Ch. 3 Social Cognition

Question 1

Social Cognition

Answer 1

how people think about themselves and the social world; more specifically how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgement and decisions

• there are two types of social cognition
  
  • automatic thinking
  • controlled thinking

Question 2

Automatic thinking

Answer 2

thinking that is non-conscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless
-helps us understand new situations by relating them to our prior experiences

Question 3

Self-fulfilling prophecy

Answer 3

the case wherein people have an expectation about what another person is like, which influences how they act toward that person, which causes the person to behave consistently with people’s original expectation, making the expectations come true

• an example of this is automatic thinking
• another example is blooming student experiment by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson

Question 4

judgmental heuristics

Answer 4

metal shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently
-this does not guarantee that people will make accurate inferences about the world

Question 5

availability heuristic

Answer 5

a mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgement in the case with each they can bring something to mind

• the problem with this is that sometimes what is easiest to remember is not typical of the overall picture, leading to faulty conclusions
• this also affects doctors

Question 6

representaticeness heuristic

Answer 6

a mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a topical case

Question 7

analytic thinking style

Answer 7

a type of thinking in which people focus on the properties of objects without considering their surrounding context

• this type of thinking is common in western cultures
  
  • only the focus on the eyes/ face of person in a group

Question 8

holistic thinking style

Answer 8

a type of thinking in which people focus in the overall context. particularly the ways in which objects relate to each other; this type of thinking is common in East Asian Cultures

• example china
  
  • for example focusing on the background instead of the foreground

Question 9

controlled thinking

Answer 9

thinking that is conscious, intentional voluntary, and effort full

Question 10

counterfactual thinking

Answer 10

mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been

• the easier it is to mentally undo an outcome, the stronger the emotional reaction to it
• controlled thinking that takes up energy