SOCPSY 1Z03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Centrality, Latanya Sweeney

• School: McMaster University
• Department: Social Psychology
• Course: SOCPSY 1Z03
• Professor: Paul Galvin

Document Summary

Impression formation: way we organize information into unified impression of another person (these impression last a long time) Create new schemas and rely on it instead of new information. Primary effect: focus on information received earlier, rather than later on. Regency effect: when there are large amounts time in-between interactions, most recent information has the strongest influence on impressions. Different traits have different impacts on impressions. Trait centrality: high level of this when the trait has a large impact on the overall impression we form of a person. Asch (1946) experiment: warm vs cold, describing an individual, words has high trait centrality, lots of assumptions made. Attribution: process that an observer uses to infer the causes of another"s behaviour. We observe behaviour and inter backwards to its cause (e. g. abilities & traits) We can determine this by examining how strong the internal & external factors are. Focus on internal states of the person who performed it.