Exam 4: Social Perception: How We Come to Understand Other People

What do the following have in common: A can-do attitude, powerful, and dominant?

What are consistency, consensus, and distinctiveness information, and how do they combine to yield internal, external, and situational attributions? Give an example.

What are self-serving attributions, and why do people make them?

"Ellen is always crabby and tense, and that's why she's acting so impatient today," Grace remarked. Grace has just used a(n) ________ attribution to explain the cause of Ellen's impatience.

Imagine traveling to a country where you don't speak the native language. You just had a great meal. You don't want to be misunderstood, so how can you communicate to your host that the meal was great, and that you're happy?

Larry sees a group of people weeping, with frowns on their faces and their eyes turned down. Larry ________ their expressions to understand that they are feeling sadness.

According to research presented in this chapter, we typically use two steps in making attributions. The first step involves ________, and the second step involves ________.

All but which of the following can interfere with people's ability to decode others' facial expressions?

"Jen's bicycle was stolen yesterday," Jason said, "and that's why she's so cranky today." Jason has just used an ________ to explain the cause of Jen's behavior.

The self-serving bias is likely to be the strongest in

Recall that Ekman and Friesen (1971) have demonstrated that Fore tribespeople from a preliterate culture in New Guinea were able to decode facial expressions of Westerners and encode emotion easily interpretable by Westerners. Their findings suggest that Darwin was

Darwin (1872) proposed that facial expressions acquire evolutionary significance. Research has demonstrated that one emotion is more easily decoded in the faces of women while another is more easily decoded in the faces of men. Explain why the ability to decode these emotions would contribute to an early human's ability to survive and pass along that ability to offspring.

When making an attribution, Dan considers how his roommate has behaved in similar situations in the past. Dan is using _______ information.

Zeinab won't make eye contact with you. In American culture, this lack of eye contact is interpreted as a sign of

Based on the research presented in this chapter, who is most likely to make self-serving attributions? Someone who is a

Are implicit personality theories universal (common across cultures) or are they culture-specific? Describe a study that provides evidence for your position.

Don is running late for work, and arrives ten minutes late. Which of the following represents an internal attribution that his supervisor would make?

________ attribution is to person to as ________ attribution is to situation.

Recall that Taylor and Fiske (1975) conducted a clever experiment in which a group of participants observed a scripted conversation between two male confederates. Some could see both of the men; others could see the face of only one or the other man. When asked questions about the two confederates (e.g., who had taken the lead in the conversation), participants who had a clear view of both men thought they were equally influential, whereas those who faced one or the other thought that the man whose face they saw was more influential. These results demonstrated that

Eva and her roommate haven't been getting along lately. Every time Eva enters the room, her roommate looks away and turns her body so that her back is to Eva. This example best illustrates the use of nonverbal behavior to