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Individual Differences in Person Perception

1 February, 2016 - 16:48

Learning Objectives

  1. Outline some important individual differences factors that influence people’s causal attributions.
  2. Explain the ways that attributions can influence mental health and the ways that mental health can affect attributions.
  3. Explore how and why people engage in self-handicapping attributions and behaviors.

To this point, we have focused on how the appearance, behaviors, and traits of the people we encounter influence our understanding of them. It makes sense that this would be our focus because of the emphasis within social psychology on the social situation—in this case, the people we are judging. But the person is also important, so let’s consider some of the person variables that influence how we judge other people.