Chapter 12 The Cognitive Perspective Flashcards
1
Q
Cognitive Perspective- Basic Assumptions
A
- Personality reflects decision making, and decision making is not always rational
- How people represent experiences mentally
- How people make decisions
- Source of information
- You integrate and organize the bits of information the world provides you.
- The flow of life consists of an elaborate web of decisions
- Some are conscious
- Outside awareness
- Mental organization -> personality (biases)
- The flow of implicit decisions is less predictable than theorists used to think
- How the mind is organized and how personality thus is structured
- How events are represented in memory and how memories guide your experience of the world
- How all this complexity is organized and used is an important issue from the cognitive vantage point.
- George Kelly: cognitive theorists view people as implicit scientists
- Use partial information to make inferences about the rest
- Conserves mental resources
2
Q
Schemas
A
- mental organizations of information (knowledge structures)
- Roughly categories
- Sometimes explicit
- Sometimes implicit
- Can include many kinds of elements: perceptual images, abstract knowledge, emotion qualities, and information about time sequence
- Include information about specific cases called exemplars
- Include information about the more general sense of what the category is
- For any given category, you can bring to mind specific examples
- You can also bring to mind a sense of the category as a whole- captured in an idealized best member of the category, often called it prototype
- It’s an idealized member an average of those you’ve experienced so far
- Organizing quality
- Integrate meaning
- Event: collection of people, movements, objects in use
- But unless there’s a sense of what the event is about, the bits might just as well be random.
- Once schemas have been developed -> recognize new experiences
- By quickly (and mostly unconsciously) comparing them to the schemas
- If the features of the new event resemble an existing schema -> recognized as “one of those”
- Category: there’s a definition of what’s in it and what’s not, but that’s not always so
- Contribute to its nature but often they aren’t necessary
- Fuzzy set
- The more criteria relevant -> more likely it will be seen as a category member
- If there’s no required criterion, members can vary a lot in what attributes they do and don’t have.
3
Q
Fuzzy set
A
- the sense that a schema is defined in a vague way by a set of criteria that are relevant but not necessary.
4
Q
Personal constructs
A
- George Kelly: the uniqueness of each person’s subjective worldview
- impose them on reality
- People don’t experience the world directly but know it through the lens of their constructs
5
Q
Effects of Schemas
A
- Make it easy to put new information into memory
- What information sticks depends on what schema you use
- Tells where in the ongoing experience to look for information
- Look for information related to the schema
- Changing schemas changes what you look for -> notice different things
- Schema-based biases -> self-perpetuating
- Schemas tell you more than just where to look
- Suggest what you’re going to find
- You’re more likely to remember what confirms your expectation than what doesn’t
- Make the schema more solid in the future -> more resistant to change
- Default
6
Q
Default
A
- something you assume is true unless you’re told otherwise
- Bring default information from memory to fill gaps
7
Q
Semantic memory
A
- organzied by meaning
* Categories of objects and concepts
8
Q
Episodic memory
A
- memory for events or episodes
- Memory for experience in space and time
- Elements of an event are strung together as they happened
- Some are long and elaborate, and some are brief
- A brief event can be stored both by itself and as part of a longer event
9
Q
Script
A
- if you experience enough episodes of a given type -> schema for that class of episodes starts to form
- A prototype of an event category
- Used partly to perceive and interpret a common event
- Provides a perception with a sense of duration and a sense of flow and change throughout the event
- Defaults- things you assume to be true- supplied information to fill gaps in the story
- Allow a lot of diversity, but each has a basic structure
- When you encounter a new variation on it, you easily understand what’s going on.
10
Q
Procedural knowledge
A
- knowledge structures that pertain to actions
- Structures about the process of doing, rather than the more passive process of perceiving and understanding
- Sometimes means engaging in mental manipulations
- Harder to gain conscious access to much of this knowledge base
- Forms schematic structures that are used in different contexts
11
Q
Social cognition
A
*personality and social psychologists began to study how the processes involved in forming categories apply to socially meaningful stimuli
12
Q
Self-schema
A
- The one you form about yourself
- Little like self-concept, but also a little different
- Provides you with a lot of default information
- Tells you where to look for new information
- Bias your recall, twisting your recollections so they fit better with how you see yourself now
- Be larger and more complex
- Spent more time noticing things about yourself
- Incorporates both trait labels and information about concrete behaviors
- Has more emotional elements than other schemas
- Whether the self-schema is truly special
13
Q
Self schemas differ in the level of self complexity
A
- Some people keep different self-aspects distinct from each other
- Each role these people play, each goal they have, each activity they do has its own place in their self-image= high in self-complexity
- Lower in self-complexity= self-aspects are less distinct, everything blends together
- Feelings relating to a bad event in one aspect of life tend to spill over into other aspects of the self
- Individuals with more complex self schemas are more protected from stress/emotional costs of failure
14
Q
Possible selves (Markus)
A
- selves they expect to become; selves they’d like to become; selves they’re afriad of becoming; disliked selves; selves they think they ought to be
- Brought to bear as motivators, because they provide goals to approach or to avoid.
15
Q
Entity schemas
A
- Entity view: attend to and remember cues of consistency
* View of ability as fixed, leads to performance goals, helpless response, avoidance of challenge, loss of persistence
16
Q
Incremental schemas
A
- Incremental view: attend to and remember cues of change
* View of ability as malleable, leads to learning goals, mastery response, embrace challenge, increased persistence
17
Q
Dweck and Leggett (1988): A Social-Cognitive Approach to Motivation and Personality
A
- Entity theorist: more likely to give up after challenges; tend to lost of persistence; don’t believe that hard-work is going to pay off
- Incremental: embrace challenges; challenges as the ways to get better
- Children is being labeled in early age -> danger of the labels
18
Q
Grant & Dweck: Clarifying Achievement Goals and Their Impact
A
- Goal: Learning, Outcome, Ability, Normative
- Are all learning goals better than performance goals? Not all performance goals are the same.
- Learning: best types of goals (more coping)
- Negative correlation with loss of intrinsic motivation and withdrawel of time and effort
- Positive correlation with help-seeking and planning
- Ability
- Positive correlation with loss of intrinsic motivation and withdrawel of time and effort
- Negative correlation with help-seeking and planning
- If you have a learning goal, you are going to be more engage in deep processing, increase commitment
