Chapter 3

Question 1

Social cognition

Answer 1

How people think about
themselves and the social world;
more specifically, how people
select, interpret, remember, and
use social information to make
judgments and decisions

Question 2

Automatic thinking

Answer 2

Thinking that is nonconscious,
unintentional, involuntary, and
effortless

Question 3

Schemas

Answer 3

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

Question 4

Accessibility

Answer 4

The extent to which schemas and
concepts are at the forefront of
people’s minds and are therefore
likely to be used when making
judgments about the social world

Question 5

Priming

Answer 5

The process by which recent
experiences increase the
accessibility of a schema, trait,
or concept

Question 6

Self-fulfilling prophecy

Answer 6

The case wherein 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

Question 7

Judgemental heuristics

Answer 7

Mental shortcuts people use to
make judgments quickly and
efficiently

Question 8

Availability heuristic

Answer 8

A mental rule of thumb whereby
people base a judgment on the
ease with which they can bring
something to mind

Question 9

Representativeness heuristic

Answer 9

A mental shortcut whereby people
classify something according to
how similar it is to a typical case

Question 10

Base rate information

Answer 10

Information about the frequency of
members of different categories in
the population

Question 11

Analytic style thinking

Answer 11

A type of thinking in which
people focus on the properties of
objects without considering their
surrounding context; this type of
thinking is common in Western
cultures

Question 12

Holistic thinking style

Answer 12

A type of thinking in which people
focus on the overall context,
particularly the ways in which
objects relate to each other; this
type of thinking is common in East
Asian cultures (e.g., China, Japan,
and Korea)

Question 13

Controlled thinking

Answer 13

Thinking that is conscious,

intentional, voluntary, and effortful

Question 14

Counterfactual thinking

Answer 14

Mentally changing some aspect
of the past as a way of imagining
what might have been

Question 15

Overconfidence barrier

Answer 15

The fact that people usually
have too much confidence in the
accuracy of their judgments