Chapter 2

Question 1

What is Social Cognition?

Answer 1

how people think about themselves and their social world, how they select, interpret and remember social information

Question 2

What is learning?

Answer 2

the relatively permanent change in knowledge that is acquired through experience

Question 3

What is associational learning?

Answer 3

When an object or event comes to be associated with a natural response, such as an automatic behaviour or a positive or negative emotion

Question 4

What is operant learning? (part of associational learning)

Answer 4

Learning from experiencing the consequences of our behaviour (punish = - likely and reward=+ likely)

Question 5

What is observational learning? (modeling)

Answer 5

observing others and modeling their behaviour

Question 6

What is vicarious reinforcement?

Answer 6

involves learning through observation of the consequences of actions for other people (for example a child might see that someone smoking makes that person cough, therefore does not want to imitate the behaviour)

Question 7

The Social Cognitive theory explains human behaviour in terms of a continuous influence between 3 factors, which are?

Answer 7

Cognitive
Behaviour
Environment

Question 8

What is the cognitive system (controlled cognition)?

Answer 8

lower, used less frequently, uses rule-based logic, make deliberate decisions, plan behaviour (when we deliberately think about something)

Question 9

What is the experiential system (automatic cognition)?

Answer 9

unconscious, intuitive way of thinking, fast, frequently used, guided by associations, and lots of habits that have been formed by emotions (make stimuli more salient)

Question 10

What are heuristics?

Answer 10

mental shortcuts, or rules of thumb, that are used for making judgments and decisions (may sometimes lead to errors)

Question 11

What is availability heuristics?

Answer 11

mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind
• Ex: more people die by cars than by planes accidents; but we still fear planes more (movies and stuff; concept is more salient)

Question 12

What is representativeness heuristics?

Answer 12

mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case (judgement about how well the event matches our expectations)
• Ex: 42 yr old who plays tennis and listens to fancy radio; is he a Ivy League prof or a truck driver? Most probably Ivy League prof? - however there are way more truck drivers in pop; therefore statistically speaking he has + chances of being a truck driver

Question 13

What is a base rate fallacy?

Answer 13

view an event or object as extremely representative and make a probability judgement without stopping to consider base rate values

Question 14

What are categories?

Answer 14

containers in which people place things that are similar to each other (mentally)

Question 15

What are schemas?

Answer 15

mental structure stored in memory that contains prior knowledge and associations with a concept (schemas are stored INTO categories)

Question 16

How can schemas be facilitators?

Answer 16

makes the understanding of complicated instructions much more simple when we know they refer to the process of laundry (laundry example)

Question 17

What are social schemas?

Answer 17

how people behave in certain social situations

Question 18

What are event schemas?

Answer 18

scripts of how certain situations are likely to happen

Question 19

What are person schemas?

Answer 19

impression of how people are

Question 20

What is self-schema?

Answer 20

Self-concept

Question 21

Where do schemas come from?

Answer 21

Cultural sources
Word of mouth
Media

Question 22

What is accomodation?

Answer 22

Adjusting schema to include info

Question 23

What is assimilation?

Answer 23

Manipulate new info to fit schema

Question 24

What is the outcome of assimilation?

Answer 24

confirmation bias; tendency for people to favor information that confirms their expectations, regardless of whether the information is true

Question 25

What is a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Answer 25

process that occurs when our expectations about others lead us to behave toward those others in ways that make those expectations come true

Question 26

How are self-fulfilling prophecies also called?

Answer 26

Pygmalion or Rosenthal effect

Question 27

What is the perseverance effect?

Answer 27

We stick to our first impressions even though we know its probably wrong

Question 28

What is cognitive accessibility?

Answer 28

ease with which people can bring an idea into consciousness

Question 29

What is chronic accessibility?

Answer 29

highly accessible, based on past experiences

Question 30

What is temporal accessibility?

Answer 30

based on recent experiences or related to a current goal

Question 31

What is priming?

Answer 31

the process by which recent experiences increase a schema or trait’s accessibility

Question 32

What is processing fluency?

Answer 32

the ease with which we can process information in our environments

Question 33

What is the false consensus effect (or consensus bias)?

Answer 33

tendency to exaggerate how common our opinions are in the general population (we tend to see other people as similar to us)

Question 34

What is counterfactual thinking?

Answer 34

mentally changing some aspect of the past as way of imagining what might have been
• Upward: imagining outcomes that are better than reality
• Downward: outcomes worse than reality

Question 35

What is anchoring and adjustement?

Answer 35

anchoring to initial information prevents us from adjusting our schema (our decisions are overly based on the things that are most highly accessible in memory)

Question 36

What is overconfidence barrier?

Answer 36

he barrier that results when people have too much confidence in the accuracy of their judgments

Question 37

What is the Dunning and Kruger Effect?

Answer 37

We over evaluate our competence when we know nothing in a domain, and it becomes more accurate when we learn more about the subject