social schemas are organized clusters of ideas about categories of social events and people

4. Stereotypes Widely held beliefs that people have certain characteristics because of their membership in a particular group. Normal cognitive process – saves time and energy Fosters inaccurate perceptions Contributes to subjectivity of perception

5. Subjectivity in person perception Illusionary correlation occurs when people estimate that they have encountered more confirmations of an association between social traits than they have actually seen Spotlight effect – people’s tendency to assume that the social spotlight shines more brightly on them than it actually does

6. Illusion of asymmetric insight – the finding that people tend to think that their knowledge of their peers is greater than their peers’ knowledge of them

7. Evolutionary Perspective The ability to quickly recognize some one else as the member of one’s ingroup or of an outgroup increased the safety/survival of our distant ancestors

8. Attribution Processes: Explaining Behavior Attributions are inferences that people draw about the causes of events, others’ and their own behavior

9. Internal vs. External Attributions Internal attributions ascribe the causes of behavior to personal dispositions, traits, abilities, and feelings. External attributions ascribe the causes of behavior to situations demands and environmental constraints.

10. Attributions for Success and Failure Internal vs. External Stability vs. Instability Combination of these two  a four celled chart of possible types of attributions

11. Biases in Attribution Actor-observer bias Fundamental attribution error Defensive attribution The tendency to blame victims for their misfortune, so that one feels less likely to be victimized in a similar way

12. Self-serving bias – the tendency to attribute one’s successes to personal factors and one’s failures to situational factors.

13. Culture and Attributional Tendencies Individualism involves putting personal goals ahead of group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group memberships

14. Collectivism involves putting group goals ahead of personal goals and defining one’s identity in terms of the groups one belongs to

15. Western societies = more individualism Eastern societies = more collectivism Self-effacing bias – tendency to explain success to help received or ease of task rather than to personal abilities