Chapter 3 - Social Cognition Flashcards
Social cognition
how people think about themselves and the social world
Automatic thinking
- nonconscious
- unintentional
- involuntary
- effortless
Schemas
mental structures used to organize people’s knowledge about the social world around them
Accessibility
the extent to which schemas are at the forefront of the mind and are therefore more likley to be used when making judgements about the social world
Priming
the process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, or concept
Self-fulfilling prophecy
having an expectation about what another person is like, and this expectation influences the way people act towards that person, which in turn causes the person to behave consistently with people’s original expectations
Automatic goal pursuit
goals can be activated and influence people’s behavior without them knowing due to priming
Judgemental heuristics
mental shortcuts people use to make judgements quickly and efficiently
Availability heuristic
a mental rule of thumb where people base their judgements on how easy it is to come up with something
Representativeness heuristic
a mental construct used to classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case
Base rate information
information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population
Analytical thinking style
a way of thinking where people focus on the properties of objects without considering the surrounding context
Holistic thinking style
a way of thinking where people focus on the general context, especialy the way objects relate to each other
Controlled thinking
- conscious
- intentional
- voluntary
- effortful
Counterfactual thinking
mentally challenging some aspects of the past as a way of imagining what might have been
