Social Cognition Flashcards
What is social cognition?
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.
What is automatic thinking?
Automatic thinking is thought that is nonconscious, and unintentional and involuntary, and effortless
What are schemas?
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
Why are schemas useful?
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
What is the condition where you lose the ability to form new memories i.e. no schemas?
Korsakov’s syndrome
When do we tend to rely on our schemas?
When information is ambiguous or not very clear cut.
An experiment that demonstrates the schemas?
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
What affects which schemas we use?
Accessibility and priming
What is accessibility
○ 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.
How does a schema become accessible
1) Chronically accessible due to past experience
2) Related to a current goal
3) Temporarily accesible due to our recent experiences (like priming)
What is priming
the process by which recent
experiences increase the accessibility of a schema,
trait, or concept.
True or false: thoughts have to be both accessible and applicable in order to sucessfully prime
TRUE
What is an experiment that showed priming
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
What is self fulfilling prophecy
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
What are some types of automatic thinking other than schemas
Automatic goal pursuit, automatic decision making, Heuristics?
What is automatic goal pursuit
When you unconciously choose to pursue a goal based on the goal that we are primed for or have recenetly activated
What is an experiment that demonstrates the automatic goal pursuit
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
TRUE or FALSE, distraction can be good for making complex decision
TRUE, Too much conscious thought can be bad sometimes to making a good decision.
What must be necessary for distraction to be useful for decision making?
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.
What is the best way to make a hard decision with complex information? Conscious thought? Distraction? Or both?
Both
What is the connection between automatic thinking and the body?
A physical sensation can activate a metaphor that influences judegements about a completely unrelated topic or person. Like clean smell associated with morality
What is the connection between automatic thinking and the body?
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
What are judgement heuristics
Mental shortcuts people use to make judgements quickly and efficiently
What is the availability heuristics?
Basing a judgement on the ease with which they can bring something to mind
Can we use availability heuristics on our own traits
Yes
What is the representative heuristics
a mental shortcut where people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case
What is base rate information
Informaiton about the relative frequency of members of different categories in the population
What do people do when they have both base rate information and contradictory information?
Poeple tend to not use base rate information as much then. People tend to focus more on the individual characteristics of what they observe
Why do most people believe the personality test thing describes them so well?
Representativeness heuristics
What is analytical thinking style
A type of thinking in which people focus on the properties of objects without considering their surrounding context. Usually common in Western cultures
What is holistic thinking style
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
What influences the cultural differences in thinking styles
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
What is controlled thinking
Thinking that is conscious, intentionalm voluntary and effortful. Can only think about one thing at a time
Is there free will?
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.
Why does it matter whether we believe in free will or not?
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
What is counterfactual thinking?
Mentally changing aspects of the past as a way of imagining what might have been. “If only”
How does counterfactual thinking affect emotions
The easier it is to undo an outcome, the easier it is to do counterfactual thinking, the stronger the emotional reaction is to it.
Can counterfactual thinking be good
Yes because it can help you to pinpoint areas that need attention/improvement. Or it can help people cope better inthe future
What is the overconfidence barrier
The fact that people usually have too much confidence in their accuract of their judgements
Can we improve human thinking
Make people a but more humble about the their reasoning abilities
Teaching reasoning like statistics
What is facilitated communication and did it work out?
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
