Psychology 2035A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Fundamental Attribution Error

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2035A/B
• Professor: Alvin Segal

Document Summary

Recognize four important cognitive distortions (social categorization, stereotypes, fundamental attribution error, defensive attribution) and use insights from research studies to describe how they operate. Social categorizations cognitive shortcuts in which we categorize people on the basis of nationality, race, gender, religion . Lead to less accurate impression as tend to overestimate the difference between groups and underestimate within group. People perceive similar individuals to be members of their ingroup (us) and dissimilar people to be members of the outgroup (them). Categorizing has three important results: people have more negative attitudes toward outgroup members, people see outgroup members are much more alike than they really are (the outgroup homogeneity effect). But ingroup as unique individuals ( diverse : the visibility of outgroup members is heightened when they comprise the minority in a crowd.