Chapter 7 - Perceiving and understanding the social world Flashcards
Social cognition
The processing of social knowledge – perceiving, thinking, judging and explaining objects, events, relationships and issues in the social world.
Attitudes
A combination of our beliefs (cognitions) and feelings, and thought to be an influence on our behaviour.
Attributions
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).
Experimental social psychology
A perspective that frames its questions about social phenomena so that they can be studied using experimental methods.
Schema
A mental structure containing knowledge relating to a particular kind of object.
Schematic processing
An efficient, but sometimes constraining, way of processing information based on pre-existing schemas.
Person schema
A mental structure that contains knowledge about types of people at the level of personality traits.
Role schema
A mental structure that contains knowledge about social roles and social groups.
Event schema/script
A mental structure that contains knowledge about social situations and activities.
Stereotype
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.
Cognitive miser model
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.
Motivated tactician
A model of the social perceiver as having multiple cognitive strategies to choose from, based on goals, motives and needs.
Automaticity
The idea of schematic processing as an automatic process, happening without any awareness or conscious control on our part.
Internal/dispositional causes
Factors that motivate behaviour and that are located ‘within’ the actor (e.g. personality, mood, ability).
External/situational causes
Factors that motivate behaviour and that are located in the actor’s environment.
Locus of causality
The location of the cause of behaviour (internal or external), or the location of the cause of outcomes of behaviour like success or failure.
Covariation model
This model proposes that we make sense of current behaviour by considering information, from past and present, relating to its consistency, distinctiveness and consensus.
Vignette
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.
Fundamental attribution error
The tendency, when explaining the behaviour of other people, to favour internal rather than external attributions.
Actor/observer effect
The tendency to favour external attributions for our own behaviour, while favouring internal explanations for others’ behaviour.
Perceptual salience
One aspect of the perceptual field is particularly significant for the perceiver, and thus attracts more attention than other aspects.
Self-serving bias
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.
Content analysis
A procedure used to represent qualitative data (i.e. language and its meaning) in quantitative (numerical) form.
Cognitive bias
An information processing bias that is thought to be caused by the way the cognitive system works.
Motivational bias
An information processing bias that is thought to be caused by the perceiver’s goals or needs.
Availability heuristic
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.
Representativeness heuristic
Refers to a tendency to make categorisations according to whether an item is representative of the category to which it might belong.
Calibration
The extent to which a person knows about the accuracy of their own judgements.
Optimistic bias
Occurs when people are more optimistic than objective statistics warrant.
Demand characteristics
Features of a psychological method that lead people to respond in particular, constrained ways.
Social representations
Shared cognitive and linguistic structures that we use to make sense of the social world.
