Problem 1 Social Cogninition( Super Summary) Flashcards
What is a social cognition?
Cognitive processes and structures that influence and are influenced by social Behaviour.
Thinking about other people’s feelings
More in social cognition?
- Interpreting other peoples communicative signals
- Not unique to humans
What is an attribution?
Process of assigning a cause to our own Behaviour and that of others. How we make sense of our (social) world and other people’s actions.
Why does this person behave like he/she does?
What are the two types of attributions?
Internal/dispositional attributions: Behaviour is determined by people’s personality
External/situational attributions: Behaviour is determined by the situation
(E.g: I greet my neighbor in the street and she doesn’t greet me back : is she rude? Did she forget her glasses?
What is a cognitive short cut?
People use the least complex demanding cognitions, this causes error and biases
Some cognitive short cuts?
- Schemas
- Biases
- Heuristics
—> help to navigate the overwhelming amount of social info in our environments
What is the configurar model?
Model of impression formation, in which central traits play a disproportionate role in configuring the final impression
Central traits va peripheral
What are two types of biases?
Biases forming impressions:
—> Primacy: First info is more important or either people pay more attention to it
—> Recency: Later information has more impact than earlier information
—>Positive Impression:When there is no info available
—>Negative Impression: we give more negative than positive impressions
Stereotypes: Shared and simplified evaluative image of a social group and its members
What is a schema?
Cognitive structure that represent knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus.
Allows quickly make sense of something with prior knowledge
What are different types of schemas?
- Script: schema about an event, makes an event meaningful
- Person schema: about a known person (eg friend)
Role schema: relative to job (Eg pilot)
Self schema: Info about our self (identity)
Content free schema: limited number of rules for processing information
What is a prototype?
Typical/ideal defining features of a category
What are fuzzy sets?
Categories are fuzzy sets of features organized around a prototype
What are exemplars?
Specific instances of a member of a category (eg: America’s=Barack Obama’s)
What are associative networks?
Model of memory in which ideas are connected by associative links along which cognitive activation can spread
What is the social identity theory?
Theory of group membership and inter group relations based on self categorization, social comparison and the construction of a shared self definition in terms of ingroup defining properties
What is the self categorization theory?
How the process of categorizing oneself as a group member produces social identity and group and inter group Behaviour
What is accessibility?
Ease of recall of categories or schemas that we already have
What are the three ways of changing schemas?
Bookkeeping
Conversion
Subtyping
What is a bookkeeping?
Gradual schema change through the accumulation of bits of schema-inconsistent information
What is conversion?
Sudden schema change as a consequence of gradual accumulation of schema inconsistent information
What is subtyping?
Schema change as a consequence of schema inconsistent information causing the formation of subcategories
What is social encoding?
Receiving for information in the environment (scanning the environment)
In social encoding what three things capture our attention?
Salience
Vividness
Priming
What is salience?
A stimuli that stands out amongst others (eg a man in the middle of many women )
What is vividness?
Vivid stimuli attract attention due to emotional interest,gory image, close in time and place (eg a violent crime)
Priming?
Accesible categories due to interest and goals (eg: sex discrimination seen everywhere due to my interest in that topic)
What is social inference?
Identification of information to form impressions and make judgements
What are the three types of social inference?
-Normative models
Behavioral decision theory
Regression
What are normative models?
Ideal processes for making accurate social inferences
What is the behavioral decision theory?
Set of normative models
What is regression?
Tendency to exaggerate observations based on initial observations (eg: restaurant is really good, so we think that it is always good until we go back and see that is acc less good than we thought it was. What
What are heuristics?
Cognitive short cuts that provide accurate inferences for most of us most of the time
What are three types of heuristics?
- Representativeness heuristic
- Availability heuristic
- Anchoring and adjustment
What is the representativeness heuristic?
Instances are assigned to categories on the basis of overall similarities or resemblance to the category (eg: singer should look attractive/Susan Boyle opposite)
What is an availability heuristic?
Frequency or likelihood of an event is based on how quickly instances or associations come to mind (eg: media shows violent Muslims, we think that it is frequent to find violent Muslims)
What is anchoring and adjustment?
Inferences are tied to initial standards or schemas (eg: we judge someone on basis of ourself,ourself=anchor)
What is the affect infusion model?
Cognition is infused with affect such that social judgements reflect mood
