S4- Social Cognition and Person Perception Flashcards
Social categorization
The process of forming categories of people based on their common attributes
Social cognition
The way in which we interpret, analyze, remember, and use information about the social world
Prototype
The most representative member of a category
Schema
A schema is an organized structure of knowledge about a stimulus that is built up from experience and that contains causal relations; it is a theory about how the social world operates
Gender schema
A cognitive structure for processing information based on it’s perceived female or male qualities
Script
A schema that describes how a series of events is likely to occur in a well-known situation and which is used as a guide for behavior ad problem solving
Priming
The process by which recent exposure to certain stimuli or events increases the accessibility of certain memories, categories, or schemas
Heuristics
Time-saving mental shortcuts that reduce complex judgements to simple rules
Representativeness heuristic
The tendency to judge the category membership of things based on how closely they match the “typical” or “average” member of that category
Availability heuristic
The tendency to judge the frequency or probability of an event in terms of how easy it is to think of examples of that event
Anchoring and adjustment heuristic
A tendency to be biased toward the starting value or anchor in making quantitative judgments
Hindsight bias
The tendency, once an event has occurred, to overestimate our ability to have foreseen the outcome
Counterfactual thinking
The tendency to evaluate events by imagining alternative versions or outcomes to what actually happened
Thought suppression
The attempt to prevent certain thoughts from entering consciousness
Person perception
The process by which we try to detect other people’s temporary states and enduring dispositions (also called social perception)
Nonverbal communication
Communicating feelings and intentions without words
Nonconscious mimicry
The tendency to adopt the behaviors, postures, or mannerisms of interaction partners without conscious awareness or intention
Social role
A cluster of socially defined expectations that individuals in a given situation are expected to fill
Social role theory
The theory that virtually all the documented behavioral differences between males and females can be accounted for in terms of cultural stereotypes about gender and the resulting social goals that are taught to the young
Central traits
Traits that exert a disproportionate influence on people’s overall impressions causing them to assume the presence of other traits
Implicit personality theories
A type of schema people use to organize and make sense of which personality traits and behaviors go together
Confirmation bias
The tendency to seek information that supports our beliefs while ignoring disconfirming information
Attribution
Process by which people use information to make inferences about the causes of behavior or events
Internal attribution
Attribution that locates the cause of an event two factors internal to the person such as personality traits, mode, attitude, abilities, or effort
External attribution
An attribution that locates the cause of an event to factors external to the person, such as a luck, or other people, or the situation
Correspondent inference
An inference that the action of an actor corresponds to or is indicative of a stable personal characteristic
Covariation principle
A principle of attribution theory stating that for something to be the cause of a particular behavior, it must be present when the behavior occurs and absent when it does not occur
Discounting principle
Principle of attribution theory stating that whenever there are several possible causal explanations for a particular event, people tend to be much likely much less likely to attribute the of effect to any particular cause
Fundamental attribution error
The tendency to overestimate the impact of dispositional causes and underestimate the impact of situational causes on other people’s behavior
Actor-observer effect
The tendency for people to attribute their own behavior to external causes but that of others to internal factors
Dual-process models of attribution
Theories of attribution that propose that people initially engaged in a relatively automatic and simple attributional assessment but then later consciously correct this attribution with more deliberate and effortful thinking
Pessimistic explanatory style
A habitual tendency to attribute negative events to internal, stable, and global causes, and positive events to the external, unstable, and specific causes
Optimistic explanatory style
A habitual tendency to attribute negative events to external unstable and specific causes and positive events to internal stable and global causes
