Chapter 1-3 Introduction and Social Cognition

Question 1

What is Social Psychology?

Answer 1

Social psychology is defined as the scientific study of the ways in which people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people.

Question 2

What is the difference between the study of social psychology and sociology?

Answer 2

The social psychologist is concerned with the individual in the context of a social situation, while the sociologist is interested in groups of people. The social psychologist is interested in the properties of human nature, while the sociologist is concerned with the properties of societies.

Question 3

What is the fundamental attribution error?

Answer 3

The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to explain our own and other people’s behavior entirely in terms of personal traits and to underestimate the power of social influence.

Question 4

What is a construal?

Answer 4

The individual’s interpretation of their social environment.

Question 5

The way in which an individul construes (perceives, comprehends, and interprets) a situation is largely shaped by two basic human motives:

Answer 5

• the need to be accurate

- the need to maintain a constant positive self-image.

Question 6

Correlation does not equate….

Answer 6

Causation

Question 7

Social cognition is..

Answer 7

The ways in which people think about themselves and the social world, including how they select, interpret, remember and use social information.

Question 8

There are two different kinds of social cognition, these are:

Answer 8

• Automatic thinking

- Controlled thinking.

Question 9

What are the hallmarks of automatic thought?

Answer 9

Nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary and effortless.

Question 10

What are schemas?

Answer 10

Mental structures that organize our knowledge about the social word. They influence the information we notice, think about, and remember. Our schemas contain our basic knowledge and impressions that we use to organize what we know about the social world and interpret new situations.

Question 11

Why do we have schemas?

Answer 11

They help us organize and make sense of the world and to fill in the gaps of our knowledge.

Question 12

In what types of situations are schemas most likely to be used?

Answer 12

Ambiguous situations.

Question 12

According to Chen & Andersen (1999), which three reasons are there for a schema becomming accessible?

Answer 12

1. A schema can be chronically accessible, influenced by life experiences.
2. A schema can become accessible because it is related to a current goal.
3. Schemas can become temporarily accessible because of our recent experiences (priming)

Question 13

Rosenthal and Leonore Jacobsons (1968) study on the effect of telling teachers that certain (randomized) students were bloomers proves the existence of..

Answer 13

Self-fulfilling prophecies.

Question 14

The teachers in Rosenthal and Jacobsons (1968) study clearly must have contributed to the “bloomers’” success, what type of social cognition was involved?

Answer 14

Automatic thinking. They were not aware that they were in any way prefering one child over the other.

Question 15

Under which conditions are self-fulfilling prophecies most likely to happen?

Answer 15

When people are not paying attention, thereby relying more on automatic thought.

Question 16

What are judgmental heuristics?

Answer 16

Judgemental heuristics are mental shortcuts used when there are more than one schema to apply to one situation.

Question 17

Mention two types of judgmental heuristics

Answer 17

The avaliablitiy heuristic, which is basing a judgment on the easy with which you can bring something to mind.
The representativeness heuristic, a mental shortcut to classify something according to how similar it is to a given case.

Question 18

Mention two culture-specific social cognition styles

Answer 18

Analytic and holistic thinking styles.

Question 19

What defines the analytic thinking style, and where is it predominant?

Answer 19

Richard Nisbett and his colleagues have found that people who grow up in Western cultures tend to have an analytic thinking style, a type of thinking which people focus on the properties of objects without considering their surrounding context.

Question 20

What defines the holistic thinking style and where is it predominant?

Answer 20

People who grow up in East Asian cultures (e.g. China, Japan or Korea) tend to have a holistic thinking style, a type of thinking in which people focus on the overall context particularly the ways in which objects relate to each other.

Question 21

What is was the design of Myiamotos experiment of holistic vs. analytic thinking style, and what conclusion can be drawn from it?

Answer 21

After discovering that photos of japanese cities had more objects in them than photos from american cities, he gave different photos to different groups (japanese city/american city - japanese students/american students) before giving them a “what’s missing”-task. Looking at pictures of japanese cities primed holistic thinking, while looking at pictures of american cities primed analytic thinking in both groups.

Question 22

Define controlled thinking

Answer 22

Thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary and effortful.

Question 23

People are more likely to cheat on a test if they believe they have ….

Answer 23

free will

Question 24

Facilitated communication was developed to allow communication-impared people express themselves. What turned out to be the problem with this technique, and what does this teach us?

Answer 24

It turned out that it was the facilitator that was unwittingly controlling the communication, not the communication-impaired person. This shows the disconnect between our conscious sense of how much we are causing our own actions and how much we REALLY are causing them.

Question 25

Medvec, Madey and Gilovich (1995) analyzed videotapes of the 1992 Olympics, and discovered that silver medalists were less happy than bronze medalists. What effect is this an example of?

Answer 25

Counterfactual reasoning

Question 26

What is counterfactual reasoning?

Answer 26

Mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been. There is a positive correlation between the amount of counterfactual reasoning and negative emotionality.

Question 27

What is the overconfidence barrier?

Answer 27

The fact that people usually have too much confidence in the accuracy of their judgments.