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
19
Q
Attribution
A
- inferring the cause of an event
- People do this spontaneously, without even knowing they’re doing it
- Relies partly on schemas about the nature of social situations
- Default values -> make inferences beyond the information that’s present
- Using different schemas -> make different inferences about the causes of events
20
Q
Weiner’s Attibutional Theory of Motivation and Emotion
A
- Causes of success and failures: ability, effort, task difficulty, luck or chance factors
- Locus of causality: internal (ability and effort); external (chance factors, task difficulty, powerful others)
- Pride/Self Esteem vs. None
- Vary in stability
- Stable (ability)
- Vary from one time to another (effort)
- Hopelessness vs. Hopefulness
- Controllability
- Intentional vs. Not Intentional
- Shame vs. Guilt (when self directed) (control but not do well vs. control but did not put enough effort)
- Angry (intentionally to be bad) vs. Gratitude (wasn’t intentional and good outcome) vs. Pity (uncontrollable and lost job) (when other directed)
- People generally tend to interpret their successes as having internal stable causes- their ability
- People tend to see failures as caused by relatively unstable influences- bad luck or too little effort
- Individual differences in attributional tendencies -> big effects
- See failure as caused by unstable factors -> no need to worry about the future (the situation probably won’t be the same next time)
- If the cause is stable -> see failures as caused by ability or the world is permanently against you -> face the same situation next time and every time -> your failure hold only more failure
- Seeing stable and permanent reasons for bad life outcomes -> depression, sickness and death
21
Q
Nodes
A
- areas of storage, are linked if they have a logical connection
- Some are semantic -> linking attributes that contribute to a category
- Others are episodic -> linking attributes that form an event
- Bits of information that have a lot to do with each other are strongly linked
- All knowledge is an elaborate web associations of different strengths among huge number of nodes of information
- When a memory node is actived -> the information it contains is in consciousness
- A node can be activated by an intentional search
- As one node becomes active -> partial activation spreads to other nodes related to it
- The stronger the relation -> the greater the degree of spreading
- Makes it easier for the related area to come all the way to consciousness
- Takes less of a boost to make it fully active
- An extra boost sometimes comes from another source -> the node becomes active enough for its content to pop into awareness
- If the node hadn’t already been partially active, the boost wouldn’t have been enough
22
Q
Priming
A
- activating a node by a task that precedes the task of interest
*First used to study two questions
-Whether the same information is more accessible later on
=It takes a while for the activation to fade
=This partial activation would leave the node more accessible than before until the activation is gone.
-Whether related information becomes more accessible after the priming
=Yes
*These effects occur only if the primed information can plausibly be applied to the later event.
*Priming seems to activate the full dimension, not just the end that’s primed
*Events can make information more accessible
*Differ in what categories are readily accessible for them
*The most accessible categories are the ones the people use the most
*Chronic accessibility reflects people’s readiness to use particular schemas in seeing the world -> provide information about how that person sees the world
*Influence people’s actions
-Goals activated -> makes attitudes more positive toward stimuli that could facilitate achieving the goal
-Increases tendencies toward different but related behaviors- as young as 18 months
*Primes of particular type of procedural knowledge -> use of that same knowledge in the future
23
Q
Subliminal primes (John Bargh)
A
- primes outside their awareness
- Often have the same effects as overt primes
- Goal linked to particular relationships -> priming the relationship outside awareness activates the related goal pursuing unconsciously
- Subliminally priming an emotion -> judgments of subsequent stimuli to take on that emotional quality
24
Q
Connectionism
A
- uses neuronal processes as a metaphor for cognitive processes
- Nervous system processes information simultaneously along many pathways -> parallel processing
- Holds that representations aren’t centralized in specific nodes
- A representation exists in a pattern of activation of an entire network of neurons
- Describe cognition in terms of networks of simple neuron-like units, in which processing means passing activations from one unit to another
- Each unit can be either excitatory or inhibitatory -> either adds to or subtracts from the total activity of the unit for which it serves as input
- Each unit sums its inputs (pluses and minuses) and passes the total onward
- Energy passes in only one direction for each connection, as in neurons
- But links are often assumed in which activation goes from a “later” unit back to an “earlier” one -> true for neurons
- Network reacts to an input with a pattern of activity
- Input -> connections -> output (response to input)
- The pattern of activations in the network is updated repeatedly- potentially, quite often.
