Chapter 3, Social Cognition Flashcards

Question

What is Ironic Processing?

Answer 1

When an individual consciously tries to avoid thinking about something, which in turn can result in having more frequent thoughts.

Answer 2

A type of thinking style in which people focus on the properties of an object and not considering its situational context, common in western cultures.

Answer 3

The type of thinking where the focus is the overall context, particularly the ways in which objects relate to one another, is common in eastern cultures.

Answer 4

The tendency to have too much confidence in the accuracy of their judgments; these judgments are usually not as correct as originally thought.

Answer 5

A great deal of social cognition involves automatic thinking, which is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless. An important part of automatic thinking is using past knowledge to organize and interpret new information. We use schemas, mental structures that help us organize knowledge about ourselves and the social world.

Answer 6

Bodily sensations can serve to prime mental structures (e.g., a cleanliness schema or thoughts such as “cleanliness is next to godliness”). These thoughts, in turn, can influence behavior (e.g., behaving in a moral way).

Answer 7

Another form of automatic thinking is the use of judgmental heuristics, which are mental shortcuts used to make judgments quickly and efficiently. Examples are the availability heuristic, whereby a judgment is based on the ease to bring something to mind, and the representativeness heuristic, classifying something according to how similar it is to a typical case. People also have a tendency to ignore base rate information—the prior probability that something or someone belongs in that classification. Heuristics are extremely useful and often produce accurate judgments, but they can also produce faulty judgments.

Answer 8

Research shows that the way in which people think about the social world differs, depending on one’s culture.

Answer 9

Although the use of schemas to organize information is universal, there are cultural differences in the content of people’s schemas. For example, the Bantu people’s economy is heavily based on cattle sales; these people have very highly differentiated schemas for different kinds of cattle.

Answer 10

Western cultures tend to emphasize an analytic thinking style, a type of automatic thinking in which people focus on the properties of objects without considering their surrounding context. People who grow up in East Asian cultures tend to have a holistic thinking style, a type of thinking in which people focus on the overall context, particularly the ways in which objects relate to one another.

Answer 11

Not all social cognition is automatic; we also engage in controlled thinking, which is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful.

Answer 12

There can be a disconnect between our conscious sense of how much we are causing our actions and how much we really are causing them. Sometimes we overestimate the amount of control we have, and sometimes we underestimate the amount of control we have. But the more people believe in free will, the more willing they are to help others in need and the less likely they are to engage in immoral actions such as cheating.

Answer 13

One form of controlled thinking is counterfactual reasoning, whereby people mentally change some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been.

Answer 14

People are affected by an overconfidence barrier, whereby they are too confident in the accuracy of their judgments. Research shows that some kinds of thinking, such as statistical reasoning, can be improved with training—such as taking a course in statistics.

Answer 15

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

Answer 16

Event-Related Potentials

Chapter 3, Social Cognition Flashcards

(40 cards)