Attribution Adventures
This is the tendency to explain other people’s behavior by focusing too much on traits and not enough on the situation.
What is the fundamental attribution error?
A person’s knowledge of the usual sequence of events in a specific setting.
What is a script?
This phenomenon occurs when a witness does not volunteer to help a victim or person in distress.
What is the bystander effect?
This widely used personality inventory was first published in 1943 and later revised (MMPI-2 in 1989).
What is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)?
Long-standing traits and patterns that lead people to consistently think, feel, and behave in certain ways.
What is personality?
This bias is when we explain our successes with internal causes but our failures with external causes.
What is the self-serving bias?
A group’s shared expectations about what behavior is appropriate and acceptable for members.
What is a social norm?
This is the term for concluding “no help is needed” because everyone else is also doing nothing.
What is pluralistic ignorance?
The basal ganglia are described as producing this neurotransmitter, important in pleasure and learning tied to rewards.
What is dopamine?
Hippocrates proposed these four temperament types tied to bodily “humors.”
What are choleric, melancholic, sanguine, and phlegmatic?
This is attributing other people’s behavior to internal factors, while attributing our own behavior to situational forces.
What is the actor-observer bias?
A socially defined pattern of behavior expected of a person in a particular setting or group.
What is a social role?
This phenomenon happens when knowing others could help reduces a person’s sense of personal responsibility.
What is diffusion of responsibility?
This projective test uses symmetrical inkblot cards to probe unconscious fears and desires.
What is the Rorschach Inkblot Test?
The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart found identical twins raised together or apart had very similar personalities, suggesting this for some traits.
What is heritability (a genetic contribution to differences)?
This effect is when your overall impression of someone (like attractiveness) shapes how you judge their character.
What is the halo effect?
This famous mock-prison study is described as demonstrating the power of roles, norms, and scripts.
What is the Stanford prison experiment?
Defined as helping motivation aimed at improving another’s welfare with no expectation of benefits for the helper.
What is altruism?
Two temperament dimensions important for adult personality are these.
What are reactivity and self-regulation?
In the Big Five, this trait is described as a tendency to experience negative emotions.
What is neuroticism?
One attribution model in the text uses three dimensions: internal vs external, stable vs unstable, and controllable vs uncontrollable.
What are locus of control, stability, and controllability?
The influence of the group majority on an individual’s judgment is called this.
What is the Asch effect?
Batson’s theory says putting yourself “in the shoes” of a victim can create empathic concern and lead to this kind of motivation to help.
What is the empathy–altruism model (or hypothesis)?
A major drawback of self-report inventories is that people may answer in a more positive, biased way (especially when applying for a job).
What is socially desirable responding?
The textbook warns that average trends are summaries and don’t necessarily apply to all individuals, which is why researchers study this.
What are individual patterns of personality development (individual differences in change)?