Chapter 4 Flashcards
Social Cognition: Thinking About People and Situations
Covariation principle
The idea that behavior should be attributed to potential causes that occur along with the observed behavior
Consensus
A type of covariation information: whether most people would behave the same way or differently in a given situation
Distinctiveness
A type of covariation information: whether a behavior is unique to a particular situation or occurs in many or all situations
Discounting principle
The idea that people will assign reduced weight to a particular cause of behavior if other plausible causes might have produced the same behavior
Counterfactual thinking
Thoughts of what might have, could have, or should have happened “if only” something had occurred differently
Emotional amplification
An increase in an emotional reaction to an event that is proportional to how easy it is to imagine the event not happening
Self-serving attributional bias
The tendency to attribute failure and other bad events to external circumstances and to attribute success and other good events to oneself
Fundamental attribution error
The failure to recognize the importance of situational influences on behavior along with the corresponding tendency to overemphasize the importance of dispositions on behavior
Actor-observer difference
A difference in attribution based on who is making the causal assessment: the actor (who is relatively inclined to make situational attributions) or the observer (who is relatively inclined to make dispositional attributions)
Primacy effect
A type of order effect whereby the information presented first in a body of evidence has a disproportionate influence on judgment
Recency effect
A type of order effect whereby the information presented last in a body of evidence has a disproportionate influence on judgment
Framing effect
The influence on judgment resulting from the way information is presented, including the words used to describe the information or the order in which it is presented
Construal level theory
A theory about the relationship between temporal distance (and other kinds of distance) and abstract or concrete thinking: Psychologically distant actions and events are thought about in abstract terms; actions and events that are close at hand are thought about in concrete terms
Confirmation bias
The tendency to test a proposition by searching for evidence in support of it
Bottom-up processing
“Data-driven” mental processing, in which an individual forms conclusions based on stimuli encountered in the environment
Top-down processing
“Theory-driven” mental processing, in which an individual filters and interprets new information in light of preexisting knowledge and expectations
Priming
The presentation of information designed to activate a concept and hence make it accessible. A prime is the stimulus presented to activate the concept in question
Subliminal
Below the threshold of conscious awareness
Heuristics
Intuitive mental operations, performed quickly and automatically, that provide efficient answers to common problems of judgment
Availability heuristics
The process whereby judgments of frequency or probability are based on how readily pertinent instances come to mind
Representativeness heuristics
The process whereby judgments of likelihood are based on assessments of similarity between individuals and group prototypes of between cause and effect
Fluency
The feeling of ease (or difficulty) associated with processing information
Base-rate information
Information about the relative frequency of events or members of different categories in a population
Illusory correlation
The belief that two variables are correlated when in fact they are not
Regression effect
The statistical tendency, when two variables are imperfectly correlated, for extreme values of one of them to be associated with less extreme values of the other
Regression fallacy
The failure to recognize the influence of the regression effect and to instead offer a causal theory for what is really a simple statistical regularity
