Social Beliefs and Judgements

Question 1

Define ‘social cognition’

Answer 1

Study of how people think about the social world and arrive at judgements that help them interpret the past, understand the present, and predict the future

Question 2

Priming explains how…

Answer 2

unattended stimuli can subtly influence how we interpret events

Question 3

Belief perseverance

Answer 3

Persistence of your initial beliefs, even when it becomes discredited, an explanation of why it is true still survives

Question 4

Confirmation bias

Answer 4

Tendency to search for information that confirms one’s beliefs

Question 5

3 remedies for overconfidence

Answer 5

1. Prompt feedback
2. Unpack a task and break it into subcomponents to reduce planning fallacy
3. Think of reasons why judgements may be wrong

Question 6

Representativeness heuristic

Answer 6

Tendency to assume that an event belongs to another event because it resembles it

Question 7

Availability heuristic

Answer 7

Things that more readily come to mind are deemed as more probable

Question 8

Illusory correlation

Answer 8

Perception of a relationship, when in reality none exists or it is much weaker

Question 9

Illusion of control

Answer 9

Perception of uncontrollable events as subject to one’s control

Question 10

Misattribution

Answer 10

Mistakenly attributing a behaviour to the wrong cause

Question 11

Dispositional (internal) attribution

Answer 11

Attributing behaviour to the person’s disposition and traits

Question 12

Situational (external) attribution

Answer 12

Attributing behaviour to the environmental circumstances

Question 13

Attribution theory

Answer 13

How people explain the behaviour of others. Attributing it to internal or external dispositions

Question 14

Spontaneous trait inference

Answer 14

An effortless, automatic inference of a trait after exposure to someone’s behaviour

Question 15

Kelley’s covariation model

Answer 15

Consistency: how consistent is this person’s behaviour in this situation?

Distinctiveness: how specific is the person’s behaviour in this situation? Is it unusual for this individual?

Consensus: to what extent do others in this situation behave similarly

Question 16

Fundamental attribution error

Answer 16

Tendency to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional influence on others’ behaviour

Question 17

We are more likely to engage in the fundamental attribution error when events are…

Answer 17

Unexpected, unpleasant, unfamiliar, or self-relevant

Question 18

Two-stage model of attributions

Answer 18

Stage 1: we make an internal attribution (many times we stop here)

Step 2: if we have the motivation and cognitive resources we consider situational information

Question 19

Actor-observer effect

Answer 19

When our action is good we attribute it to our dispositions.

When our action is poor we are more likely to attribute it to the situation

Question 20

Fixed mindset

Answer 20

You are either good at something or you are not

Question 21

Incremental mindset

Answer 21

You improve through effort and learning

Question 22

Self-fulfilling prophecies

Answer 22

Ones expectations about a person lead that person to engage in ways that confirm those expectations

Question 23

Examples of self-fulfilling prophecies

Answer 23

Teacher expectations and student performance

Getting from others what we expect