Social Cognition Flashcards
What is Social Cognition?
The study of how people think about their social world and make decisions about socially relevant events.
What is the concept of consistency
Wether the persons behaviour is the same across different situations and times. Ex. Has my professor always shown up in clown shoes
What is the concept of consensus
Do other people react teh same way to the stimulus or situation. ex. do other people think its weird the professor is wearing clown shoes?
What is the concept of Distinctiveness?
is the person’s reaction distinctive to this particular situation or target, or is it a more general pattern of behavior across various situations and targets. ex. does this professor act odd in other situations.
what does rational thought require
That the thinker has access to accurate, useful information.
That the thinker has time to process all of the relevant information
What is a cognitive miser?
Humans are programmed to be cognitive misers. We are lazy. We have the tendency to conserve cognitive energy
What are heuristics?
Mental shortcuts or rules of thumb that people use when making decisions or judgements
What are some benefits of heuristics?
Can result in correct answers with very little effort. They can also save us time
What are some cons of heuristics
They can lead to errors, and the mistakes have consistency, meaning the mistake is predictable across individuals
What is the availability heuristic?
Tendency to make judgements based on how quickley things come to mind
what is social categorization?
natural human tendency to classify others into groups based on shared characteristics. This process is described as something we do naturally when we encounter numerous people, often on a weekly basis.
What was Rosenthal and Jacobsens study of self fulfilling prophecies?
At the beginning of the school year, children were given an IQ test.
*
The researchers then randomly selected 20% of the children.
*
Crucially, the teachers were told that these randomly selected children were “potential bloomers” who were expected to show significant academic improvement during the year. In reality, these children were no different in their initial test scores than any of the other students.
*
The researchers then retook the IQ tests at the end of the school year.
*
The key finding of the study was that the 20% of children who had been labeled as “potential bloomers” showed the greatest academic gains compared to the other students.
what is a self fullfiling prophecy?
When we act on our initial impressions of others in a way that makes their behaviour conform to our expectations
What are illusory correlations?
our tendency to perceive relationships between entities that we think should be related but are in fact not.
what are the groups we categorize people into?
In groups- people like us
Out groups- people not like us
what is the homogeneity effect?
the tendency to see members of the outgroup as being similar to one another
Devaluing people as individuals
What is in group favourtism?
the tendency to see our own group as being better on all dimensions and to allocate more resources to them
More forgiving of them
