Chapter 2 - Social Learning and Social Cognition

Question 1

Social Cognition

Answer 1

The mental activity that relates to social activities and helps us meet the goal of understanding and predicting the behavior of ourselves and others

Question 2

Learning

Answer 2

The relatively permanant change in knowledge that is acquired through experience

Question 3

Cognitive heuristics

Answer 3

Information-processing rules of thumb that enable us to think in ways that are quick and easy but that may sometimes lead to error

Question 4

Conditioning

Answer 4

The ability to connect stimuli with responses (behaviors or other actions)

Question 5

Operant learning

Answer 5

The principle that we learn new information as a result of the consequences of our behavior

Question 6

Associational learning

Answer 6

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

Question 7

Observational learning (modeling)

Answer 7

Learning by observing the behavior of others

Question 8

Prefrontal cortex

Answer 8

The part of our brain that lies in front of the motor areas of the cortex and that helps us remember the characteristics and actions of other people, plan complex social behaviors, and coordinate our behaviors with those of others

Question 9

Accomodation

Answer 9

When existing schemas change on the basis of new information

Question 10

Assimilation

Answer 10

A process in which our existing knowledge influences new conflicting infomration to better fit with our existing knowledge, thus reducing the likelihood of schema change

Question 11

Confirmation bias

Answer 11

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

Question 12

Self-fulfilling prophecy

Answer 12

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

Question 13

Automatic cognition

Answer 13

Thinking that occurs out of our awareness, quickly, and without taking much effort

Question 14

Controlled cognition

Answer 14

When we deliberately size up and think about something– for instance another person

Question 15

Priming

Answer 15

A technique in which information is temporarily brought into memory through exposure to situational events

Question 16

Salient

Answer 16

A trait that particularly attracts our attention when we someone/something with it (ex. religious belief, being a foreigner, etc.)

Question 17

Base rate

Answer 17

Likelihood that an event occurs across a large population

Question 18

Representativeness heuristic

Answer 18

Basing our judgement on information that seems to represent, or match, what we expect will happen while ignoring more informative base-rate information

Question 19

Cogitive accessibility

Answer 19

The extent to which a schema is activated in memory and thus likely to be used in information processing

Question 20

Availability heuristic

Answer 20

The tendency to make judgements of the frequency of an event, or the likelihood that an event will occur, on the basis of the ease with which the event can be retrieved from memory

Question 21

Processing fluency

Answer 21

The ease with which we can process information in our environments

Question 22

False consensus bias

Answer 22

The tendency to overestimate the extent to which other people are similar to us

Question 23

Counterfactual thinking

Answer 23

The tendency to think about events according to what might have been

Question 24

Anchoring and adjustment

Answer 24

Anchoring our judgement on the initial construct provided to you and not adjusting sufficiently