Impression Formation Theory Lecture Slides, Slides of Social Psychology

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Impression Formation

The process by which we

integrate various sources of

information about another into

overall judgment.

Guess Characteristics

• Major?
• Spare time?
• Hobbies?
• Music?
• In high school, this person was…
• Personality characteristics?

Facial Expressions

 Happiness

 Sadness

 Anger

 Disgust

 Surprise

 Fear

Forms of Eye Contact

 Staring

 Non-contact: avoidance

 Gaze aversion

 Ellsworth 1972

Implicit Personality Theory

►Assumptions people make about which

personality traits go together.

Positivity vs. Negativity Bias

• The tendency for people to rate individual human beings more positively than groups or impersonal objects - The tendency for negative traits to bear weighted more heavily in impression formation than positive traits.

Primacy Vs. Recency Effect

 The tendency for the FIRST information received to carry more weight on one’s overall impression than later information.

 The tendency for the last information received to carry greater weight than earlier information.

Correspondent Inference Theory

• The Action of the actor corresponds to, or

is indicative of a stable personality

characteristic.

• Social desirability of the behavior
• Actor’s degree of choice
• Noncommon effects

The Fundamental Attribution

Error

 When explaining the actions of others,

we tend to locate the cause in terms of

dispositional characteristics rather than

more appropriate situational

characteristics.

The Actor-Observer Effect

The tendency to attribute

other’s behavior to internal

causes and our own behavior

to external causes.

Self Serving Bias in

Action

• “Nicholas does well in school because I’m a good parent.”
• “Nicholas was crabby because he has not been feeling well.”