Social Beliefs and Judgements Flashcards
Define ‘social cognition’
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
Priming explains how…
unattended stimuli can subtly influence how we interpret events
Belief perseverance
Persistence of your initial beliefs, even when it becomes discredited, an explanation of why it is true still survives
Confirmation bias
Tendency to search for information that confirms one’s beliefs
3 remedies for overconfidence
- Prompt feedback
- Unpack a task and break it into subcomponents to reduce planning fallacy
- Think of reasons why judgements may be wrong
Representativeness heuristic
Tendency to assume that an event belongs to another event because it resembles it
Availability heuristic
Things that more readily come to mind are deemed as more probable
Illusory correlation
Perception of a relationship, when in reality none exists or it is much weaker
Illusion of control
Perception of uncontrollable events as subject to one’s control
Misattribution
Mistakenly attributing a behaviour to the wrong cause
Dispositional (internal) attribution
Attributing behaviour to the person’s disposition and traits
Situational (external) attribution
Attributing behaviour to the environmental circumstances
Attribution theory
How people explain the behaviour of others. Attributing it to internal or external dispositions
Spontaneous trait inference
An effortless, automatic inference of a trait after exposure to someone’s behaviour
Kelley’s covariation model
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
Fundamental attribution error
Tendency to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional influence on others’ behaviour
We are more likely to engage in the fundamental attribution error when events are…
Unexpected, unpleasant, unfamiliar, or self-relevant
Two-stage model of attributions
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
Actor-observer effect
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
Fixed mindset
You are either good at something or you are not
Incremental mindset
You improve through effort and learning
Self-fulfilling prophecies
Ones expectations about a person lead that person to engage in ways that confirm those expectations
Examples of self-fulfilling prophecies
Teacher expectations and student performance
Getting from others what we expect
