6 social cognition Flashcards
Person perception: mental processes used to think about and evaluate other people
*
Physical cues: information gained from the way people look and act
Salience detection: a personal characteristic that is distinctive and therefore attracts attention
Social categorisation: classifying people into different groups on the basis of common characteristics
- ingroup
- outgroup
Physical cues *
Physical appearance: halo effect – positive impression of a person to influence beliefs and expectations about them
Body language: non-verbal communication that expresses feelings & thoughts through facial expressions, gestures or other movements
Behaviour: actions that are observable
Attributions – explaining behaviour
Internal attributions: an explanation of behaviour due to characteristics
External attributions: an explanation of behaviour due to factors associated with the situation
Biases affecting attributions
Fundamental attribution error: when explaining someone’s behaviour, overestimate internal factors and underestimate external factors
Actor–observer bias: attribute one’s own behaviour to external factors, while attributing others’ behaviour to internal factors
Self-serving bias: when judging ourselves, we take the credit for our successes (internal factors) and attribute failures to external factors
Tri-component model of attitudes *
Affective: emotional reaction or feeling
Behavioural: attitude is expressed through our actions *
Cognitive: thoughts and beliefs
Stereotypes *
a generalisation about the personal characteristics of the members of a social group, regardless of individual differences among members of that group
Cognitive dissonance
an unpleasant psychological state that occurs when there is inconsistency in behaviours and cognition; discomfort
Anchoring bias
- rely heavily on the very first piece of info. received (anchor)
- does NOT modify this anchor in light of later information
Attentional bias
prioritise attention to certain info. over other info.
Confirmation bias *
- seeks info. confirming existing beliefs
- dismisses contradictory evidence
- avoids dissonance
False-consensus bias *
- overestimate people’s beliefs, characteristics and behaviours
- assume people are more alike to us
Hindsight bias
- only after an event, overestimates that an outcome could be foreseen
- leads to unjustifiable risks
Misinformation effect
- info. gained AFTER an event to influence the memory of the original event
- mistaken recall
Optimism bias
- overestimate positive events, underestimate negative events
- motivational
Dunning–Kruger effect *
- overestimates own abilities they DON’T have expertise which leads to incorrect conclusions
- protective value
Availability heuristic *
- based on the difficulty of recalling examples
- info. stored long-term
Representativeness heuristic
- categorise by the closeness of similarity to our ideas
- judgements based on comparisons
Affect heuristic
- influenced by emotions
- current emotional state at the time of the decision
–> pos. emo. state = risky judgements
–> neg. emo. state = focus on potential risks
Prejudice
Old-fashioned: explicit discrimination
Modern: implicit discrimination
Discrimination
Direct: treated less favourably than another person or group
Indirect: requirement that appears to be neutral and the same for everyone in fact has the effect of disadvantaging someone
Prejudice vs discrimination:
- think and feel (P)
- do (D)
Ways to reduce prejudice
Intergroup/extended contact: interaction between people from different social groups to reduce prejudice
Contact hypothesis: intergroup contact under appropriate conditions to reduce prejudice
- Superordinate goal: two diff social groups work together to achieve a common shared goal
Cognitive interventions: a psychological intervention, a technique and therapy practised in counselling
