Chapter 4-Social cognition Flashcards
(31 cards)
Social cognition
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.
Automatic thinking/process
› Occurs without intention, effort or awareness • Primary affective reactions › Does not interfere with other concurrent cognitive processes
Controlled thinking/process
› Occurs without intention, effort or awareness • Primary affective reactions › Does not interfere with other concurrent cognitive processes
3 shortcuts
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
Priming
Activating one stimulus facilitates the subsequent processing of another related stimulus. (wing, feather)
Encoding
How we translate what we see into a suitable format that can be readily stored in our mind.
Accessibility
The extent to which information is easily located and retrieved.
Automatic process
A process that occurs without intention, effort or awareness
Controlled process
A process that is intentional
Schema
a cognitive mental representation of knowledge about objects or people in specific groups and categories
Heuristic
Shortcut to arrive at judgments that are effective but not optimal. Stereotypes for example.
Stereotype
A cognitive structure that contains our knowledge and beliefs, and expectancies about some human social group.
Categorization
The tendency to group objects or people into discrete groups based upon shared characteristics common to them.
Lexical decision task
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.
Encoding
The way in which we translate what we see into a digestible format to be stored in the mind.
Representativeness heuristics
A mental shortcut whereby instances are assigned to categories on the basis of how similar they are to the category in general.
Base rate information
Information that gives us an idea about how frequent certain categories are in the general population.
Availability heuristics
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
Anchoring/adjustment heuristics
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.
Cognitive miser
A view of people as being often limited in processing capacity and apt to take shortcuts where possible to make life simple.
Goal
a positively valued behavioral end-state.
Implicit goal operation
perceives individual motivation to behave in a certain way, example: overcome stereotypes
goal dependent
arising from the interplay of a range of cognitive, motivational and biological factors.
Accountability
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.
