Social Cognition Flashcards
Social cognition, definition?
How people select,
interpret, remember, and use social
information to make judgments and
decisions
Five Critical Aspects of Social Cognition?
- Judgments are only as good as the information upon which they are based, yet the information available to us is not always accurate or complete
- The way in which information is presented can affect our judgments
- We do not passively take information in – we seek it out and often in a biased way
- Our pre-existing knowledge and expectations can influence how we construe new information
- Reason and intuition both underlie social cognition, whose complex interactions affect judgment
What we strive for though social cognition?
- Accuracy
- Conserving Mental Resources
-> This is a trade-off! - Self-Enhancement, we want to feel good about ourselves (like confirmation bias)
Schema?
Mental structures that help us organize social information that we receive
Types of Schemes (4)? what type of thinking can it lead to?
- Person schemas
- Appearance
- Behaviour
- Personality
- Preferences
- Self-schemas
- Future doctor
- Smart
- Hates broccoli
- Social schemas
- Be respectful
- Pat for movie tickets
- Don’t eat garlic
- Event schemas (Specific to the event)
- Handshake
- Professionalism
- Portfolio
- Business suit
-> Can lead to automatic thinking
Dual Process Theory?
Automatic
- Unintentional
- Fast
- Parallel Processing
- Intuitive
- Narrow Problems
- Implicit Memory
- Context-Dependent
- Efficient
Controlled
- Intentional
- Slow
- Serial Processing
- Rational
- Abstract Problems
- Working Memory
- Effortful
Priming?
When a concept or other knowledge structure is automatically triggered or activated by an environmental stimulus, thereby
becoming more likely to affect subsequent thoughts, feelings,
and behaviors
Spreading activation?
Activating other concepts that are closely associated
in memory
Can be related to priming
- Yellow
- Water
- Park
DUCK!
How are social psychologists approaching inconsistent findings? (Replication crisis)
- Open Science Practices, pre-registering hypothesis cannot make things up post hoc, everyone has access to the data
- Preregistered Reports, accepting null findings pre-approval that a journal will purplish before the results are in
- Science as a Process, knowledge is always being updated
Cognitive Load Theory?
We possess a limited capacity for working memory and, if
presented with information that exceeds this capacity,
information overload occurs
Fewer cognitive resources -> inhibits controlled
processes when making quick judgments
Heuristics? definition plus 4
Mental shortcuts or rules of thumb or problem-solving or probability judgments
*Representativeness
*Availability
*Base-rate fallacy
*Anchoring and Adjustment
Representativeness heuristic?
Categorizing a particular instance
based on how similar the instance is to
an existing mental prototype
Availability Heuristic?
Making a judgment about the
frequency or likelihood of an event
based on how easily examples
come to mind
Base-rate fallacy?
Ignoring underlying
probabilities—the base rate or frequency of an
event—and instead, focusing on unusual or
atypical instances (e.g., attention to anecdotes,
vivid examples)
Anchoring and Adjustment?
Rely on reality available information on which to base estimation and then to adjust that estimate up or down.
