Chapter 3, Social Cognition

Question 1

What is Social Cognition?

Answer 1

Broad: How people think about themselves and the social world.

Specific: How people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make decisions.

Question 2

Is Social Cognition usually Automatic or Controlled?

Answer 2

A great deal of social cognition is automatic, this means it’s unconscious.

Question 3

What is a Schema?

Answer 3

Schemas are mental constructions that people use to organize their knowledge about the world.

Question 4

What can schemas be about?

Answer 4

Objects, ourselves, other people, groups of people, and events

Question 5

What else can schemas be about?

Answer 5

they can give us info about how to behave in a particular situation and with different people

Question 6

What do schemas do to information?

Answer 6

Schemas act as a filter, it affects what we notice, thinks about, and remember. Filtering out info that is not consistent with the schema itself making the info we attend to schema consistent.

Question 7

What do Schemas do?

Answer 7

They help us relate new experiences to old ones and help us interpret ambiguous info. They have an effect on the impressions of words and can influence how an individual might perceive a story.

Question 8

What are Accessibility and Schemas?

Answer 8

This means the extent that the schema and concepts are in the forefront of the mind, with more accessible schema being used more in making judgments.

Question 9

What is Chronic Accessibility?

Answer 9

it is based on our past experiences and is directly related to our current goals

Question 10

What is Temporary Accessibility?

Answer 10

This involves priming, which brings a schema or concept to the forefront of a person’s mind

Question 11

What is a problem with schemas?

Answer 11

They are hard to change and can lead to the perseverance effect or a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Question 12

What is the Perseverance Effect?

Answer 12

it is the beliefs that persist even after disconfirming evidence

Question 13

What is a Self-Fulfiling Prophecy?

Answer 13

It is when a perceiver’s expectations affect the perceiver’s behavior towards the target, then this behavior affects the target behavior towards the perceiver. The cycle then repeats as the perceiver’s expectations are reinforced due to this directed behavior from the target.

Question 14

What is Automatic Processing / Thinking?

Answer 14

It is thinking that is generally unconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless

Question 15

What info does Automatic thinking use?

Answer 15

It uses past experiences to organize and interpret info.

Question 16

What is Embodied Cognition?

Answer 16

It is when bodily sensations activate mental structures such as schemas.

Question 17

What is Heuristics and is it efficient?

Answer 17

Mental shortcuts that an individual rely on to make judgments, usually work well but can lead to errors.

Question 18

What type of Heuristics are there?

Answer 18

Availability, Representative, Anchoring and Adjustment, and Judgemental Heuristics

Question 19

What is Availability Heuristics?

Answer 19

A mental shortcut whereby we make judgments based on how easily something like info comes to mind, this works well in most situations.

Question 20

What is Representative Heuristics?

Answer 20

Classifying something based on how similar it is to a typical case.

Usually works well, but can lead to errors if people over-rely on this heuristic while ignoring base-rate info.

Question 21

What is Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristics?

Answer 21

The tendency to use a number or value as a starting point and then adjusting our answer away from the anchor. Often times adjusting is not sufficient.

Question 22

What is Judgemental Heuristics?

Answer 22

Mental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently.

Question 23

What is Controlling Processing/thinking?

Answer 23

Thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful.

Question 24

What is Counterfactual Thinking?

Answer 24

Mentally undoing an event or imagining an alternative outcome. The easier it is to mentally undo the event shows the likelihood of an individual engaging in counterfactual thinking leading to more distress.

Question 25

What is Ironic Processing?

Answer 25

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

Question 26

What is the Analytic Thinking style?

Answer 26

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.

Question 27

What is a Holistic Thinking Style?

Answer 27

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.

Question 28

What is the Overconfidence Barrier?

Answer 28

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

Question 29

What is Low effort thinking in Social Psychology?

Answer 29

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.

Question 30

What is Automatic Thinking and Metaphors about the Body and Mind?

Answer 30

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).

Question 31

What is the Mental Strategie and shortcut of Heuristics?

Answer 31

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.

Question 32

Explain the Cultural differences in Social Cognition

Answer 32

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

Question 33

What are the Cultural Determinants of Schemas?

Answer 33

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.

Question 34

What is the Holistic versus Analytic Thinking?

Answer 34

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.

Question 35

What is Controlled Social Cognition in relation to High-effort thinking?

Answer 35

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

Question 36

What is Controlled Thinking and Free Will?

Answer 36

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.

Question 37

What is Counterfactual Reasoning?

Answer 37

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.

Question 38

How do we improve Human THinking?

Answer 38

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.

Question 39

What is Base-rate information?

Answer 39

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

Question 40

What is ERP’s?

Answer 40

Event-Related Potentials