Person Perception & Attribution
When evaluating a new colleague, we form rapid mental impressions using situational cues and personal attributions.
What is person perception?
Asking a neighbor to lend you a quarter first makes them significantly more likely to agree to lend you $5 later.
What is the foot-in-the-door technique?
In Solomon Asch's classic line-judgment studies, participants often agreed with a visibly wrong group answer to avoid social discomfort.
What is conformity?
Repeatedly hearing a novel song on the radio gradually transforms initial indifference into genuine liking.
What is the mere exposure effect?
During a group project, an individual exerts significantly less effort because their personal contribution is pooled into the team's overall score rather than individually evaluated.
What is social loafing?
This three-part mixture consists of negative emotions, generalized beliefs (stereotypes), and a predisposition to discriminatory behavior.
What is prejudice?
Making an initial extreme request that gets rejected, followed by a smaller, reasonable request that is subsequently accepted.
What is the door-in-the-face technique?
In Stanley Milgram's famous experiments at Yale, two-thirds of participants delivered maximum voltage shocks when commanded by a legitimate authority figure.
What is obedience?
Nearby witnesses failed to intervene or call for help during the Kitty Genovese assault because the presence of other witnesses assumed others would help (two concepts).
What are the bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility?
A decision-making board rushes to approve a flawed corporate proposal without considering alternative perspectives, prioritizing group harmony over critical appraisal.
What is groupthink?
An individual blames their low chemistry test score on an unfair exam while attributing a classmate's low score to a lack of effort or intelligence.
What is the actor-observer bias?
When an individual's actions conflict with their expressed beliefs, they experience psychological tension and alter their attitudes to align with their actions.
What is cognitive dissonance theory?
Expert pool players make 80% of their shots when an audience watches (compared to 71% alone), because physical arousal amplifies well-learned dominant responses.
What is social facilitation?
Fishing vessels depleting ocean fish stocks by pursuing maximum individual catches—ultimately destroying the fish population for everyone—illustrate this dilemma.
What is a social trap?
The expectation that people will help and not hurt those who have helped them in the past.
What is the reciprocity norm?
Athletes credit their personal skill and hard work when winning a game, but blame bad weather or unfair referees when losing.
What is the self-serving bias?
An advertisement featuring a famous celebrity endorsement triggers fast, thoughtless judgments rather than deep analytical reflection.
What is peripheral route persuasion?
Sports fans wearing depersonalizing masks or paint engage in destructive rioting due to a loss of self-awareness and self-restraint fostered by anonymity.
What is deindividuation?
Psychologists eliminated hostility between competing boy scout groups at Robbers Cave by introducing shared tasks that required joint cooperation.
What are superordinate goals?
In societies characterized by this pattern, social norms are clearly defined and reliably enforced, leading citizens to strictly obey rules.
What is a tight culture?
Members of a college fraternity view students at a rival school as uniformly rude and identical, while viewing their own fraternity brothers as unique individuals.
What is the out-group homogeneity bias?
Assuming that a charismatic and physically attractive job applicant also possesses high intelligence and exceptional work ethic.
What is the halo effect?
Discussion among like-minded individuals in an online forum causes their preexisting political viewpoints to grow significantly more extreme.
What is group polarization?
Assuming a peer is hostile causes you to treat them coldly, which prompts them to act defensively and confirm your original suspicion.
What is a self-fulfilling prophecy?
When over 80 percent of voters in both major political parties prior to an election assume the rest of the country will elect their candidate, people exhibit this cognitive bias.
What is the false consensus effect?