Chapter 7 - Perceiving and understanding the social world

Question 1

Social cognition

Answer 1

The processing of social knowledge – perceiving, thinking, judging and explaining objects, events, relationships and issues in the social world.

Question 2

Attitudes

Answer 2

A combination of our beliefs (cognitions) and feelings, and thought to be an influence on our behaviour.

Question 3

Attributions

Answer 3

The explanations we arrive at to account for the causes of our own behaviour (and its outcomes) and other people’s behaviour (and its outcomes).

Question 4

Experimental social psychology

Answer 4

A perspective that frames its questions about social phenomena so that they can be studied using experimental methods.

Question 5

Schema

Answer 5

A mental structure containing knowledge relating to a particular kind of object.

Question 6

Schematic processing

Answer 6

An efficient, but sometimes constraining, way of processing information based on pre-existing schemas.

Question 7

Person schema

Answer 7

A mental structure that contains knowledge about types of people at the level of personality traits.

Question 8

Role schema

Answer 8

A mental structure that contains knowledge about social roles and social groups.

Question 9

Event schema/script

Answer 9

A mental structure that contains knowledge about social situations and activities.

Question 10

Stereotype

Answer 10

A mental representation of a person as more like a ‘typical’ member of a social category than the person actually is. Seen as an inevitable consequence of the basic cognitive process of overgeneralization.

Question 11

Cognitive miser model

Answer 11

A view of the social perceiver as someone who uses as little processing capacity as possible and thus is limited to seeing things in terms of assumptions and expectations.

Question 12

Motivated tactician

Answer 12

A model of the social perceiver as having multiple cognitive strategies to choose from, based on goals, motives and needs.

Question 13

Automaticity

Answer 13

The idea of schematic processing as an automatic process, happening without any awareness or conscious control on our part.

Question 14

Internal/dispositional causes

Answer 14

Factors that motivate behaviour and that are located ‘within’ the actor (e.g. personality, mood, ability).

Question 15

External/situational causes

Answer 15

Factors that motivate behaviour and that are located in the actor’s environment.

Question 16

Locus of causality

Answer 16

The location of the cause of behaviour (internal or external), or the location of the cause of outcomes of behaviour like success or failure.

Question 17

Covariation model

Answer 17

This model proposes that we make sense of current behaviour by considering information, from past and present, relating to its consistency, distinctiveness and consensus.

Question 18

Vignette

Answer 18

A short description
of a person, event or behaviour, used in an experimental setting, which permits control over the amount and nature of information provided to participants.

Question 19

Fundamental attribution error

Answer 19

The tendency, when explaining the behaviour of other people, to favour internal rather than external attributions.

Question 20

Actor/observer effect

Answer 20

The tendency to favour external attributions for our own behaviour, while favouring internal explanations for others’ behaviour.

Question 21

Perceptual salience

Answer 21

One aspect of the perceptual field is particularly significant for the perceiver, and thus attracts more attention than other aspects.

Question 22

Self-serving bias

Answer 22

An information processing bias which serves the perceiver’s interests in some way, for example the tendency to attribute one’s success to internal causes and failure to external causes.

Question 23

Content analysis

Answer 23

A procedure used to represent qualitative data (i.e. language and its meaning) in quantitative (numerical) form.

Question 24

Cognitive bias

Answer 24

An information processing bias that is thought to be caused by the way the cognitive system works.

Question 25

Motivational bias

Answer 25

An information processing bias that is thought to be caused by the perceiver’s goals or needs.

Question 26

Availability heuristic

Answer 26

Refers to the practice of making judgements on the basis of examples or instances that are accessible to the cognitive system/ decision-maker. Examples may come to mind more easily if they are more memorable or easier to construct.

Question 27

Representativeness heuristic

Answer 27

Refers to a tendency to make categorisations according to whether an item is representative of the category to which it might belong.

Question 28

Calibration

Answer 28

The extent to which a person knows about the accuracy of their own judgements.

Question 29

Optimistic bias

Answer 29

Occurs when people are more optimistic than objective statistics warrant.

Question 30

Demand characteristics

Answer 30

Features of a psychological method that lead people to respond in particular, constrained ways.

Question 31

Social representations

Answer 31

Shared cognitive and linguistic structures that we use to make sense of the social world.