Chapter 4: Social Cognition Flashcards
Social Judgement (1) -> Information Quality
our judgements are only as accurate as the quality of the information on which they are based (the information available to us in everyday life is not always representative or complete)
Social Judgment (2) -> Information Presentation
The way information is presented can affect our judgments
Social Judgement (3) -> Seeking Information Bias
We often seek out inforamtion, which can create bias in the total information we have to make our judgment
Social Judgment (4) -> My Own Brain Bias
Our pre-existing knowledge and mental habits influence how we think/construct information
Social Judgment (5) -> Reason and Intuition
Reason and intuition are complex systems that power every judgement we make
What are possible reasons for not have all or correct information to make a judgment? (1)
- minimal information
- misleading information
DEF What is minimal information? (1)
judgments made in 1/10th of a second collect very little information
ex. judgments made from physical appearence
ex. perceiving trust and dominance in facial features
Perceiving Trust and Dominance Example (1)
hypermasculine = dominant
baby face = weak
these impulsive judgments can change how someone is treated in criminal court or how likely they are to be hired
DEF What is pluralistic ignorance? (1)
- a kind of misleading information
- people complying with a false norm even if they believe otherwise because they don’t want to stand out
- effect on firsthand information
- ex. gang members not wanting to object to brutal treatment of people even if they don’t agree with it because they don’t want to be kicked out
DEF What are self-sulfilling prophecies? (1) (4)
- A kind of misleading information
- Acting in ways that bring about what one would expect
- effect on firsthand information
- ex. thinking a child will perform well on a test and inadvertently giving them more intention which in turn helps them perform well on the test
DEF What are idealogical distortions? (1) (4)
- A kind of misleading information
- a perons’s ideologies or beliefs being worked into their retellling of an event
- effect on secondhand information
DEF What is an overemphasis on bad news? (1)
- A kind of miselading information
- many media outlits publish more bad news than good news because fear sells
- can create false norms because people think the proportion of negative news articles is equal to the relative danger they are in
- effect on secondhand information
What are the two dangers to firsthand information? (1)
- pluralistic ignorance
- self-fulfilling prophecy
What are the two dangers to secondhand information? (1)
- ideaological distortions
- overemphasis on bad news
What are two effects on how information is presented? (2)
- order effects
- framing effects
What are order effects? (2)
the order of informarion can have a powerful influence
- type of framing effect (pure framing, the content remains the same)
- primacy effect
- recency effect
DEF What is the primacy effect? (2)
- type of order effect
- information presented first exerts the most influence
- if effects how later information is interpreted
DEF What is the recency effect? (2)
- type of order effect
- information presented last exerts the most impact
- last item is most easily remembered
What are framing effects? (2)
the way information is presented can have a powerful influence
- order effects
- spin-framing
- positive vs. negative framing
- temporal framing
DEF What is spin-framing? (2)
- type of framing effect
- changing the order and the content
- undocumented workers vs. illegal aliens
- different connotations
DEF What is pos. vs. neg. framing? (2)
- type of framing effect
- two accurate statments, one pos one neg
- 75% lean vs. 25% fat
- negative on often attracts more attention an illicits a stronger response
DEF What is temporal framing? (2)
- type of framing effect
- we think about actions and events within a particular time perspective
- something may seem like a good idea now, but a bad idea later
- example taking lots of courses at the beginning of the semester vs. during midterm season
- construal level theory
DEF What is construal level theory? (2)
- a theory about the relationship between temporal distance and abstract or concrete thinking
- current events = low level abstraction, rich in detail
- distant events (past or future) = high level abstraction, no detail, lots of meaning
ex. low level abstraction lots of courses = learning, growing, bettering myself
ex high level abstraction lots of courses = too many hours in the library
What are two effects on how we seek information? (3)
- confirmation bias
- motivated confirmation bias
DEF What is confirmation bias? (3)
- the tendency to test a proposition by searching for evidence that would support it
- looking for evidence to confirm your own theory
- creates false beliefs because you can find evidence to support anything
ex seeking out tennis players who practiced and won by comparing to tennis players who didn’t practice and lost, while ignoring players who didn’t practice and won or did practice and lost
DEF What is motivated confirmation bias? (3)
- people finding evidence to support their belief regardless of whether it actually does
ex people given evidence in support or against the death pentalty, but all supporters used evidence in support
DEF What is top down processing? (4)
