Chapter 2: Social Cognition

Question 1

What are schemas?

Answer 1

They are cognitive frameworks for organising interpreting and recalling information.

Question 2

What is information overload?

Answer 2

It’s greater demands on cognitive systems more than what it’s capacity can provide.

Question 3

What are heuristics

Answer 3

They are simple rules for making complex decisions or drawing inferences in a quick and efficient manner.

Question 4

What is a prototype?

Answer 4

Is a list of attributes commonly possessed by members of a group.

Question 5

What is the representative heuristic?

Answer 5

A strategy for making judgments
based on the extent to which current stimuli or events resemble
other stimuli or categories.

Question 6

What is the availability heuristic?

Answer 6

A strategy for making judgments on the basis
of how easily specific kinds of information can be brought to mind.

Question 7

What is social cognition

Answer 7

The manner in which we interpret, analyze, remember, and use information about the social world.

Question 8

What is the portion size effect?

Answer 8

The tendency to eat more when a larger portion
of food is received than if a smaller portion is received. Portion size
acts as a starting point (anchor) for how much food is perceived to
be appropriate to eat. Since portion sizes have steadily increased
over time, this effect is believed to play an important role in overeating in western societies

Question 9

What is the status quo effect?

Answer 9

It’s choosing the tried and tested (old) over new and improved.

Question 10

What is the status quo effect?

Answer 10

It’s choosing the tried and tested (old) over new and improved.

Question 11

What are the three processes of social cognition?

Answer 11

1. Attention which refers to the info we notice.
2. Encoding which refers to the processes we use to store noticed info in memory.
3. Retrieval which refers to how we recover info from memory in order to use it later.

Question 12

What are the three processes of social cognition?

Answer 12

1. Attention which refers to the info we notice.
2. Encoding which refers to the processes we use to store noticed info in memory.
3. Retrieval which refers to how we recover info from memory in order to use it later.

Question 13

What is priming

Answer 13

situation that occurs when stimuli or events increase the

availability in memory or consciousness of specific types of information held in memory.

Question 14

What is unpriming

Answer 14

Refers to the fact that the effects of the schemas tend to
persist until they are somehow expressed in thought or behavior
and only then do their effects decrease.

Question 15

What is the perseverance effect

Answer 15

The tendency for beliefs and schemas to remain

unchanged even in the face of contradictory information.

Question 16

What is controlled processing?

Answer 16

processing A mode of social thought that is logical,

systematic, and effortfull.

Question 17

How do schemas prepare us for future interaction when we have no prior experience?

Answer 17

Decisions we make under conditions of uncertainty involve the use of heuristic strategies which are simple rules for drawing inferences in a rapid and efficient manner.

Question 18

What is the optimistic bias ?

Answer 18

Our predisposition to expect things to turn out well
overall.

Question 19

What is the overconfidence bias

Answer 19

It’s the overestimation of a person’s judgement and prediction about themselves.

Question 20

What is error by omission

Answer 20

Having a lack of comparative info that would allow them to know what factors they haven’t considered.

Question 21

What is the planning fallacy

Answer 21

The tendency to make optimistic predictions concerning how long a given task will take for completion.

Question 22

What is counterfactual thinking?

Answer 22

tendency to imagine other outcomes in
a situation than the ones that actually occurred (“What might have
been”).

Question 23

What is magical thinking

Answer 23

Thinking involving assumptions that don’t hold
up to rational scrutiny—for example, the belief that things that
resemble one another share fundamental properties.

Question 24

What is the law of similarity

Answer 24

Things that resemble one another share basic properties.

Question 25

What is terror management?

Answer 25

Our efforts to cope with the knowledge that we will die.

Question 26

What is affect?

Answer 26

It is our current moods and emotions. Which influence the world around us.

Question 27

What is cognition

Answer 27

Various aspects of the ways in which we think process store remember and use info.

Question 28

What is the mood congruence effect

Answer 28

The fact that we are more likely to store or remember positive information when in a positive mood and negative information when in a negative mood

Question 29

What is mood dependent memory?

Answer 29

The fact that what we remember while in a given mood may be determined, in part, by what we learned when previously in that mood

Question 30

What are affective forecasts ?

Answer 30

Predictions about how we would feel about events we have not actually experienced