PSY 2012 Lecture Notes - Lecture 23: Fundamental Attribution Error, Physical Attractiveness, Social Cognition
Document Summary
Study of how people think about, influence, and relate to others. Examines many topics in psychology in a social context. Study psychology: the study of thoughts, feelings, and behavior influenced by the real, or implied presence of others. Social psychology studies how we think about our social world, how other people influence our behavior, and how we relate toward other people. Explores how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information. Processes by which social stimuli, such as faces, are used to form impressions of others. Physical attractiveness: beautiful is good stereotype, or generalization, self-fulfilling prophecy of expectations, being average as an essential component. Attribution theory: people as motivated to discover underlying causes of behavior to make sense of behavior. Heuristics: cognitive shortcuts that allow rapid decision-making, can play role in social information processing, helpful but can lead to mistakes. False consensus effect: overestimation of degree to which everybody else thinks or acts as we do.
