Chapter 16

Key Terms

Social perception: the processes involved when one person perceives, evaluates, and forms an impression of someone else.

Attributions: our inferences concerning the causes of behaviour patterns in other people and in ourselves.

Dispositional attribution: deciding someone’s behaviour to internal characteristics (e.g., personality) rather than the situation.

Situational attribution: deciding someone’s behaviour is due to the situation in which they find themselves rather than their disposition.

Fundamental attribution error: a bias towards attributing another person’s behaviour to their personality rather than the situation.

Actor-observer bias: others’ actions tend to be attributed to internal dispositions whereas our own actions are attributed to the current situation.

Implicit personality theory: the assumption (sometimes mistaken) that certain personality traits tend to be found together in other people.

Primacy effect: the finding that first impressions have more impact than later ones in influencing our opinions of other people.

False consensus effect: the mistaken belief that most other people resemble us in many ways (e.g., personality; beliefs).

Self-disclosure: revealing personal or private information about oneself to another person.

Weblinks

The full text of Solomon Asch’s article “Forming impressions of personality”
http://www.all-about-psychology.com/solomon-asch.html

Useful short summary of the halo effect
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuometYfMTk

Dr Judith Langlois’ Social Development Lab
https://labs.la.utexas.edu/langloislab/

An interesting article about “reading” faces
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/articles/emotions/faceperception1.shtml

“Beauty Check”: Lots of information on human facial attractiveness
http://www.uni-regensburg.de/Fakultaeten/phil_Fak_II/Psychologie/Psy_II/beautycheck/english/index.htm

Face research: Participate in facial attractiveness experiments
http://www.faceresearch.org/

The mathematics of beauty
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1OOc8HC3TY

Words have power: An article on the primacy effect
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/let-their-words-do-the-talking/201011/words-have-power

In the Name of Love: An article on the role of similarity in attraction
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/in-the-name-love/200902/does-being-similar-you-make-me-more-attractive-darling

Do you think opposites attract?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/3034610.stm

PSYBLOG: Does Familiarity Breed Liking or Contempt? – includes a discussion of Reis et al.’s (2011) research on familiarity
http://www.spring.org.uk/2011/09/does-familiarity-breed-liking-or-contempt.php

Buss Lab: Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Texas – includes links to lots of information on evolutionary psychology
https://labs.la.utexas.edu/buss/

Evolutionary psychology: A primer
http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html

An exploration of Human Instincts introduced by Professor Robert Winston
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OH-FN9942w&list=PL_kdQ_spKED7Uui7gAmpO956ZGyUwbKt1

Eysenck, M.W. (2009). Fundamentals of psychology. Chapter 18 of this textbook is devoted to a discussion of theory and research on social behaviour and relationships
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9781841693729/