Chapter 4: Social cognition: thinking about people and situations

Question 1

pluralistic ignorance

Answer 1

…, which occurs whenever people act in ways that conflict with their private beliefs because of a concern for the social consequences

Question 2

self-fulfilling prophecy

Answer 2

Another way in which firsthand information can be misleading: we can fail to notice that our own behavior has brought about what we’re seeing. This phenomenon is called the …: our expectations lead us to behave in ways that elicit the very behavior we expect from others.

Question 3

primacy effect

Answer 3

Sometimes the information presented first exerts the most influence, a phenomenon known as a …

Question 4

recency effect

Answer 4

Other times the information presented last has the most impact, a phenomenon known as a …

Question 5

framing effect

Answer 5

Order effects are a type of …: the way information is presented, including the order of presentation

Question 6

confirmation bias

Answer 6

When evaluating a proposition (a plant needs frequent watering; a generous allowance spoils a child; Hispanics highly value family life), people more readily, reliably, and vigorously seek out evidence that would support the proposition rather than information that would contradict the proposition. This tendency is known as the …

Question 7

Bottom-up processing

Answer 7

… takes in relevant stimuli from the outside world, such as text on a page, gestures in an interaction, or sound patterns at a cocktail party

Question 8

top-down processing

Answer 8

… filters and interprets bottom-up stimuli in light of preexisting knowledge and expectations

Question 9

priming

Answer 9

certain types of behavior are elicited automatically when people are exposed to stimuli in the environment that bring to mind a particular action or schema. Such exposure is called … a concept or schema.

Question 10

heuristics

Answer 10

…: mental shortcuts that provide serviceable, if usually rather inexact, answers to common problems of judgment. They yield answers that feel right and therefore often forestall more effortful, rational deliberation.

Question 11

availability heuristic

Answer 11

We rely on the … when we judge the frequency or probability of some event by how readily pertinent instances come to mind

Question 12

representativeness heuristic

Answer 12

We use the … when we try to categorize something by judging how similar it is to our conception of the typical member of the category

Question 13

fluency

Answer 13

Psychologists use the term … to refer to the ease (or difficulty) associated with information processing. A clear image is easy to process, or …. An irregular word (like imbroglio) is hard to process, or dis…

Question 14

base-rate information

Answer 14

…, concerns our knowledge of relative frequency of the members of a given cate” gory