29. Social Cognition Flashcards
Refers to the processes by which people make sense of themselves, others, social interactions and relationships.
Social cognition
The initial perceptions of another person that affect future beliefs about that person.
First impressions
Solomon Asch (1946), suggested that first impressions create a ____ of ____ within which everything else that is learned about a person is interpreted.
frame of reference
A particularly ____ characteristic of first impressions is physical appearance, especially attractiveness.
salient
Individuals who are physically attractive benefit from the ____ ____, the tendency to assume that positive qualities cluster together.
halo effect
And even more important variable than actual physical attractiveness, however, maybe how attractive people _____ themselves to be.
perceive
Individuals who perceive themselves as physically attracted report being more _______________ than those that are less comfortable with their appearance.
extroverted, socially comfortable and mentally healthy
In which feeling attractive leads to behaviour that is perceived by others as attractive.
Self-fulfilling prophecy
First impressions are essentially the ____ ____ people form when they encounter someone for the first time.
initial schemas
The patterns of thought hypothesised to organise human experience – apply in the social realm as in other areas of life.
Schemas
Schemas direct attention, organise encoding and influence ____.
retrieval
We ____ schemas about specific people or types of people, situations, roles and relationships.
form
People are especially prone to recall schema relevant ____ ____ – behaviours or aspects of a situation related to activated schema.
social information
As in other cognitive domains, schemas guide ____ ____ about people and relationships.
information processing
Thus, schemas can be very functional in allowing us to ____ some of what will happen in particular situations.
predict
Schemas are essential for social cognition. Without them people would walk into every new situation without knowing how to ____ or how others are likely to act.
behave
Literally means prejudgment, involves judging people based on (either positive or negative) stereotypes. Prejudice involves a persons thoughts or cognitions about another person or group.
Prejudice
Characteristics attributed to people based on the membership of specific groups. Stereotypes are often overgeneralise, inaccurate and resistant to new information.
Stereotypes
Do the roots of prejudice lie in ____ psychology (such as personality dynamics or cognition) or in ____ dynamics (the oppression of one group by another)?
individual, social
Are the causes of prejudice found in ____ or ____ – in the way people think or in the way they want to think?
cognition or motivation
Refers to behaviours that follow from evaluations or attitudes towards members of particular groups.
Discrimination
Characterised by a tendency to hate people who are different or downtrodden. These individuals tend to have a dominant, stern and sometimes sadistic father and a submissive mother.
The authoritarian personality
Authoritarian personality - As adults, authoritarian individuals displace or ____ their rage onto groups such as Jews, indigenous peoples, homosexuals or other people whom they perceive to be different.
project
Authoritarian personality - According to the theory, children in such families ____ and ____ their fathers, but they would be brutally punished if the expose these feelings, so they repress them.
fear and hate
____ has changed in the last three decades. Today, overt racial discrimination against ethnic minorities is generally meet with public disapproval.
Racism
But, racism of a seemingly different kind seems to remain alive and well. Many people claim not to be ____ but in fact hold one attitude after another that ‘just happened’ to be unfavourable to minorities.
racist
Another form of conflict is between ____ and ____ attitudes toward members of minority groups.
explicit and implicit
Many white people have ____ negative attitudes toward people of different ethnic backgrounds over the course of their lives.
absorbed
They often express non-bigoted explicit attitudes, but when acting or responding without much conscious attention, unconscious ____ slip through the cracks.
stereotypes
Paralleling the change from old-fashioned racism to ____ ____ is a change from old-fashioned sexism to more subtle brand of sexism.
subtle racism
Alternatively, they may learn to recognise their unconscious tendencies towards racist thinking and perpetually ____ their reactions to try to prevent racist attitudes from colouring their actions.
monitor
When conscious beliefs and values conflict with deep-seated, automatic negative stereotypes, people may alternate between extreme positions, either laying ____ ____ at the feet of members of devalued groups or refusing to hold them ____ for their behaviour.
