Ch. 2 - Social Cognition Flashcards
Social Cognition
The study of how people come to believe what they do; how they explain, remember, predict, make decisions, and evaluate themselves and others; and why these processes so frequently produce errors.
Cognitive Misers
The idea that people try to conserve cognitive energy in decision-making by taking mental shortcuts whenever they can.
Bias Blind Spot
The belief that we are more objective and less biased than most other people.
Explanatory Style
Habitual pattern of explaining their successes and failures that affects their sense of control and emotional well-being.
Confirmation Bias
We notice, remember, and accept information that confirms what we already believe, and tend to ignore, forget, and reject information that disconfirms what we believe.
Egocentric Bias
The tendency to perceive one’s self as more central to events than one really is
Spotlight Effect
The tendency of people to feel as though social spotlight shines more brightly on them than it actually does.
(We think people pay attention to us more than they actually do)
Cloak of Invisibility Illusion
We may feel we’re in the spotlight when imagining how others see us, but we also feel that we notice and observe others more than they notice and observe us.
Negativity Bias
The tendency to focus more on potential threats than blessings (negative stimuli are more salient)
Loss Aversion
When given a choice, people are more likely to try to avoid loss than try to achieve gains.
Ingroup
The group which we identify and feel we belong, see those in the group as unique individuals.
Outgroup
A group with which an individual does not identify, tend to see those in the outgroup as more alike.
Belonging
Our desire for stable, meaningful connections with others.
Need for Control
The feeling that we have the autonomy and competence to direct our own actions and make things happen.
Attribution Theory
A theory that describes the way in which people explain the causes of their own and other people’s behaviors.
Causal Attributions
Everyday people’s attempts to understand why others act as they do, not as systematic as professional scientists.
Dispositional Attribution
An explanation for someone’s behavior that has to do with the person’s typical personality.
Situational Attribution
An explanation for someone’s behavior that has to do with the person’s situation.
Fundamental Attribution Error
The tendency to overestimate people’s behavior in regards to internal dispositional factors and underestimate the role of situational factors.
Contrast Effect
An object appears to be better or worse than it is, depending on the quality of objects it is compared to.
Social Comparison
Process by which we evaluate our abilities, achievements, attitudes, and other attributes by comparing ourselves to others.
Priming
The use of subtle cues that direct our thinking; a procedure based on the notion that ideas that have been recently encountered or frequently activated are more likely to come to mind and thus will be used in interpreting social events.
Primacy Effect
Information encountered first has more impact on impressions/beliefs than subsequent information.
Heuristics
Mental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently.
Representative Heuristic
A mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case.
Ex). People with tattoos are often stigmatized and perceived as less professional in job interview settings. Under the representativeness heuristic, a hiring manager might perceive a candidate with tattoos as unsuited for the job
Availability Heuristic
Tendency to predict likelihood of event or judge how risky it is based on how easy it is to bring specific examples to mind.
Ex). People overestimate the risk of shark attacks because there are far more news stories and movies about them. As a result, images of shark attacks are easier to bring to mind. If you can quickly think of multiple examples of something happening, then you are tricked into thinking it must happen often.
Affect Heuristic
When feelings shape our evaluations of people or ideas.
Halo Effect
A bias in which our favorite or unfavorable general impression of a person affects our inferences about and future expectations of that person.
Ex). Pretty People Privilege
Schemas
Mental models of the world such as stereotypes, mindsets, attitudes.
Self-Serving Bias
A tendency for individuals to make dispositional attributions for their successes and situational attributions for their failures.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
The case whereby people 1) have an expectation about what another person is like, which 2) influences how they act toward that person, which 3) causes that person to behave in a way consistent with those people’s original expectations.
Social Identity Theory
Most important memberships in religious, political, regional, national, occupational groups feed sense of belonging and self worth and shape thinking about people in or beyond our group.
Growth Mindset
Believe in human ability to grow and the commitment to self improvement.
Reconstructive Memory
How suggestive questioning can influence memory and eyewitness testimony.
Reconstructive Process
Memories most strongly influenced not by what actually happened in the past, but what we think about those events in the present.
Automatic Processing
Unconscious (implicit) and involuntary operations that guide most behavior: well-learned associations or routes that mental systems perform effortlessly without awareness.
Ex). Reading
Controlled Processing
Conscious, explicit, effort we make in dealing with novel problems.
Ex). Solving a complex algebraic equation
The Default Mode Network
A set of interacting brain regions that are active when not directed to a task or focused on the outside world.