using schemas that already exist in our head (top) that filter and interpet the information according to our pre-existing knowledge and expectations from the schema
- “theory driven”
- accessability
DEF What is bottom up processing? (4)
forming a conclusion based solely on the observed features of the stimulus
- “data driven”
- applicability
What do schemas do? (4)
- help us organize the world
- color our judgments, memories, and interpretations
- can potentially lead up to mischaracterize the world
What are the influences of schemas? (4)
- attention
- memory
- construal
- behavior
How do schemas influence attention? (4)
- schema and expectation guide what we focus our attention on
- ex focusing on the basketball and missing the gorilla suit
How do schemas influence memory? (4)
- most likely to remember stimuli that captured our attention
- ex video that portrarys a waitress/librarian, participants remembered only waitress things or only librarian things and ignored the other even though both were equally present
How do schemas influence construal? (4)
- schemas change our interpretation of new information
- adventurous schema vs reckless schema change how participants viewed a vague story (daniel story)
- lack of details/stimulus in the vague story necessary for bottom-up so the brain resorts to top-down
How do schemas influence behavoir? (4)
- can automatically ellicit behavior based on a prime
- ex. subliminal messages to fold or to bet
DEF What is a priming? (4)
the presentation of information designed to acticate a concept and make it accessible for top-down processing
What are the factors that influence which schema is applied/activated? (4)
- recent activation
- equent activation
- chronic accessibility
- conciousness of activation
- expectations
DEF What is recent activation? (4)
if a schema has been brought to mind more recently
DEF What is equent activation? (4)
the context of a situation changes which schemas are brought ot mind (talking to a boss)
DEF What is chronic accessibility? (4)
a habit or frequently used shema
DEF What is conciousness of activation? (4)
don’t need to be concious of a prime to be affected
How do expecations affect schema activation? (4)
expectations can activate a specfic schema
What are the two reason/intuition systems? (5)
- intutitive system
- rational system
DEF What is the intutitive system? (5)
- processing something quickly and automatically
- based on associations
- performed simultaneously or in parallel
DEF What is the rational system? (5)
- processing something slower and more controlled
- based on rules and deduction
- operations performed one at a time
How do the intuitive and rational system coordinate? (5)
- the two systems may agree
- the two systems may disagree
- the intuitive system may be so fast and seemingly accurate that the rational system is never engaged
What are the mental operations performed within the intuitive system? (5)
heuristics = mental shortcuts to answer common problems of judgment
- yeild answers that feel right
What are two types of heuristics? (5)
- availabilty heuristic
- representativeness heuristic
DEF What is the availability heurisitc? (5)
judgments of frequency and probability are based on how quickly instances come to mind
DEF What is the representativeness heuristic? (5)
judgments of liklihood are based on how the object of the heuristic compares to group prototype
What are conseqeunces of the availability heuristic? (5)
- biased assessment of risk
- biased estimates of contributions to joint projects
- fluency
DEF What is biased assessment of risk? (5)
more coverage of negative events mean they come to mind more frequently or more availably
What are biased estimates of contribution in joint projects? (5)
your own actions come to mind more readily than the actions of others in the project so you think that you did mroe
DEF What is fluency? (5)
the feeling of difficulty or ease associated with processing information
- easier names are more famous
- hard to read font makes a task seem more difficult
- can even change our processing to slow down and be more careful if something seems more difficult
DEF What is base-rate information? (5)
information about the relative frequency of an event of members in a category of a population
What is a consequence on the representativeness heuristic? (5)
base rate neglect
DEF What is base rate neglect? (5)
people ignore data or base rate information if the object strongly resembles their prototype
ex. students ignored data of how many students participated in each program and instead made incorrect judgment based on how each person fit the prototype of a science or art student
How is the representativeness heuristic related to cause an effect? (5)
big effects are assumed to have big causes
small effects are assumed to have small causes
DEF What is the regression effect? (5)
- component of representativeness heuristic
- when two variables are imperfectly correlated, it is thought that extreme values of one correspond with extreme values of the other
DEF What is the regression fallacy? (5)
- component of the representativeness heuristic
- failure to recognize the influence of the regression effect and to create and causal attribution that explains what is really a statistical regularity
How can availability and representativeness heuritics create havoc? (5)
if something resembles another object, they are regularely recalled together creating a false sense of correlation
