Social Cognition Flashcards
Exam 1
What is cognition?
How we perceive, remember, and interpret information
What is social cognition?
How we perceive, remember, and interpret information about ourselves and others (often biased by expectations, needs, and wishes of person)
What is bottom-up processing?
Data-driven processing that is guided by the present stimuli
What is top-down processing?
Concept-driven processing that is guided by prior knowledge
What are schemas?
Folders in our minds, organize old and new information/knowledge
What are the different types of schemas?
Person, Self, Roles, Event, Group
What are advantages of schemas?
Guides memory of what we’ve done/seen, directs attention, provide clues for how we should behave, give quick understanding of information
What are disadvantages of schemas?
Distort incoming information, bias recall and decision-making, become self-fulfilling prophecies
What are self-fulfilling prophecies?
Our expectations of someone else’s behavior (from schema) lead to them confirming that expectation
What is confirmation bias?
Tendency to interpret, seek, & create info in ways that verify existing beliefs (see what you want to see)
What is priming?
Tendency for recent experiences to increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, or concept
What can be primed?
Words, feelings, personality traits, goals, behaviors, stereotypes, attitudes