- Gradually, the system “settles” into a configuration, and further updates yield no more change.
25
Q
Social perception and decision making in connectionism
A
- Selecting one possibility from among two or more
- Experience is being constructed from bits of input
- Activations get transferred from unit to unit, around and around
- As the activation pattern is updated over and over, some constraints get stronger and some get weaker.
- The network, as a whole, settles into a pattern -> perception or the decision
- Decisions re made from fitting bits of evidence together despite their constraints on one another.
- Once a decision has been reached -> influence back on your evaluation of the evidence, making it more coherent with the decision
- Very hard to tell ahead of time how they will settle out
- These networks can be very stable, they sometimes reorganize abruptly
- Effects of that small change are amplified instead of dampened -> profound reverberation over cycles -> drastic reorganization
26
Q
Dual-process models (Smolensky)
A
- Conscious processor is used for effortful reasoning and following of programs of instructions
- intuitive processor manages intuitive problem solving, heuristic strategies, and skilled or automatic activities using connectionist processes
27
Q
Seymour Epstein’s cognitive-experiential self-theory
A
- assumes that we experience reality through two systems
- The rational system operates mostly consciously, uses logical rules, and is fairly slow - symblic processor in rational mind
- The experiential system is tuitive; “quick and dirty” way of assessing and responding to reality; relies on shortcuts and readily available information; functions automatically and largely outside consciousness
- Both systems are always at work and that they jointly determine behavior
- Each can also be engaged to a greater degree by circumstances
- The more emotionally charged a situation is, the more thinking is dominated by the experimential system
- The experiential system resulted from eons of evolution.
- Dominates when speed is needed as when the situation is emotionally charged
- Act fast; can’t even wait to form an intention (avoid danger)
- The rational system- recent in origin
- Provides a more cautious, analytic, planful way of proceeding
- When you have enough time and freedom from pressure to think things through
28
Q
Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion
A
- Two different routes to persuasion in making decisions
- Central route occurs when a person is thinking carefully about a situation, elaborating on the information they are given, and creating an argument. This route occurs when an individual’s motivation and ability are high.
- The peripheral route occurs when a person is not thinking carefully about a situation and uses shortcuts to make judgments. This route occurs when an individual’s motivation and ability are low.
29
Q
Explicit knowledge
A
- accessible on demand
- comes from verbal, conceptual learning
- rational, deliberative system
30
Q
Implicit knowledge
A
- which isn’t accessible on demand; existence of automatic mental associations we aren’t really aware of
- Concerns prejudices and how they’re mentally represented
- comes from simple association learning- classical and instrumental conditioning
- starts forming earlier in life than explicit knowledge
- experiential or reflexive or intuitive system
31
Q
Implicit self-esteem
A
- Relate to negative feeling states in day-to-day life, independent of any role of explicit self-esteem
- Isn’t very highly correlated with explicit self-esteem
- Both implicit and explicit attitudes -> behaviors (different aspects of behavior)
32
Q
Cognitive-social learning person variables (Mischel)
A
- Person’s competencies: the skills that one develops over life
- Skills for manipulating the physical world
- Develop social skills and problem-solving strategies, tools for analyzing the social world
- Different people have different patterns of competencies
- Situations also vary in what competencies they call for
- Different situations provide opportunities for different persons to take advantage of.
- Encoding strategies and personal constructs
- Covers schemas
- Unique worldview each person develops
- People construe events and people differently, depending on the schema they’re using
- Two people react to the same situation differently because they literally experience it differently.
