Personality psychology is a branch of psychology that examines personality and its variation among individuals. It aims to show how people are individually different due to psychological forces. Its areas of focus include:
In psychology, illusory correlation is the phenomenon of perceiving a relationship between variables even when no such relationship exists. A false association may be formed because rare or novel occurrences are more salient and therefore tend to capture one's attention. This phenomenon is one way stereotypes form and endure. Hamilton & Rose (1980) found that stereotypes can lead people to expect certain groups and traits to fit together, and then to overestimate the frequency with which these correlations actually occur. These stereotypes can be learned and perpetuated without any actual contact occurring between the holder of the stereotype and the group it is about.
Social behavior is behavior among two or more organisms within the same species, and encompasses any behavior in which one member affects the other. This is due to an interaction among those members. Social behavior can be seen as similar to an exchange of goods, with the expectation that when you give, you will receive the same. This behavior can be affected by both the qualities of the individual and the environmental (situational) factors. Therefore, social behavior arises as a result of an interaction between the two—the organism and its environment. This means that, in regards to humans, social behavior can be determined by both the individual characteristics of the person, and the situation they are in.
Stanley O. Gaines Jr. is a Social Psychologist and Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Brunel University. Gaines is the lead author of Culture, Ethnicity, and Personal Relationship Processes, published by Routledge in 1997 (ISBN 9780415916530).
Social perception is the study of how people form impressions of and make inferences about other people as sovereign personalities. Social perception refers to identifying and utilizing social cues to make judgments about social roles, rules, relationships, context, or the characteristics of others. This domain also includes social knowledge, which refers to one's knowledge of social roles, norms, and schemas surrounding social situations and interactions. People learn about others' feelings and emotions by picking up information they gather from physical appearance, verbal, and nonverbal communication. Facial expressions, tone of voice, hand gestures, and body position or movement are a few examples of ways people communicate without words. A real-world example of social perception is understanding that others disagree with what one said when one sees them roll their eyes. There are four main components of social perception: observation, attribution, integration, and confirmation.
Scott Plous is an American academic social psychologist. He is currently a Professor of Psychology at Wesleyan University and Executive Director of Social Psychology Network.
Aversive racism is a theory proposed by Samuel L. Gaertner & John F. Dovidio (1986), according to which negative evaluations of racial/ethnic minorities are realized by a persistent avoidance of interaction with other racial and ethnic groups. As opposed to traditional, overt racism, which is characterized by overt hatred for and discrimination against racial/ethnic minorities, aversive racism is characterized by more complex, ambivalent expressions and attitudes nonetheless with prejudicial views towards other races. Aversive racism arises from unconscious personal beliefs taught during childhood. Subtle racist behaviors are usually targeted towards African Americans. Workplace discrimination is one of the best examples of aversive racism. Biased beliefs on how minorities act and think affect how individuals interact with minority members.
Thin-slicing is a term used in psychology and philosophy to describe the ability to find patterns in events based only on "thin slices", or narrow windows, of experience. The term refers to the process of making very quick inferences about the state, characteristics or details of an individual or situation with minimal amounts of information. Research has found that brief judgments based on thin-slicing are similar to those judgments based on much more information. Judgments based on thin-slicing can be as accurate, or even more so, than judgments based on much more information.
Interpersonal perception is an area of research in social psychology which examines the beliefs that interacting people have about each other. This area differs from social cognition and person perception by being interpersonal rather than intrapersonal, and thus requiring the interaction of at least two actual people. There are three stages of the perception process including selection, organization, and interpretation.
Some of the research that is conducted in the field of psychology is more "fundamental" than the research conducted in the applied psychological disciplines, and does not necessarily have a direct application. The subdisciplines within psychology that can be thought to reflect a basic-science orientation include biological psychology, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and so on. Research in these subdisciplines is characterized by methodological rigor. The concern of psychology as a basic science is in understanding the laws and processes that underlie behavior, cognition, and emotion. Psychology as a basic science provides a foundation for applied psychology. Applied psychology, by contrast, involves the application of psychological principles and theories yielded up by the basic psychological sciences; these applications are aimed at overcoming problems or promoting well-being in areas such as mental and physical health and education.
