Impression Formation The process by which we integrate

Impression Formation The process by which we integrate various sources of information about another into overall judgment.

Guess Characteristics • • • Major? Spare time? Hobbies? Music? In high school, this person was… Personality characteristics?

Stereotype n A fixed way of thinking about people that puts them into categories and doesn’t allow for individual variation

Facial Expressions n n n Happiness Sadness Anger Disgust Surprise Fear

Forms of Eye Contact Ø Staring Ø Non-contact: avoidance Ø Gaze aversion Ø Ellsworth 1972

Can you Detect Lies in Others? • Expressions Give: Words and gestures consciously transmitted • Expressions given off: non verbal leakage. Unintentional transmission.

Implicit Personality Theory ► Assumptions people make about which personality traits go together.

Positivity vs. Negativity Bias • The tendency for people to rate individual human beings more positively than groups or impersonal objects • The tendency for negative traits to bear weighted more heavily in impression formation than positive traits.

Fritz Heider’s Naïve Psychology o People are motivated to form a coherent view of the world o People have a need to gain control over their environments n n n Internal vs. external Stable vs. Unstable Controllability

Primacy Vs. Recency Effect l The tendency for the FIRST information last information received to carry more received to carry weight on one’s greater weight than overall impression earlier information. than later information.

Correspondent Inference Theory • The Action of the actor corresponds to, or is indicative of a stable personality characteristic. – Social desirability of the behavior – Actor’s degree of choice – Noncommon effects

Kelley’s Covariation Model n n Covariation Principle: A principle of attribution theory stating, for that something to be a cause of a particular behavior, it must be present when the behavior occurs and absent when it does not occur. Discounting principle: Whenever there are several explanations for a particular event, we tend to be less likely to attribute the effect to any particular cause. n n n Consensus Consistency Distinctiveness

The Fundamental Attribution Error Ø When explaining the actions of others, we tend to locate the cause in terms of dispositional characteristics rather than more appropriate situational characteristics.

The Actor-Observer Effect The tendency to attribute other’s behavior to internal causes and our own behavior to external causes.

Self-Serving Bias • The tendency to assign an internal locus of causality for our positive outcomes and an external locus for our negative outcomes.

Self Serving Bias in Action • “Nicholas does well in school because I’m a good parent. ” • “Nicholas was crabby because he has not been feeling well. ”