Chapter 2: Social Cognition Flashcards
2.1 examine how heuristic strategies are employed to judge complex info. 2.2 describe the role of schemas in guiding our thoughts and actions 2.3 distinguish between automatic and controlled processing modes of social thought. 2.4 evaluate the imperfections of the social cognition process 2.5 assess the interrelation of affect and cognition.
What are schemas?
They are cognitive frameworks for organising interpreting and recalling information.
What is information overload?
It’s greater demands on cognitive systems more than what it’s capacity can provide.
What are heuristics
They are simple rules for making complex decisions or drawing inferences in a quick and efficient manner.
What is a prototype?
Is a list of attributes commonly possessed by members of a group.
What is the representative heuristic?
A strategy for making judgments
based on the extent to which current stimuli or events resemble
other stimuli or categories.
What is the availability heuristic?
A strategy for making judgments on the basis
of how easily specific kinds of information can be brought to mind.
What is social cognition
The manner in which we interpret, analyze, remember, and use information about the social world.
What is the portion size effect?
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
What is the status quo effect?
It’s choosing the tried and tested (old) over new and improved.
What is the status quo effect?
It’s choosing the tried and tested (old) over new and improved.
What are the three processes of social cognition?
- Attention which refers to the info we notice.
- Encoding which refers to the processes we use to store noticed info in memory.
- Retrieval which refers to how we recover info from memory in order to use it later.
What are the three processes of social cognition?
- Attention which refers to the info we notice.
- Encoding which refers to the processes we use to store noticed info in memory.
- Retrieval which refers to how we recover info from memory in order to use it later.
What is priming
situation that occurs when stimuli or events increase the
availability in memory or consciousness of specific types of information held in memory.
What is unpriming
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.
What is the perseverance effect
The tendency for beliefs and schemas to remain
unchanged even in the face of contradictory information.
What is controlled processing?
processing A mode of social thought that is logical,
systematic, and effortfull.
How do schemas prepare us for future interaction when we have no prior experience?
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.
What is the optimistic bias ?
Our predisposition to expect things to turn out well
overall.
What is the overconfidence bias
It’s the overestimation of a person’s judgement and prediction about themselves.
What is error by omission
Having a lack of comparative info that would allow them to know what factors they haven’t considered.
What is the planning fallacy
The tendency to make optimistic predictions concerning how long a given task will take for completion.
What is counterfactual thinking?
tendency to imagine other outcomes in
a situation than the ones that actually occurred (“What might have
been”).
What is magical thinking
Thinking involving assumptions that don’t hold
up to rational scrutiny—for example, the belief that things that
resemble one another share fundamental properties.
What is the law of similarity
Things that resemble one another share basic properties.
What is terror management?
Our efforts to cope with the knowledge that we will die.
What is affect?
It is our current moods and emotions. Which influence the world around us.
What is cognition
Various aspects of the ways in which we think process store remember and use info.
What is the mood congruence effect
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
What is mood dependent memory?
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
What are affective forecasts ?
Predictions about how we would feel about events we have not actually experienced