excessive blame, accountable
Duckitt (2001, 2002) suggests that prejudice is based in early ____ ____.
learning experiences
Duckitts ____ ____ predicts that social situations impact on ideological beliefs through changing peoples worldviews and ideological attitudes.
causal model
According to this model, social situations and personality (e.g. tough-mindedness and social conformity) each influence an individuals’ ____ – the extent to which people view the world as dangerous or competitive.
worldviews
These two worldviews and personality dimensions then impact on ____ ____ (e.g. authoritarianism and social dominance).
ideological attitudes
Prejudice is indeed _____ from one generation to the next, and it takes hold early.
transmitted
Children show signs of prejudice by age ____ or ____.
four or five
Suppressing a stereotype, however, can lead to ____ effects, in which the person later responds even more stereotypically.
rebound
Such culturally patterned associations can later make ____ ____ difficult for adolescent members of devalued groups, who must somehow integrate a positive view of themselves with negative stereotypes that others hold of them.
identity formation
Many theorists have argued that prejudiced social attitudes serve a function. They preserve the interests of the ____ classes.
dominant
Children from both minority and majority subcultures tend to express preferences towards the majority culture by the ____ years.
preschool
One process that intensifies stereotyping is that people tend to perceive members of outgroups as much more ____ than they really are and to emphasise the individuality of ingroup members.
homogeneous
Thus, people of other races ‘all look alike’, and are seen to share many core ____ – which is highly unlikely, given the tremendous differences in personality that exist within any group of people.
traits
Another form of subtle racism or group antagonism may lie less in the ‘presence’ of hostile feelings than in the ‘____’ of the positive feelings that normally blind people together and lead them to help each other.
absence
Prejudice requires a distinction between ____ and ____ – people who belong to the group and those who do not.
Ingroups and outgroups
From a ____ point of view, casting ingroup members in a positive light gives you a positive glow as a member of the group.
motivational
The readiness to create and act on ingroup–outgroup distinctions probably rests on both motivational and cognitive ____.
processes
Suggests that people derive part of their identity from the groups to which they belong.
Social identity theory
Goals requiring the groups to cooperate for the benefit of all.
Superordinate goals
Researchers conclude that ____ alone is not enough to reduce conflict; the contract must also involve corporation.
contact
From a ____ perspective, ingroup effects reflect our continuous and automatic efforts to categorise and schematise information.
cognitive
Other factors also ____ whether contact leads to increased tolerance or animosity.
influence
Tolerance or animosity - (1) individuals must have the opportunity to get to know one another all ____ basis, as in sports teams and musical groups, and have relatively equal status.
one-to-one
Tolerance or animosity - (2) people from different groups also need to have enough ____ values, beliefs, interests, culture and skills so that interactions dissolve stereotypes rather than confirm them.
shared
Unfortunately, members of cultures and subcultures often differ on precisely these things, so these characteristics increase the need for superordinate goals and shared or complimentary skills that ____ differences and emphasise commonalities.
de-emphasise
Attribution plays a central role in virtually every ____ ____.
social encounter
Bernard Weiner (1992, 1995) proposed a model of ____ with three elements.
attribution
Attribution - (1) people seek to ____ why certain events happened.
understand
The process of inferring the causes of one’s own and others mental states and behaviours is called ____.
Attribution
Attribution - (2) people attribute the outcome to a ____.
cause
Attribution - (3) people base their ____ behaviour on the attributions that they make.
future
In other words they ____ the extent to which the presence of one variable predicts the presence of another – that is, whether the two variables co-vary.
assess
According to one view, when people make attributions, they are behaving like ____ ____.
intuitive scientists
People attribute causes by ____ the covariation of situations, behaviour and specific people.
observing
Understanding other people’s behaviour requires figuring out when their actions reflect the demands of the situation, aspects of their personalities (often called personality dispositions) or ____ between the two (the ways specific people behave in a particular situation).
interactions
They rely on intuitive theories, frame hypotheses, collect data about themselves and others, and draw conclusions as ____ ____ ___ based on the pattern of data they have observed.
best they can
Attributions to the person.
