10.02 Social cognition

Question 1

field of social psychology that focuses on how we think about other people and how those cognitions influence our behavior toward them

Answer 1

social cognition

Question 2

a tendency to respond positively or negatively to a certain idea, person, object, or situation

Answer 2

attitude

Question 3

three components of an attitude

Answer 3

affective, behavioral, cognitive

Question 4

component of an attitude: how a person feels toward something; the emotional component

Answer 4

affective component

Question 5

component of an attitude: the action a person takes toward something

Answer 5

behavioral component

Question 6

component of an attitude: how a person thinks about something

Answer 6

cognitive component

Question 7

factors that determine the match between attitudes and behaviors

Answer 7

attitude specificity, strength, and salience

Question 8

forms of learning that contribute to an attitude

Answer 8

• direct contact
• direct instruction
• interaction with others
• vicarious conditioning / observational learning

Question 9

the process of changing a person’s beliefs or actions through argument, pleading or explanation

Answer 9

persuasion

Question 10

factors that contribute to the effectiveness of a persuasive effort

Answer 10

• source
• message
• target audience
• medium

Question 11

hypothesis that states that people respond to the facts of a message by central-route or by peripheral-route processing

Answer 11

elaboration likelihood model

Question 12

processing of a persuasive message that attends to the content of the message

Answer 12

central-route processing

Question 13

processing of a persuasive message that attends to clues outside the message of the content

Answer 13

peripheral-route processing

Question 14

a sense of discomfort or tension that occurs when a person’s behavior does not correspond with her attitudes

Answer 14

cognitive dissonance

Question 15

three ways to reduce cognitive dissonance

Answer 15

• change attitude
• change behavior
• form new attitudes

Question 16

he famously studied and described cognitive dissonance by paying people different amounts of money to lie about an experiment

Answer 16

Leon Festinger

Question 17

area of the brain that is activated when people make a decision to reduce cognitive dissonance

Answer 17

left frontal cortex

Question 18

the forming of the first knowledge that someone has about another person; it includes assigning the person to categories and drawing conclusions from that about what a person is likely to do

Answer 18

impression formation

Question 19

a belief that one set of characteristics is shared by all members of a particular categor

Answer 19

stereotype

Question 20

the basis for which we place people into categories; the personality traits that we assign to certain groups

Answer 20

implicit personality theories

Question 21

a test that measures the implicit attitudes that makes up each person’s implicit personality theory

Answer 21

Implicit Association Test (IAT)

Question 22

our tendency to come up with possible explanations when we see someone performing an action that we don’t understand

Answer 22

attribution

Question 23

type of attribution in which we assume that the cause of the behavior comes from external sources

Answer 23

situational cause

Question 24

type of attribution in which we assume that the cause of the behavior comes from within the individual

Answer 24

dispositional cause

Question 25

our tendency to overestimate the influence of a person’s internal characteristics on her behavior, and to underestimate the influence of the situation

Answer 25

fundamental attribution error

Question 26

cognitive bias that involves attributing our own successes to internal characteristics, and blaming our failures on outside forces; allows us to protect our self-esteem

Answer 26

self-serving bias