Social Cognition

Question 1

What is social cognition?

Answer 1

Social cognition is how people think about themselves and the social work. How people select, interpret, remember and use social information to make judgements and decisions.

Question 2

What is automatic thinking?

Answer 2

Automatic thinking is thought that is nonconscious, and unintentional and involuntary, and effortless

Question 3

What are schemas?

Answer 3

Schemas are mental structures that organize our knowledge about the world around themes or subjects and that influence the information people notice, think about and remember

Question 4

Why are schemas useful?

Answer 4

Schemas are useful because they fill in the gaps of knowledge about the world and we can apply them in new situations and adapt to them. If we had to approach every situation as new then it would be very difficult as you would have to spend time understanding the stiuation and you are very confused all the time

Question 5

What is the condition where you lose the ability to form new memories i.e. no schemas?

Answer 5

Korsakov’s syndrome

Question 6

When do we tend to rely on our schemas?

Answer 6

When information is ambiguous or not very clear cut.

Question 7

An experiment that demonstrates the schemas?

Answer 7

Guest lecturer when they were told that the lecturer was nice or cold. The teacher rating was higher when the students were told he was warm. However when the prof was obviously arrogant they could also tell he was arrogant but when they were asked if he was funny (ambiguous) then warm conditions rated higher

Question 8

What affects which schemas we use?

Answer 8

Accessibility and priming

Question 9

What is accessibility

Answer 9

○ Accessibility is the extent to which schemas and concepts are at the front of the mind and are therefore likely to be used when making judgements about the social world.

Question 10

How does a schema become accessible

Answer 10

1) Chronically accessible due to past experience
2) Related to a current goal
3) Temporarily accesible due to our recent experiences (like priming)

Question 11

What is priming

Answer 11

the process by which recent
experiences increase the accessibility of a schema,
trait, or concept.

Question 12

True or false: thoughts have to be both accessible and applicable in order to sucessfully prime

Answer 12

TRUE

Question 13

What is an experiment that showed priming

Answer 13

One where participants were doing a pre trial where they were asked to identify colours while memorizing words. Depending on the words they were asked to memorize , they were either describing a pragraph about “DONALD” as either positive or negative even though they read the same passage. However, the words had to be related to the traits

Question 14

What is self fulfilling prophecy

Answer 14

The case wherein people have an expectation about what another person is like, which influences how they act toward that person, which causes that person to behave consistently with people’s original expectations, making the expectations come true

Question 15

What are some types of automatic thinking other than schemas

Answer 15

Automatic goal pursuit, automatic decision making, Heuristics?

Question 16

What is automatic goal pursuit

Answer 16

When you unconciously choose to pursue a goal based on the goal that we are primed for or have recenetly activated

Question 17

What is an experiment that demonstrates the automatic goal pursuit

Answer 17

The game about money taking and the next person knows how much money you took. Before the game you have to unscramble words having to do with either (fairness) or * unrelated words. If the words were about fairness, they were less likely to take money for themselves while if the words were unrelated, they were more likely to take

Question 18

TRUE or FALSE, distraction can be good for making complex decision

Answer 18

TRUE, Too much conscious thought can be bad sometimes to making a good decision.

Question 19

What must be necessary for distraction to be useful for decision making?

Answer 19

There must be conscious thought to even want to make a good decision and to set the agenda. Distraction also does not work for simple and straighforward rules.

Question 20

What is the best way to make a hard decision with complex information? Conscious thought? Distraction? Or both?

Answer 20

Both

Question 21

What is the connection between automatic thinking and the body?

Answer 21

A physical sensation can activate a metaphor that influences judegements about a completely unrelated topic or person. Like clean smell associated with morality

Question 22

What is the connection between automatic thinking and the body?

Answer 22

A physical sensation can activate a metaphor that influences judegements about a completely unrelated topic or person. Like clean smell associated with morality or weight associated

Question 23

What are judgement heuristics

Answer 23

Mental shortcuts people use to make judgements quickly and efficiently

Question 24

What is the availability heuristics?

Answer 24

Basing a judgement on the ease with which they can bring something to mind

Question 25

Can we use availability heuristics on our own traits

Answer 25

Yes

Question 26

What is the representative heuristics

Answer 26

a mental shortcut where people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case

Question 27

What is base rate information

Answer 27

Informaiton about the relative frequency of members of different categories in the population

Question 28

What do people do when they have both base rate information and contradictory information?

Answer 28

Poeple tend to not use base rate information as much then. People tend to focus more on the individual characteristics of what they observe

Question 29

Why do most people believe the personality test thing describes them so well?

Answer 29

Representativeness heuristics

Question 30

What is analytical thinking style

Answer 30

A type of thinking in which people focus on the properties of objects without considering their surrounding context. Usually common in Western cultures

Question 31

What is holistic thinking style

Answer 31

A type of thinking in which people focus on the overall contect, particularly the ways in which objects relate to each other. Common in East Asian cultures

Question 32

What influences the cultural differences in thinking styles

Answer 32

One hypothesis is the difference in the environments, like Japanese cities are “busier” than American cities. In fact, Japanese city pictures can prime holistic thinking and American city pictures can prime analytical thinking

Question 33

What is controlled thinking

Answer 33

Thinking that is conscious, intentionalm voluntary and effortful. Can only think about one thing at a time

Question 34

Is there free will?

Answer 34

One theory states that there is a correlation between the thought of doing something and then doing it that implies free will but correlation does not mean causation.

Question 35

Why does it matter whether we believe in free will or not?

Answer 35

People who believe in free will are more willing to help people in need and less likely to engage in immoral actions. Eg, the one where students were primed to either believe in free will or not and then self graded a test. People who were primed to not believe were more likely to cheat

Question 36

What is counterfactual thinking?

Answer 36

Mentally changing aspects of the past as a way of imagining what might have been. “If only”

Question 37

How does counterfactual thinking affect emotions

Answer 37

The easier it is to undo an outcome, the easier it is to do counterfactual thinking, the stronger the emotional reaction is to it.

Question 38

Can counterfactual thinking be good

Answer 38

Yes because it can help you to pinpoint areas that need attention/improvement. Or it can help people cope better inthe future

Question 39

What is the overconfidence barrier

Answer 39

The fact that people usually have too much confidence in their accuract of their judgements

Question 40

Can we improve human thinking

Answer 40

Make people a but more humble about the their reasoning abilities
Teaching reasoning like statistics

Question 41

What is facilitated communication and did it work out?

Answer 41

It is the way of letting communication-impaired people express their thoughts but it was discredited and found that facilitators were underestimating the control they had in because they unconsciously pressing their own answers