Social Cognition

Question 1

Social Cognition

Answer 1

How people think about themselves and the social world

How people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgements and decisions.

Question 2

Schemas

Answer 2

Mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about he social world around themes or subjects that would influence the information people notice, think about, and remember.

Question 3

Person schemas

Answer 3

appearance, behavior, personality, preferences (of the other person)

Question 4

Social schemas

Answer 4

being respectful, and other social expectations such as a man paying for dates or making sure you’re presentable for an interview

Question 5

Sterotypes

Answer 5

applied rapidly and automatically when we encounter other people, is applied to member of social groups, genders, or race.

Question 6

Accessibliity

Answer 6

the extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people’s minds and are therefore more likely to be used when making judgements about the social world.

Question 7

Priming

Answer 7

The process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema, trait or concept. It is automatic and occurs unintentionally and unconsciously.

Question 8

What are three reasons a schema would become accessible?

Answer 8

Some schemas are chronically accessible due to past experience.
Something can become accessible because it is related to a current goal
Schemas can become temporarily accessible because of our recent experiences

Question 9

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Answer 9

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

More likely to occur when people are distracted

Question 10

Behavioral confirmation

Answer 10

acting in such a way as to make your belief true

Question 11

Judgmental Heuristics

Answer 11

Mental shortcuts people use to make judgements quickly and efficiently.
-They do not guarantee that people will make accurate inferences about the world
-sometimes heuristics are inadequate for the job at hand, or misapplied leading to faulty judgments.

Question 12

Availability Heuristics

Answer 12

A mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgement on the ease of which they can bring something to mind

Question 13

Representative heuritic

Answer 13

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

Question 14

Base Rate Information

Answer 14

A statistic used to describe the percentage of a population that demonstrates some characteristic.

Ex: the percentage of students at a particular college who have major depressive disorder.

Question 15

Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic

Answer 15

A mental shortcut whereby people use a number or value as a starting point and then adjust insufficiently from this anchor

Question 16

Controlled Thinking

Answer 16

Thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary and effortful

Question 17

Counterfactual reasoning

Answer 17

Mentally changing some aspect of the past in imagining what might have been. “if only I had answered one question differently I would’ve passed”

-can be useful, but focuses attention on what ways people can cope better in the future.
-can result in rumination, where people repetitively focus on negative things in their lives.

Question 18

Thought suppression

Answer 18

the attempt to avoid thinking about something we would prefer to forget

Question 19

Overconfidence Barrier

Answer 19

The fact that people usually have too much confidence in the accuracy of their judgements.