Chapter 2 Flashcards
What is Social Cognition?
how people think about themselves and their social world, how they select, interpret and remember social information
What is learning?
the relatively permanent change in knowledge that is acquired through experience
What is associational learning?
When an object or event comes to be associated with a natural response, such as an automatic behaviour or a positive or negative emotion
What is operant learning? (part of associational learning)
Learning from experiencing the consequences of our behaviour (punish = - likely and reward=+ likely)
What is observational learning? (modeling)
observing others and modeling their behaviour
What is vicarious reinforcement?
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)
The Social Cognitive theory explains human behaviour in terms of a continuous influence between 3 factors, which are?
Cognitive
Behaviour
Environment
What is the cognitive system (controlled cognition)?
lower, used less frequently, uses rule-based logic, make deliberate decisions, plan behaviour (when we deliberately think about something)
What is the experiential system (automatic cognition)?
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)
What are heuristics?
mental shortcuts, or rules of thumb, that are used for making judgments and decisions (may sometimes lead to errors)
What is availability heuristics?
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)
What is representativeness heuristics?
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
What is a base rate fallacy?
view an event or object as extremely representative and make a probability judgement without stopping to consider base rate values
What are categories?
containers in which people place things that are similar to each other (mentally)
What are schemas?
mental structure stored in memory that contains prior knowledge and associations with a concept (schemas are stored INTO categories)
How can schemas be facilitators?
makes the understanding of complicated instructions much more simple when we know they refer to the process of laundry (laundry example)
What are social schemas?
how people behave in certain social situations
What are event schemas?
scripts of how certain situations are likely to happen
What are person schemas?
impression of how people are
What is self-schema?
Self-concept
Where do schemas come from?
Cultural sources
Word of mouth
Media
What is accomodation?
Adjusting schema to include info
What is assimilation?
Manipulate new info to fit schema
What is the outcome of assimilation?
confirmation bias; tendency for people to favor information that confirms their expectations, regardless of whether the information is true
What is a self-fulfilling prophecy?
process that occurs when our expectations about others lead us to behave toward those others in ways that make those expectations come true
How are self-fulfilling prophecies also called?
Pygmalion or Rosenthal effect
What is the perseverance effect?
We stick to our first impressions even though we know its probably wrong
What is cognitive accessibility?
ease with which people can bring an idea into consciousness
What is chronic accessibility?
highly accessible, based on past experiences
What is temporal accessibility?
based on recent experiences or related to a current goal
What is priming?
the process by which recent experiences increase a schema or trait’s accessibility
What is processing fluency?
the ease with which we can process information in our environments
What is the false consensus effect (or consensus bias)?
tendency to exaggerate how common our opinions are in the general population (we tend to see other people as similar to us)
What is counterfactual thinking?
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
What is anchoring and adjustement?
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)
What is overconfidence barrier?
he barrier that results when people have too much confidence in the accuracy of their judgments
What is the Dunning and Kruger Effect?
We over evaluate our competence when we know nothing in a domain, and it becomes more accurate when we learn more about the subject
