Social Cognition Flashcards
social cognition
process by which people think about and make sense of other people, themselves, and social situations
dispositional inference
attributing someone’s behavior to their personal qualities rather than the situation
fundamental attribution error
bias toward dispositional (person-based) inferences
actor-observer bias
behavior of others is due to personality; my behavior is due to the situation
confirmatory bias
tendency to use information that confirms or verifies our existing beliefs (interpret, seek, create)
anchoring and adjustment heuristic
begin with rough estimate, then adjust
anchor low (come up with relatively small answer) anchor high (come up with large answer)
can be an excellent tool
representativeness heuristic
strategy of basing likelihood judgments on prototypes
Gambler’s fallacy
a belief that the onset of a certain random event is more or less likely to happen following the occurrence of a prior random event
availability heuristic
when likelihood estimates are based on how easy examples come to mind
false consensus effect
the tendency to overestimate other’s agreement with us
straightness heuristic
tendency to “tidy up” untidy realities to make more in line with “prettier picture”
affective forecasting error
tendency to mispredict the intensity and duration of emotional reactions to future events
focalism
the tendency to overestimate how much we will think about an event in the future
immune neglect
the tendency to ignore automatic psychological processes that help us “cope” with emotional events
accessability
information that is more easily retrieved is more likely to be used
