Chapter 2 - Social Learning and Social Cognition Flashcards
Social Cognition
The mental activity that relates to social activities and helps us meet the goal of understanding and predicting the behavior of ourselves and others
Learning
The relatively permanant change in knowledge that is acquired through experience
Cognitive heuristics
Information-processing rules of thumb that enable us to think in ways that are quick and easy but that may sometimes lead to error
Conditioning
The ability to connect stimuli with responses (behaviors or other actions)
Operant learning
The principle that we learn new information as a result of the consequences of our behavior
Associational learning
When an object or event comes to be associated with natural response, such as an automatic behavior or a positive or negative emotion
Observational learning (modeling)
Learning by observing the behavior of others
Prefrontal cortex
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
Accomodation
When existing schemas change on the basis of new information
Assimilation
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
Confirmation bias
The tendency for people to favor information that confirms their expectations, regardless of whether the information is true
Self-fulfilling prophecy
A process that occurs when our expectations about others lead us to behave towards those others in ways that make those expectations come true
Automatic cognition
Thinking that occurs out of our awareness, quickly, and without taking much effort
Controlled cognition
When we deliberately size up and think about something– for instance another person
Priming
A technique in which information is temporarily brought into memory through exposure to situational events
Salient
A trait that particularly attracts our attention when we someone/something with it (ex. religious belief, being a foreigner, etc.)
Base rate
Likelihood that an event occurs across a large population
Representativeness heuristic
Basing our judgement on information that seems to represent, or match, what we expect will happen while ignoring more informative base-rate information
Cogitive accessibility
The extent to which a schema is activated in memory and thus likely to be used in information processing
Availability heuristic
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
Processing fluency
The ease with which we can process information in our environments
False consensus bias
The tendency to overestimate the extent to which other people are similar to us
Counterfactual thinking
The tendency to think about events according to what might have been
Anchoring and adjustment
Anchoring our judgement on the initial construct provided to you and not adjusting sufficiently
