correspondence

n. in attribution theory, the extent to which an observed behavior, such as pushing past others to go to the front of a line, is believed to correlate to a general personality trait in the actor, such as rudeness or aggressiveness. Observers have a strong tendency to overestimate the correspondence of behaviors with traits (the fundamental attribution error). See actor–observer effect; correspondent inference theory. —correspondent adj.

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Psychology term of the day

January 14th 2025

Kruskal–Shepard scaling

a type of multidimensional scaling applied to judgments of similarity or dissimilarity for pairs of items (e.g., cities). The dissimilarities are represented by distances between items in a highly dimensional space: Larger distances indicate greater dissimilarity. [William Henry Kruskal (1919–2005), U.S. statistician; Roger N. Shepard (1929– ), U.S. experimental and cognitive psychologist]