Psychology 2720A/B Lecture Notes - Covariance, Headache, Social Perception

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2720A/B

Document Summary

Social perception: how people make judgements about others, info they use to make these judgements. Na ve scientist approach: ordinary people are rational, scientific thinkers who make causal attributions using similar processes as scientists, there is a lot of rational analysis occurring when we try to attribute cause, external attribution = situational. Make internal attributions when : people attempt to infer whether a person"s action is caused by internal dispositions, look at factors related to the action in order to do this. Infer person has traits that correspond to their behaviour when these three conditions are met. If they answer yes to all = dispositional. We ignore context: we fail to take the context into consideration in our judgements. In theory we should be taking behaviour and context into account simultaneously: then we should make an interpretation of significance or meaning of behaviour, then make a dispositional inference. In reality we look at the behaviour, ignore the context.