Term
| Actor-observer difference |
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Definition
| The bias in attribution whereby actors tend to see their own behavior as due to characteristics of the external situation, whereas observers tend to attribute actors' behavior to the actors' internal, personal characteristics. |
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| The process by which people make inferences about the causes of behavior or attitudes. |
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| The tendency to perceive stimuli as members of groups or classes rather than as isolated entities; the act of encoding stimuli as members of classes. |
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Term
| Dispositional Attribution |
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Definition
| A decision by an observer to attribute a behavior to the internal state (s) of the person who performed it rather than to factors in that person's environment. |
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Definition
| The tendency to over-estimate the casual impact of whomever or whatever we focus on. |
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Term
| Fundamental attribution error |
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Definition
| The tendency to underestimate the importance of situational influences and to overestimate personal, disposition factors as causes of behavior. |
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Definition
| The tendency of our general or overall liking for a person to influence our assessment of more specific traits of that person. The halo effect can produce inaccuracy in our ratings of others' traits and performances. |
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| Mental shortcuts that allow individuals to quickly select and apply schemas to new or ambiguous situations. |
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Definition
| the tendency, when forming an impression, to be influenced by the earliest information received. The primacy effect accounts for the fact that first impressions are especially powerful. |
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Definition
| A principle that attributes behavior to the potential cause that is present when the behavior occurs and absent when the behavior fails to occur. |
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Definition
| In person perception, an abstraction that represents the "typical" or quintessential instance of a class or group. |
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Definition
| The tendency, when forming an impression, to be most influenced by the latest information received. |
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Term
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Definition
| A specific cognitive structure that organizes the processing of complex information about other persons, groups, and situations. Our schemas guide what we perceive in the environment, how we organize information in memory, and what inferences and judgements we make about people and things. |
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Definition
| In attribution, the tendency for people to take personal credit for acts that yield positive outcomes to to deflect blame for bad outcomes by attributing them to external causes. |
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Definition
| A decision by an observer to attribute a behavior to environmental forces facing the person who performed it rather than to the person's internal state. |
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| The process through which we construct an understanding of the social world out of the data we obtain through out senses. More narrowly defined, the processes through which we use available information to form impressions of people. |
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Definition
| The suspicion a member of a group holds that he or she will be judged based on a common stereotype of the group. |
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Term
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Definition
| A personal trait has a high level of trait centrality when information about a person's standing on that trait has a large impact on the overall impression that others form of that person. The warm-cold trait, for instance, is highly central. |
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