Microsoft Word Chapter 1 done doc

ingroup, and any group he doesn’t belong to is an outgroup. 
People generally have a lower opinion of outgroup members and a 
higher opinion of members of their own group. People who identify 
strongly with a particular group are more likely to be prejudiced 
against people in competing outgroups. 
Prejudices in workplaces affect how people perceive sexual 
harassment. Men are more likely than women to attribute blame to 
the victim. Changing men’s attributions regarding sexual 
harassment may help to prevent it. The theory also helps in 
criminal law to understand the psychology of criminals. In today's 
world, with the increase in crime and global terrorism understanding 
criminal psychology has become essential. 
Check Your Progress : III 
1. What is meant by attribution? 
2. Name the model which assumes that people make causal 
attributions in a rational and logical manner. 
3. When does fundamental attribution error occur? 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
5.7 LET US SUM UP : 
Social perception refers to the processes through which 
we
use available information to form impressions of other people, to 
assess what they are like. Social perceptions can obviously be 

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flawed - even skilled observers can misperceive, misjudge, and 
reach the wrong conclusions. Once we form wrong impressions, 
they are likely to persist.
Just as we form impressions about others, they also form 
impressions about us. At some point, most of us try to influence the 
impressions others hold of us. We use self-presentation and 
impression management tactics. We often try to simplify the 
complex flow of incoming information by putting people into useful 
categories. We pay attention to some stimuli while ignoring others. 
These classifications help to specify how various objects or events 
are related or similar to each other.
Nonverbal communication refers to the communication and 
interpretation of information by any means other than language. 
Nonverbal communication includes communication through any 
behavioral or expressive channel of communication such as facial 
expression, bodily movements, vocal tone and pitch, and many 
other channels. Nonverbal communication involves cues related to 
the communication (also referred to as the encoding or sending) of 
information as well as the interpretation (or the decoding or 
receiving) of information. The communication and interpretation of 
nonverbal behavior draws on tacit, implicit knowledge that all 
human beings possess. Such communication is often subtle, 
uncontrollable, and spontaneous, rapidly and unconsciously 
communicated and interpreted, and provides a great deal of 
information regarding affective states.
In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 
first published in 1872, Darwin argued that emotional expressions 
are adaptive responses; they communicate internal states, send out 
signals that enemies are present and have a powerful survival 
value for many species. Darwin's primary interest was in describing 
facial expressions and demonstrating that they are linked to the 
same emotions in all human cultures. 
Attribution is a very special percept about assigning cause to 
people or events.
People are naive psychologists trying to understand the
causes of their own and other’s behaviour. People take account of 
consensus,
consistency and distinctiveness when deciding 
between
internal and external attributions.
Our attributions have a profound impact on our emotions,
self-concept, and relationships. 
A special attribution is the correspondent inference in which 
we link behaviors directly to personal traits in an actor.
But they can 
be biased in many ways. 
As observers, we tend to locate the 

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causes of behavior in actors (as actors, however, we attribute 
cause to the environment)--this is called the fundamental attribution 
error.
Attributions of people as group members are
ethnocentric 
and based on stereotypes.
Attribution theory also helps in understanding depression 
and prejudice.