4 docs tagged with "social-psychology"

The Bystander Effect is the social psychological phenomenon in which individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when other people are present. The more bystanders witness an emergency, the less likely any individual is to intervene — due to diffusion of responsibility ("someone else will handle it") and pluralistic ignorance ("no one else is reacting, so maybe it's not serious"). First documented by John Darley and Bibb Latané following the Kitty Genovese murder in 1964.

The False Consensus Effect is the tendency to overestimate the extent to which other people share our beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours. Documented by Lee Ross and colleagues (1977), it leads people to see their own choices as normal and common while viewing divergent choices as unusual or deviant. It drives overconfident product assumptions, miscalibrated political beliefs, and systematic errors in social inference.

The Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) is the tendency to overestimate the role of personal dispositions (character, intentions, personality) and underestimate the role of situational factors when explaining other people's behaviour. First described by Lee Ross (1977), it is one of the most replicated findings in social psychology and explains why we judge others more harshly than circumstances warrant, while explaining our own failures situationally.

The Halo Effect is the cognitive bias in which a positive impression in one area influences judgments in unrelated areas. First described by Edward Thorndike (1920), it explains why attractive people are assumed to be more intelligent, why successful companies are assumed to have superior cultures, and why a person liked for one quality is assumed to have many other positive qualities. The reverse (the 'horns effect') applies to negative impressions.