Chapter 2: Key Terms Flashcards
Social Cognition
How people think about themselves and the social world, or more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments and decisions
Automatic Thinking
Thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless
Schemas
Mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social world around themes or subjects and that influence the information people notice, think about, and remember
Accessibility
The extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people’s minds and are therefore likely to be used when we are making judgments about the social world
Priming
The process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, or concept
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
The case whereby people have an expectation about what another person is like, which influences how they act toward that person, which causes that person to behave consistently with people’s original expectations, making the expectations come true
Judgmental Heuristics
Mental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently
Availability Heuristic
A mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind
Representativeness Heuristic
A mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case
Base Rate Information
Information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population
Controlled Thinking
Thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful
Counterfactual Thinking
Mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been
Thought Suppression
The attempt to avoid thinking about something we would prefer to forget
Overconfidence Barrier
The fact that people usually have too much confidence in the accuracy of their judgments
