PSYC 215 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Confirmation Bias, Clinical Pathology, Representativeness Heuristic

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 215
• Professor: John Lydon

Document Summary

The field of social cognition is the study of how people think about the social world and arrive at judgements that help them interpret the past, understand the present and predict the future. We often judge people using snap judgment based on their appearance. Todorov and his colleagues had participants rate photographs of different faces, all with neutral expressions on personality dimensions people mention when describing faces. There is positive-negative dimension (whether someone is seen as trustworthy or aggressive or not). There is also the dimension centred around power (whether someone seems confident or bashful, dominant or submissive). Trustworthy, non-dominant faces that were voted tend to look like baby faces. Some investigators report moderately high correlations between the judgements made about people based on their facial appearance and those individual"s own reports about how approachable, extraverted, and powerful they are. Evidence that people can accurately assess other people"s personalities based on facial appearance alone if hard to find.