Chapter 2 Flashcards
What are the differences between thoughts and cognition?
Thought is the internal language/symbols we use (often conscious) while cognition refers to mental processing that is relatively automatic, which we are largely unaware of.
What is Social Cognition?
It is the cognitive processes and structures that influence and are influenced by social behaviour. It was very popular in the 1980s and expanded on social psychological research ever since.
What is the history of social cognition?
Wilhelm Wundt started examining cognition through autobiographical methods. Later, the popularity American behaviourism made cognition appear unscientific. But the 1960s made a fresh interest on cognition due to lack of explanation for language (cognitive revolution). The computer revolution led to an idea of a human “computer model” for cognition (encoding, storage and retrieval) although not entirely accurate with emotions/limited cognitive capacity. Later, Kurt Lewin used gestalt psychology to explain cognition in social psychology - introducing the four guises. Now, there is more focus on social neuroscience.
What is gestalt psychology?
Perspective in which the whole influences constituent parts, rather than vice versa.
What are the four guises of Lewin for social cognition?
- Cognitive consistency
- Naive scientist
- Cognitive miser
- Motivated tactician
What is cognitive consistency?
A model of social cognition in which people try to reduce inconsistency among their
cognitions, because they find inconsistency unpleasant.
What is a naive scientist?
Model of social cognition that characterises people as using rational, scientific-like, cause–
effect analyses to understand their world.
What is a cognitive miser?
A model of social cognition that characterises people as using the least complex and demanding cognitions that generally produce adaptive behaviours.
What is a motivated tactician?
A model of social cognition that characterises people as having multiple cognitive strategies available, which they choose from based on personal goals, motives and needs.
What is social neuroscience?
Exploration of brain activity associated with social cognition and social psychological processes and phenomena.
What is Asch’s configural model?
Asch’s gestalt-based model of impression formation, in which central traits play a disproportionate role in configuring the final impression over peripheral traits. Asch did an experiment for warm/cold and competence, which proved these results.
What are central traits?
Traits that have a disproportionate influence on the configuration of final impressions, in Asch’s configural model of impression formation.
What are peripheral traits?
Traits that have an insignificant influence on the configuration of final impressions, in Asch’s
configural model of impression formation.
What may be biases in forming impressions?
- Primacy and recency
- Positivity and negativity - we assume positivity in people, but negativity sticks in our mind.
- Personal constructs and implicit personality theories
- Physical appearance
- Stereotypes
- Social judgeability
What is primacy?
An order of presentation effect in which earlier presented information has a disproportionate influence on social cognition.
What is recency?
An order of presentation effect in which later-presented information has a disproportionate influence on social cognition. Happens when distracted or when you have little motivation to attend to someone.
What are personal constructs?
Idiosyncratic and personal ways of characterising other people.
What are implicit personality theories?
Idiosyncratic and personal ways of characterising other people and explaining their behaviour. We have ideas about characteristics that fit together so that when we know one thing about a person we assume others.
What are stereotypes?
Widely shared and simplified evaluative image of a social group and its members.
What is social judgeability?
Perception of whether it is socially acceptable to judge a specific target.
What is a schema?
Cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among those attributes.
What is a script?
A schema about an event.
What are the types of schemas?
- Person schemas
- Role schemas
- Scripts
- Content-free schemas - not a specific category but a limited number of rules of processing information
- Self-schemas
What are roles?
Patterns of behaviour that distinguish between different activities within the group, and that interrelate to one another for the greater good of the group.
What are prototypes?
Cognitive representation of the typical/ideal defining features of a category that are kind of fuzzy (not a definitive list).
What is a family resemblance?
Defining property of category membership.
What is an exemplar?
Specific instances of a member of a category.
What are associative networks?
Model of memory in which nodes or ideas are connected by associative links along which cognitive activation can spread. Activating one concept makes others (via links) more accessible
What is the difference between a prototype and a schema?
Prototypes are relatively nebulous, unorganised fuzzy representations of a category; schemas are highly organised specifications of features and their interrelationships
What are some facets of stereotyping?
People do it easily, they are slow to change, often respond to wider societal changes, acquired at an early age, increase with social tension/conflict and may not be inaccurate/wrong but serve to make sense of certain groups
What is the Accentuation Principle?
Categorisation accentuates perceived similarities within and differences between groups on dimensions that people believe are correlated with the categorisation. The effect is amplified where the categorisation and/or dimension has subjective importance, relevance or value.
What is Social Identity Theory?
Theory of group membership and intergroup relations based on self-categorisation, social comparison and the construction of a shared self-definition in terms of ingroup-defining properties.
What is Self-Categorisation Theory?
Turner and associates’ theory of how the process of categorising oneself as a group member produces social identity and group and intergroup behaviours.
What type of categories do people make?
Basic-level categories that are neither too inclusive or too exclusive
What may be some individual differences that lead to different schema usage?
- Attributional complexity (the complexity of their explanations of others)
- Uncertainty orientation (interest in gaining information vs. being uninformed but certain)
- Need for cognition (how much they like to think deeply about things)
- Need for cognitive closure (How quickly one needs to tidy cognitive loose ends)
- Cognitive complexity (How complex their cognitive processes and representations are)
What is accessibility?
Ease of recall of categories or schemas that we already have in mind.
What are some features of schemas?
They become more abstract and richer/complex as more instances are encountered, they become more organised, compact, resilient and generally more accurate, they are relatively resistant to change unless really innaccurate
How may schemas change?
- Bookkeeping - slow change in the face of accumulating evidence
- Conversion - sudden and massive change once a critical mass of disconfirming evidence has accumulated
- Subtyping - schemas morph into a subcategory to accommodate disconfirming evidence.
What influences social encoding?
Cognitive processes occur in a situation/context, and depending on that situation/context certain information may be salient, vivid or more accessible
What is salience?
Property of a stimulus that makes it stand out in relation to other stimuli and attract attention.
How might someone be salient?
If they are novel in the immediate context, they are behaving in ways that do not fit prior expectations of them and if they are important to your goals, dominate your visual field or if you have to pay attention to them.
What is vivideness?
An intrinsic property of a stimulus on its own that makes it stand out and attract attention.
How might something be vivid?
If they are emotionally attention-grabbing, concrete and image-provoking and if they are close to you in time/place
What is priming?
Activation of accessible categories or schemas in memory that influence how we process new information.
What is Behavioural Decision Theory?
Set of normative models (ideal processes) for making accurate social inferences
What are heuristics?
Cognitive short-cuts that provide adequately accurate inferences for most of us most of the time.
What is a representativeness heuristic?
A cognitive short-cut in which instances are assigned to categories or types based on
overall similarity or resemblance to the category
What is an availability heuristic?
A cognitive short-cut in which the frequency or likelihood of an event is based on how quickly instances or associations come to mind
What is the anchoring and adjustment heuristic?
A cognitive short-cut in which inferences are tied to initial standards or schemas.
What may be the criticisms of social cognition?
That is way more of the cognitive psychology than social psychology and may be reductionist - social neuroscience may falter in the same way but worse
How do we form first impressions of people?
- We observe visible features
- We interpret non-verbal language
- We search for an explanation of what people do/say
What is the order of cognition when meeting someone for the first time?
- Schemas and Social Categorisation - fast and automatic, make knowledge salient and influence what we think/feel/do
- Heuristics - Decision rules that apply when we are not thinking systematically
What is social categorisation?
The tendency to categorise objects/people into discrete groups based on shared characteristics among them
