DEFINITIONS 2: Social Cognition: How We Think About the Social World

Question 1

Social cognition

Answer 1

The manner in which we interpret, analyze, remember, and use information about the social world.

Question 2

heuristics

Answer 2

Simple rules for making complex decisions or drawing inferences in a rapid manner and seemingly effortless manner.

Question 3

affect

Answer 3

Our current feelings and moods.

Question 4

information overload

Answer 4

Instances in which our ability to process information is exceeded.

Question 5

conditions of uncertainty

Answer 5

Where the “correct” answer is difficult to know or would take a great deal of effort to determine.

Question 6

prototype

Answer 6

Summary of the common attributes possessed by members of a category.

Question 7

representativeness heuristic

Answer 7

A strategy for making judgments based on the extent to which current stimuli or events resemble other stimuli or categories.

Question 8

Availablity Heuricstic

Answer 8

A strategy for making judgments on
the basis of how easily specific kinds
of information can be brought to
mind.

Question 9

anchoring and adjustment heuristic

Answer 9

A heuristic that involves the tendency to use a number of value as a starting point to which we then make adjustments.

Question 10

schemas

Answer 10

Mental frameworks centering on a specific theme that help us to organize social information.

Question 11

priming

Answer 11

A situtation that occurs when stimuli or events increase the availability in memory or consciousness of specific types of information held in memory.

Question 12

unpriming

Answer 12

Refers to the fact that the effects of the schemas tend to persist until they are somehow expressed in thought or behavior and only then do their effects decrease.

Question 13

perseverance effect

Answer 13

The tendency for beliefs and schemas to remain unchanged even in the face of contradictory information.

Question 14

metaphor

Answer 14

A linguistic device that relates

or draws a comparison between one abstract concept and another dissimilar concept.

Question 15

automatic processing

Answer 15

This occurs when, after extensive experience with a task or type of information, we reach the stage where we can perform the task
or process the information in a seemingly effortless, automatic, and nonconscious manner.

Question 16

optimistic bias

Answer 16

Our predisposition to expect things to turn out well overall.

Question 17

overconfidence barrier

Answer 17

The tendency to have more confidence in the accuracy of our own judgments than is reasonable.

Question 18

planning fallacy

Answer 18

The tendency to make optimistic predictions concerning how long a given task will take for completion.

Question 19

counterfactual thinking

Answer 19

The tendency to imagine other outcomes in a situation than the ones that actually occurred (“What might have been”).

Question 20

magical thinking

Answer 20

Thinking involving assumptions that don’t hold up to rational scrutiny— for example, the belief that things that resemble one another share fundamental properties.

Question 21

terror management

Answer 21

Our efforts to come to terms with certainty of our own death and its unsettling implications.

Question 22

mood congruence effects

Answer 22

The fact that we are more likely

to store or remember positive information when in a positive mood and negative information when in a negative mood.

Question 23

mood dependent memory

Answer 23

The fact that what we remember while in a given mood may be determined, in part, by what we learned when previously in that mood.

Question 24

affective forecasts

Answer 24

Predictions about how we would feel about events we have not actually experienced.