When we meet people, we make impressions about their personal qualities. This is called ______.
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → Impression Formation
Option (1) Social Cognition — Incorrect. Social cognition is the collective name for the mental activities of gathering and interpreting information about the social world. Impression formation, attribution and attitudes are all examples of it, so it is too broad to name this one process.
Option (2) Social Facilitation — Incorrect. Social facilitation is the improvement in performance in the presence of others. It is observable behaviour, not an inference about another person.
Option (3) Social Inhibition — Incorrect. Social inhibition is the opposite effect, a decline in performance in the presence of others.
Option (4) Impression Formation — Correct. When we meet people, we make inferences about their personal qualities. This is called impression formation. The perceiver selects some information about the target person, organises it and draws inferences about her/him.
Note: Impression formation, and social inhibition in Option (3), in the chapter ‘Attitude and Social Cognition’, were there in the pre-rationalised NCERT, which NTA followed in 2023, and are not there in the NCERT book (2025-26). Hence this question has been picked from the pre-rationalised NCERT.
NCERT (2025-26): “Influence of Group on Individual Behaviour … What impact does the presence of others have on our performance? We will discuss two situations : (i) an individual performing an activity alone in the presence of others (social facilitation), and (ii) an individual performing an activity along with the others as part of a larger group (social loafing).” “Social Loafing Social facilitation research suggests that presence of others leads to arousal and can motivate individuals to enhance their performance if they are already good at solving something. This enhancement occurs when a person’s efforts are individually evaluated.…” NCERT (Pre-rationalised): “Explaining Social Behaviour … When we meet people, we make inferences about their personal qualities. This is called impression formation. We are also interested in why people behave in the ways they do — that is, we assign causes to the behaviour shown in specific social situations. This process is called attribution. Very often, impression formation and attributions are influenced by attitudes. These three processes are examples of mental activities related to the gathering and interpretation of information about the social world, collectively called social cognition.…” “…Two such examples are social facilitation/ inhibition, i.e. the improvement/decline in performance in the presence of others, and helping, or pro-social behaviour, i.e. responding to others who are in need or distress.…” |