Exam 1

Question 1

Concerned with how people think about the social world and arrive at judgments that help them interpret the past, understand the present, and predict the future

Answer 1

Social Cognition

Question 2

Predisposed quick analysis people make for strangers based on whether they should be approached or avoided (dimension 1), and whether they’re likely to be top dog or underdog (dimension 2).

Answer 2

Snap Judgements

Question 3

The process of identifying the factors that cause a specific behavior or outcome. It involves explaining the causes of behavior by looking at internal factors like ability or effort, and external factors like luck or task difficulty

Answer 3

Causal Attribution

Question 3

When we try to determine what causes—internal or external, characteristic of the person in question or applicable to nearly everyone—“covary” with what we’re trying to explain, attributes to observed behavior

Answer 3

Covariation Principle

Question 3

A type of covariation information, whether most people would behave the same way or differently in a given situation

Answer 3

Consensus

Question 4

A type of covariation information, whether a behavior is unique to a particular situation or occurs in many or all situations

Answer 4

Distinctiveness

Question 5

The idea that people will assign reduced weight to a particular cause of behavior if other plausible causes might have produced the same behavior

Answer 5

Discounting Principle

Question 6

Considerations of what might have, could have, or should have happened “if only” a few minor things were done differently

Answer 6

Counterfactual thinking

Question 7

An increase in an emotional reaction to an event that is proportional to how easy it is to imagine the event not happening

Answer 7

Emotional Amplification

Question 8

A difference in attribution based on who is making the causal assessment: the actor who is relatively inclined to make situational attributions or the observer who is inclined to make dispositional attributions

Answer 8

Actor-observer difference

Question 8

People are inclined to attribute their failures and other bad events to external circumstances but to attribute their successes and other good events to themselves

Answer 8

self-serving attributional bias

Question 9

Phenomenon where information presented first exerts the most influence

Answer 9

Primacy Effect

Question 10

Phenomenon where the information presented last has the most impact

Answer 10

Recency Effect

Question 11

The way information is presented, including the order of presentation, can “frame” the way it’s processed and understood

Answer 11

Framing Effect

Question 12

The mixed nature of most things means that they can be described, or framed, in ways that emphasize the good or the bad, with predictable effects on people’s judgments; Ex: people feel much safer using a condom described as having a 90% success rate than one described as having a 10% failure rate

Answer 12

Positive/Negative framing

Question 13

A form of framing that varies the content, not just the order, of what is presented; EX: Another company whose product has a lower price will feature information that frames the consumer’s choice as one of savings.

Answer 13

Spin Framing

Question 14

The ability to recognize that we think about actions and events within a particular time perspective; belonging to the distant past, the present moment, the immediate future and so on

Answer 14

Temporal Frame

Question 15

When evaluating a proposition (a plant needs frequent watering; a generous allowance spoils a child; Cuban Americans are family oriented), people more readily, reliably, and robustly seek out evidence that would support the proposition rather than information that would contradict the proposition

Answer 15

Confirmation bias

Question 16

Someone who wants a given proposition to be true may sift through the relevant evidence with special vigor to uncover information that confirms its accuracy

Answer 16

Motivated confirmation bias

Question 16

“data-driven” mental processing, in which an individual forms conclusions based on stimuli encountered in the environment

Answer 16

Bottom up processing

Question 17

“theory-driven” mental processing, in which an individuals filters and interprets new information in light of preexisting knowledge and expectations

Answer 17

top down processing

Question 18

The presentation of information designed to activate a concept and hence make it accessible

Answer 18

Priming

Question 19

stimuli presented outside of conscious awareness

Answer 19

Subliminal stimuli

Question 20

mental shortcuts that provide serviceable, if usually rather inexact, answers to common problems of judgment

Answer 20

heuristics

Question 21

when we judge the frequency or probability of some event by how readily instances of that type of event come to mind

Answer 21

availability heuristics

Question 22

refer to the ease (or difficulty) associated with information processing. Clear images and common words are easy to process, or fluent. Blurred texts and unusual words (like imbroglio) are hard to process, or disfluent

Answer 22

fluency

Question 23

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

Answer 23

representative heuristic

Question 23

concerns our knowledge of the relative frequency of the members of a given category. How many members of the category are there relative to the members of all other categories?

Answer 23

base-rate information

Question 24

The belief that two variables are correlated when they in fact are not

Answer 24

illusory correlation

Question 25

when any two variables are imperfectly correlated, for extreme values of one of them to be associated with less extreme values of the other. Tall parents tend to have tall kids, but not as tall as the parents themselves. Extremely attractive people tend to marry partners who are also attractive, but not as attractive as they are themselves.

Answer 25

regression effect

Question 26

People often fail to see the regression effect for what it is and instead conclude that they’ve discovered an important cause/effect relationship

Answer 26

regression fallacy

Question 27

A term for the concept that your variable represents; Ex: violence in the media, heat, internet use

Answer 27

Conceptual Definition

Question 27

A specific, measurable, translation of our variable; Ex: # of violent scenes in 10 hours of a TV show, degrees fahrenheit, # of hours using internet-enabled applications per day

Answer 27

Operational Defintion

Question 28

When an increase in X predicts an increase in Y; Ex: Generally, as study time increases, exam scores tend to increase as well. This indicates that more studying is associated with better performance on tests

Answer 28

Positive Correlation

Question 29

When an increase in X predicts a decrease in Y; Ex: Typically, as the time spent watching TV increases, physical fitness levels decrease. This suggests that more time in front of the TV is associated with less physical activity

Answer 29

Negative Correlation

Question 30

Occurs when it’s unclear whether variable A causes variable B, or if variable B actually causes variable A. In other words, instead of A influencing B, it might be that B is influencing A

Answer 30

Reverse Causality Problem