Social Perception
a general term for the processes by which people come to understand one another.
Facial “pop-out” effect
human faces really capture our attention
Overgeneralization Hypothesis
we infer personality characteristics based on similarity of one’s appearance with learned associations.
Baby Facedness
- we have urges to be caring and gentle.
Physiognomy
Scripts
preset notions about certain types of situations that enable us to anticipate the outcomes likely to occur in a particular setting.
Mature features
Mind perception
the process by which people attribute human like mental states to various animate and inanimate objects, including other people.
Pareidolia
we see faces and attribute personality where no faces exist.
People perceive minds along 2 dimensions
2. ) Experience
Agency
a target’s ability to plan & execute behaviour.
Experience
the capacity to feel pleasure, pain and other sensations.
Nonverbal behaviour
behaviour that reveals a person’s feelings without words, through facial expressions, body language, and vocal cues.
Primary Emotions
In group advantage
people are more accurate at judging faces from their own national, ethnic or regional groups.
Anger superiority effect (face in crowd effect)
people are quicker to spot and slower to look away from angry faces in a crowd.
Eye contact effect
Eye contact holds attention, increases arousal & activates brain areas.
Gage disengagement
people form negative impressions when someone can’t hold eye contact as if uninterested.
4 Channels of Communication
Dispositions
stable characteristics such as personality traits, attitudes, abilities.
Attributions
the explanation we come up with.
Attribution Theory
a group of theories that describe how people explain the causes of behaviour.
2 Groups of Causal Attributions
Covariation Principle
a principle of attribution theory that holds that people attribute behaviours to factors that are present when a behaviour occurs and are absent when it does not.