- But to know what people will do in that world, you also need to know their expectancies
- An anticipation that one kind of event typically leads to another event
- Expectancies about what’s connected to what provide continuity in experience
- Behavior-outcome expectancy: the belief that particular acts typically lead to particular outcomes
- Expectancies begin to specify what people do: people do what they think will produce outcomes
- Knowing what outcomes the person wants to produce: the person’s subjective values
- Cause people to use their expectancies in action
- Self-regulatory systems and plans
- Set goals, make plans, and do the various things that need to be done to see that the plans are realized in action
33
Q
Cognitive-affective processing system (Mischel and Shoda) (1995)
A
- reflects the recognition that emotion plays a key role in much of cognitive experience
- People develop organizations of information about the nature of situations, other people and the self.
- These schema are more complex
- Have a kind of if…then property- a conditional quality
- People normally think in conditional terms about each other
- People also think conditionally about themselves
- Norms- appropritate actions in those situations
34
Q
Individuality arises from two sources
A
- People differ in the accessibility of their various schemas and the cues that evoke the schemas
- Different schemas are likely to pop up for different people in a given setting
- People literally perceive different things in the same situation.
- People differ in their if…then profiles
- When a schema is active, the person will act in ways that fits it.
- Different actions for different people
35
Q
To predict consistency of action -> you need to know two things
A
- You need to know how the person construes the situation (which depends on the person’s schemas and their accessibility)
- You need to know the person’s if …then profile
36
Q
Behavioral signature
A
- the unique profile of if…then relations for a person’s personality
- May define personality
- Relatively stable over time
- Account for temporal consistency in behavior- element in conceptions of personality
37
Q
Mirror neurons
A
- certain neurons that are active when a monkey does an action are also active when the monkey sees the same action
- Perceptual memories may actually be organized in terms of potentials for action
38
Q
Cognitive assessment
A
- range from interviews and self-reports to think-aloud protocols, in which a person says what comes to mind while doing an acitivity.
- A variation on this is experience sampling, which is more intermittent.
39
Q
Think-aloud approaches
A
*assess cognition during problem solving
40
Q
Experience sampling
A
- People report at certain times what they’ve been thinking and doing
- Some are made at scheduled times
- Sometimes are randomly paged and asked to report
- Allows researchers to sample across a wide range of events in a person’s day
- Find out what cognitions and emotions go along with which kinds of events
41
Q
Event recording or self-monitoring
A
- Focuses not on particular moments of the day but on particular classes of events
- The person records instances of specific event types, noting the behavior, emotion, or thought pattern and documenting information about what was going on at that moment.
- Lets the person see regularities in the contexts that surround particular thoughts and emotions
- Provides a better understanding of what schemas he or she is automatically using
42
Q
Automatic thoughts
A
- Inaccurate schemas are used quickly and spontaneously
- Influence feelings and behaviors
- Run-on quality: negative feelings -> more use of negative schemas -> more negative affect and so on
- Expecting emotional distress makes distress more likely
- People who are prone to depression or anxiety seem to over-rely on information in memory and under-rely on the reality of the situation
43
Q
Cognitive triad (Beck)
A
*negative thinking about the self, the world, and the future
44
Q
Cognitive restructuring/reframing
A
- Therapy should help people to put faulty schemas aside and build new ones
- People must learn to recognize automatic self-defeating thoughts and substitute other self-talk
- People must also learn to focus on the information in the situation and rely less on their preconceptions
- These people should become more controlled in processing what’s going on and less automatic
45
Q
Cognitive therapies
A
- Changing faulty schemas and their consequences
- Getting people to go ahead and do things they expect (unrealistically) to have bad consequences
- If the bad outcome doesn’t happen -> re-examine/change expectations
- People are encouraged to view their thought patterns as hypotheses to be tested, instead of as certainties
- Encouraged to go ahead and test the hypotheses
- Large impact on how people view themselves
