PSY220H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Fundamental Attribution Error, Kurt Lewin, Milgram Experiment
Document Summary
Social psychology - the scientific study of the feelings, thoughts, and behaviors of individuals in social situations. Dispositions - internal factors such as beliefs, values, personality traits, or abilities that guide a person"s behavior. Fundamental attribution error - the failure to recognize the importance of situational influences on behavior, and the corresponding tendency to overemphasize the importance of dispositions or traits on behavior. Channel factors - certain situational circumstances that appear unimportant on the surface but that can have great consequences for behavior, either facilitating or blocking it or guiding behavior in a particular direction. Construal - people"s interpretation and inference about the stimuli or situations they confront. Gestalt psychology - based on the german word gestalt, meaning form or. Figure, this approach stresses the fact that people perceive objects not by means of some automatic registering device but by active, usually unconscious interpretation of what the object represents as a whole.