Psychology 2070A/B Chapter 4: Chapter #4 Social Perception
Document Summary
Chapter #4: social perception perceiving the self and others. What we see in others: social perception: to cope effectively in a social world it is essential that we predict other people"s actions reasonably well. Attribution theories: explaining social behaviour: attributions causal judgements about why an event or behaviour occurred. The attributions we make about another person"s behaviour influences how we behave. External attribution something due to the environment. Internal attribution something due to the person. We tend to interact mainly with people who agree with us this makes us assume that these people are representative of the general population when they prob aren"t. Augment" the role of intelligence and conclude that they must be extremely smart. Can involve both overestimating the role of personality factors and underestimating role of. Situational factors guiding behaviour may be subtle or nonobvious (subtle norms: we simply underestimate the power of situational factors. Even when we notice external factors we may still underestimate their strength.