Internal attributions
In making attributions, people rely on three types of ____: consensus, consistency and distinctiveness.
information
Refers to the way most people respond.
Consensus
Attributions to the situation.
External attributions
Refers to the individuals likelihood to respond in this way to many different stimuli.
Distinctiveness
Refers to the extent to which a person always responds in the same way to the same stimulus.
Consistency
Occurs when people downplay (discount) the role of one variable because they know that others may be contributing to the behaviour in question.
Discounting
Part of the difficulty in making accurate attributions is that most actions have ____ ____, some situational and some dispositional. And deciding how much to credit or blame a person, people generally adjust for the strength of situation demands through two processes, discounting and augmentation.
multiple causes
Making a attribution is typically a three step process.
(1) people ____ the behaviour they have observed.
(2) based on the way they have ____ the behaviour, they categorise the persons personality.
(3) if the situation seems to have elicited or contributed to the behaviour, they may ____ the attribution of hostility.
categorise, interpreted, discount
A person’s habitual manner of assigning causes to behaviours or events is referred to as his ____ ____.
attributional style
Increasing (augmenting) an internal attribution for behaviour that has occurred despite situational demands.
Augmentation
The fundamental attribution error occurs primarily when explaining ____ behaviour.
others
When explaining our own behaviour, we are far more likely to look for causes ____ ourselves.
outside
One of the most pervasive biases in social cognition, the ____ ____ ____, is the tendency to assume that other people’s behaviour corresponds to their internal states rather than external situations – that is, to attribute behaviours to peoples personalities and to ignore possible situational causes.
Fundamental attribution error
Furthermore the degree to which the fundamental attribution error occurs depends on which ____ is being observed.
culture
The self-serving bias takes a number of forms.
Self-serving bias (1) The majority of people rate themselves as ____ average on most dimensions.
above
Another pervasive bias in social cognition is the ____ ____ ____, in which people tend to see themselves in a more positive light the others see them.
Self-serving bias
Self-serving bias (2) People are also more likely to recall ____ than negative information about themselves and to see their talents as more striking and unusual than their deficiencies.
positive
Self-serving bias (3) In addition, they attributed greater ____ to themselves for a group product than other group members attribute to them and assume that they are less driven by self interest than those around them.
responsibility
Heuristics can lead to biases in social thinking, as in when people assume that all politicians are crooks because of some salient (most notable) examples that come to mind (the availability heuristic).
COGNITIVE BIASES
____ can lead people awry, but they are essential to everyday functioning, because they allow us to make decisions and judgements rapidly and without conscious reflection. People frequently lack that time or information they need to make accurate attributions, should they do the best they can.
Heuristics
Other biases reflect motivation. Schemas and attributions are influenced by wishes, needs and goals.
MOTIVATIONAL BIASES
Self-serving bias (4) Finally, people take credit for their successes and attribute failure to ____, situational factors.
external
Differences between social and non-social cognition.
(1) A person observing a social interaction is almost always ____ the most relevant data: the unspoken intentions, thoughts and feelings of the people involved. Because observers of a social interaction have access only to behaviours, they must infer what those behaviours mean.
missing
Differences between social and non-social cognition.
(2) Social cognition is inherently intertwined with ____. People either like or dislike their roommate.
emotion
The tendency to see information that confirms ones hypotheses.
CONFIRMATION BIAS
Social cognition is inherently infused with cultural ____ ____ because categories (such as men, nurses or doctors) carry with them implications for how people who fit them should behave.
value judgements
Differences between social and non-social cognition.
(3) Although culture influences many cognitive processes, such as categorisation, it plays a particularly ____ while in social cognition.
important
