C3 Flashcards
Social Cognition
How people think about themselves and the social world
How people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments and decisions
two kinds of social cognition
automatic and controlled (we did this in cognitive!)
auto-pilot/low-effort/automatic thinking
making decisions without real thought; nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless thinking
Quick
No conscious deliberation of thoughts, perceptions, assumptions
how do we automatic-think
Relate new to past experiences and use schemas
We often size up new situations very quickly and often correctly (tell the difference between classroom and party easily, apples/oranges, whatever.)
schemas
mental structures that organize our knowledge of social world
Influences info people notice, think about, and remember
stereotypes
When applied to members of a social
group such as a gender, or race, schemas
are commonly referred to as stereotypes.
–Can be applied rapidly and automatically
when we encounter other people.
Accessibility schema
The extent to which schemas and concepts are at the
forefront of people’s minds and are therefore likely to
be used when we are making judgments about the
social world
priming schema
The process by which recent experiences increase
the accessibility of a schema, trait, or concept. something might be chronically accessible due to past experience, or temporarily accessible because of our recent experience
Effortful/controlled thinking:
conscious effort into decision/effortful and deliberate
Thinking about self and environment
experiment on accessibility and priming
People who previously memorize words like
adventurous, self-confident, independent, and
persistent
–Formed positive impressions
•People primed with words like reckless
conceited, aloof, and stubborn
–Formed negative impressions
•Priming is a good example of automatic thinking
because it occurs quickly, unintentionally, and
unconsciously.
Priming is a good example of automatic thinking bc it occurs quickly, unintentionally, unconsciously (if ur in a bar vs hospital then see someone wandering; bar u think drunk, hospital u think patient)
self fulfilling prophecy experiment
Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson
demonstrated the self-fulfilling prophecy in an
elementary school
–Administered a test to all students
–Teachers led to believe particular students will
“bloom” academically in the upcoming year
–In actuality, students randomly assigned to condition
–At the end of the school year, students given an IQ
test
Bloomers did better bc:
•Treated “bloomers” differently in four critical ways:
– Created a warmer emotional climate for those students, giving
them more personal attention, encouragement, and support
– Gave them more challenging material
– Gave them more and better feedback
– Gave them more opportunities to respond in class and gave
them longer to respond
what can prime metaphors?
Physical sensations can prime metaphors –Example: ▪Scent of cleanliness ▪Cleanliness associated with morality; dirtiness with immorality
how can metaphors influence decisions?
Metaphors can influence decisions –Holding hot coffee or iced coffee –Encounter a stranger ▪Hot coffee: Primes “warm & friendly” metaphor –Stranger rated as friendly ▪Iced coffee: Primes “unfriendly people are cold” –Rate stranger as unfriendly (i like iced coffee; rude)
Judgmental Heuristics
Mental shortcuts people use to make
judgments quickly and efficiently
(as a result not always accurate)
availability heuristic:
mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind
Representative heuristic
A mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case/when people rely on representativeness to make judgments, they are likely to judge wrongly because the fact that something is more representative does not actually make it more likely
so if most monkeys are evil it doesn’t tell you anything about how likely your pet monkey is to be evil
you assume it’s evil because you assume “in other ways, my pet monkey is like a classic evil monkey, so it must be evil too”
base rate fallacy
A base rate fallacy is committed when a person misjudges likelihood of an event because he or she doesn’t take into account other relevant base rate information. What do we mean by relevant base rate information? Well, base rate concerns the likelihood of an event occurring out there in the world regardless of what the conditions of a particular situation may be.
They focus on other information that isn’t relevant instead. (like using the representativeness heuristic)
Base Rate Fallacy is our tendency to give more weight to the event-specific information than we should, and sometimes even ignore base rates entirely. Say a doctor performs a test that is 99% accurate, and you test positive for the disease. However, the incidence of the disease is 1/10,000. Your actual chance of having the disease is 1%, because the population of healthy people is so much larger than the disease.
Base rate information
–Information about the frequency of members
of different categories in the population
base rate concerns the likelihood of an event occurring out there in the world regardless of what the conditions of a particular situation may be.
•Analytic thinking style
–focus on objects without considering context
–associated with Western cultures
•Holistic thinking style
–focus on the overall context, relation between objects
–associated with Eastern cultures
cultural impact on thinking style
•Eastern and Western cultures capable of using both styles but environment in which people live “primes” one style over the other
controlled thinking
high effort thinking; Thinking that is conscious, intentional,
voluntary, and effortful
Counterfactual Reasoning
mental undoing of past–Mentally changing some aspect of the past in
imagining what might have been
▪“If only I had answered that one question differently, I would
have passed the test.”
–Can have a big influence on our emotional reactions
to events
second place sadness
counterfactual reasoning
Who do you think would be happier: someone who won a silver medal at the
Olympics or someone who won a bronze? Surprisingly, research shows that silver
medalists are often less happy, because they can more easily imagine how they
might have come in first and won a gold.
