Chapter 4-Social cognition

Question 1

Social cognition

Answer 1

Topic concerned with understanding how we think about ourselves and how the process involved impact upon our judgments and behavior in social context.
How we process social information.
-Select, store and remember social information.

Question 2

Automatic thinking/process

Answer 2

› Occurs without intention,
effort or awareness
• Primary affective reactions
› Does not interfere with
other concurrent cognitive
processes

Question 3

Controlled thinking/process

Answer 3

› Occurs without intention,
effort or awareness
• Primary affective reactions
› Does not interfere with
other concurrent cognitive
processes

Question 4

3 shortcuts

Answer 4

1. Social categorisation
• Become active very fast and
automatically (priming!)
The tendency to group objects (including people) into
discrete groups based on shared characteristics common
to them
2. Schemas
• Make knowledge salient(activate)
•Influence what we feel, think and
do...
Schemas are the mental structures that help organize
and interpret information
3. Heuristics
• Decision rules
• Largely apply when we are not
thinking systematically
rule of thumb to arrive at a judgment that is effective in many but not all cases

Question 5

Priming

Answer 5

Activating one stimulus facilitates the subsequent processing of another related stimulus. (wing, feather)

Question 6

Encoding

Answer 6

How we translate what we see into a suitable format that can be readily stored in our mind.

Question 7

Accessibility

Answer 7

The extent to which information is easily located and retrieved.

Question 8

Automatic process

Answer 8

A process that occurs without intention, effort or awareness

Question 9

Controlled process

Answer 9

A process that is intentional

Question 10

Schema

Answer 10

a cognitive mental representation of knowledge about objects or people in specific groups and categories

Question 11

Heuristic

Answer 11

Shortcut to arrive at judgments that are effective but not optimal. Stereotypes for example.

Question 12

Stereotype

Answer 12

A cognitive structure that contains our knowledge and beliefs, and expectancies about some human social group.

Question 13

Categorization

Answer 13

The tendency to group objects or people into discrete groups based upon shared characteristics common to them.

Question 14

Lexical decision task

Answer 14

A cognitive measure of how quick people can classify a stimulus as real words or nonsense word; quicker responses to certain word categorization indicate increased accessibility.

Question 15

Encoding

Answer 15

The way in which we translate what we see into a digestible format to be stored in the mind.

Question 16

Representativeness heuristics

Answer 16

A mental shortcut whereby instances are assigned to categories on the basis of how similar they are to the category in general.

Question 17

Base rate information

Answer 17

Information that gives us an idea about how frequent certain categories are in the general population.

Question 18

Availability heuristics

Answer 18

a cognitive shortcut that allows us to draw upon information about how quickly information comes to mind about a particular event, to deduce? the frequency or likelihood of that event

Question 19

Anchoring/adjustment heuristics

Answer 19

a cognitive heuristics that makes us place weight upon initial standards/schemes and as a result means we may not always adjust sufficiently far from these anchors to provide accurately judgments.

Question 20

Cognitive miser

Answer 20

A view of people as being often limited in processing capacity and apt to take shortcuts where possible to make life simple.

Question 21

Goal

Answer 21

a positively valued behavioral end-state.

Question 22

Implicit goal operation

Answer 22

perceives individual motivation to behave in a certain way, example: overcome stereotypes

Question 23

goal dependent

Answer 23

arising from the interplay of a range of cognitive, motivational and biological factors.

Question 24

Accountability

Answer 24

A processing goal whereby the perceivers believe they will have to justify their responses to a third party and to be held responsible for their impressions; this typically leads to less stereotypical impressions.

Question 25

Continuum model of impression formation

Answer 25

a process going from category-based evaluations at one end of the model to individuated responses at the other, dependent on the motivational and attentional factors.

Question 26

Dissociation model

Answer 26

proposes that two different processes can occur independently and that one does not inevitably follow from the other.

Question 27

Individuating information

Answer 27

Details about a person’s personal characteristics (not as a group member)

Question 28

Outcome dependency

Answer 28

a motivational objective in which participants believe they will later meet a target and work together on a jointly task

Question 29

Probe reaction task

Answer 29

A simple reaction-time task that assesses attention left over from performing the primary task; does nor take away attention from the primary task.

Question 30

Rebound effect

Answer 30

where suppression attempts fail;

Active suppression: end up thinking even more about a thing we want to stop thinking about.

Question 31

Stereotype suppression

Answer 31

the act of trying to prevent an activated stereotype from impacting upon one’s judgments about a person from a stereotypical group