The behavioral immune system is a phrase coined by the psychological scientist Mark Schaller to refer to a suite of psychological mechanisms that allow individual organisms to detect the potential presence of infectious parasites or pathogens in their immediate environment, and to engage in behaviors that prevent contact with those objects and individuals.
Mark Schaller is a psychological scientist who has made many contributions to the study of human psychology, particularly in areas of social cognition, stereotyping, evolutionary psychology, and cultural psychology. He is a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia.
Steven L. Neuberg is an experimental social psychologist whose research has contributed to topics pertaining to person perception, impression formation, stereotyping, prejudice, self-fulfilling prophecies, stereotype threat, and prosocial behavior. His research can be broadly characterized as exploring the ways motives and goals shape social thought processes; extending this approach, his later work employs the adaptationist logic of evolutionary psychology to inform the study of social cognition and social behavior. Neuberg has published over sixty scholarly articles and chapters, and has co-authored a multi-edition social psychology textbook with his colleagues Douglas Kenrick and Robert Cialdini.
Psychology encompasses a vast domain, and includes many different approaches to the study of mental processes and behavior. Below are the major areas of inquiry that taken together constitute psychology. A comprehensive list of the sub-fields and areas within psychology can be found at the list of psychology topics and list of psychology disciplines.
In psychology, a first impression is the event when one person first encounters another person and forms a mental image of that person. Impression accuracy varies depending on the observer and the target being observed. First impressions are based on a wide range of characteristics: age, race, culture, language, gender, physical appearance, accent, posture, voice, number of people present, economic status, and time allowed to process. The first impressions individuals give to others could greatly influence how they are treated and viewed in many contexts of everyday life.
Personality in animals has been investigated across a variety of different scientific fields including agricultural science, animal behaviour, anthropology, psychology, veterinary medicine, and zoology. Thus, the definition for animal personality may vary according to the context and scope of study. However, there is recent consensus in the literature for a broad definition that describes animal personality as individual differences in behaviour that are consistent across time and ecological context. Here, consistency refers to the repeatability of behavioural differences between individuals and not a trait that presents itself the same way in varying environments.
A zero-acquaintance situation requires a perceiver to make a judgment about a target with whom the perceiver has had no prior social interaction. These judgments can be made using a variety of cues, including brief interactions with the target, video recordings of the target, photographs of the target, and observations of the target's personal environments, among others. In zero-acquaintance studies, the target's actual personality is determined through the target's self-rating and/or ratings from close acquaintance(s) of that target. Consensus in ratings is determined by how consistently perceivers rate the target's personality when compared to other raters. Accuracy in ratings is determined by how well perceivers' ratings of a target compare to that target's self-ratings on the same scale, or to that target's close acquaintances' ratings of the target. Zero-acquaintance judgments are regularly made in day-to-day life. Given that these judgments tend to remain stable, even as the length of interaction increases, they can influence important interpersonal outcomes.
Simine Vazire is Professor of Psychology Ethics and Wellbeing at the University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; formerly Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. She is a social and personality psychologist who studies how self-perception and self-knowledge influence one's personality and behavior. She obtained a PhD in the social and personality psychology program at the University of Texas at Austin.
Social vision is a sub-topic of social psychology that investigates the ways from which individuals extract information and perceive others using their vision alone. The field of social vision is highly interdisciplinary and located at the nexus of social psychology, communication studies, and vision science.
Nalini Ambady was an Indian-American social psychologist and a leading expert on nonverbal behavior and interpersonal perception. She was born in Calcutta, India and earned her bachelor’s degree at Lady Shri Ram College for women, Delhi University. She furthered her education by moving to the United States for her master’s degree in psychology, from the College of William and Mary, and later received her PhD in social psychology from Harvard. While completing her research at Harvard, she met her husband Raj Marphatia, who was studying at Harvard Law school.
