Social Cognition

Question 1

What is social cognition?

Answer 1

cognitive processes that influence and are influenced by social behavior

Question 2

Cognitive misers

Answer 2

• people have a limited capacity to process information and are cognitive misers who take all sorts of cognitive short cuts
• they try to put as less effort in it as possible

Question 3

Motivated tactician

Answer 3

social thinker is characterized as someone who has multiple cognitive strategies available, which they choose among on the basis of personal goals, needs and motives

Question 4

Configural model by Asch

Answer 4

configural model= Asch’s Gestalt-based model of impression formation in which central traits play a disproportional role in configuring the final impression

central traits = traits that have a disproportionate influence on the configuration of final impression

peripheral traits = traits that have insignificant influence

people distinguish between good/bad social and good/bad intellectual

Question 5

Primacy (biases)

Answer 5

an order of presentation effect in which earlier presented information has a disproportionate influence on social cognition
-> person was evaluated more favorably, when positive information was presented first than when negative information was presented first
two possible explanations for it : first informations act as central cues or people simply pay more attention to earlier information

-> Primacy effect is more common : First impression really do matter

Question 6

Recency (biases

Answer 6

an order of presentation effect in which later presented information has a disproportionate influence on social cognition
possible explanations: people are distracted in the beginning or the motivation to attend someone is very little, later they get to know that they e.g. have to work together with the person

Question 7

Implicit- personality theory

Answer 7

every person develops their own way of characterizing other people and explaining their behavior

• widely shared within cultures but they also differ between cultures
• he specific patterns and biases an individual uses when forming impressions based on a limited amount of initial information about an unfamiliar person

Question 8

Social judgeability (biases)

Answer 8

= perception of whether it is socially acceptable to judge a specific target
people will not make stereotype-based judgements if conventions or legislation proscribe such behaior as politically incorrect but they would so if conventions encourage and legitimize such behavior

Question 9

Stereotypes (biases)

Answer 9

widely shared and simplified evaluative image of a social group and its members

if we meet a person, we first get knowledge of their category membership and this generates a stereotype-consistent impression

Question 10

Physical appearance (biases)

Answer 10

-> first information that we get about a person -> first impression
we attribute positive traits to attractive people
physical appearance has a great impact on affiliation, attraction, love and on the career

Question 11

cognitive algebra

Answer 11

approach to the study of impression formation that focuses on how people combine attributes that have valence into an overall positive or negative impression

three principal models of cognitive algebra: summation, averaging, weighted averaging

1 Summation: method of forming positive ore negative impression by summing the valence of all the constituent person attributes

2 Averaging averaging the valence of all the positive and negative constituent attributes

3 Weighted avergaging first weighting and then averaging the valence of all the constituent person attributes

Question 12

schema definition

Answer 12

cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among those attributes
- schemas become more abstract, organized, compact, resilient over time -> hard to change

Question 13

What types of schemas do exist?

Answer 13

1 person schema 
2 role schema
3 scripts ( schema about an event) 
4 content free schemas (if tom likes jack and you like tom you probably also like jack to maintain balance) 
5 self-schemas

Question 14

prototype

Answer 14

cognitive representation of the typical / ideal defining features of a category

Question 15

Social identity theory

Answer 15

theory of who people are based on their group membership

Question 16

Self-categorization theory

Answer 16

theory how the process of categorazing oneself as a group member produces social identity and group and intergroup behaviors

Question 17

three ways in which schemas can change if they are quite inaccurate

Answer 17

1 Bookkeeping ( gradual schema change through the accumulation of bits of schema-inconsistent information) 
2 Conversion ( sudden and massive change once a critical mass of disconfirming evidence has accumulated 
3 Subtyping ( schema change as the consequence of schema inconsistent informtion, causing the formation of subcategories)

Question 18

Salience

Answer 18

refers to the property of a stimulus that makes is stand out relative to other stimuli
-> people can be salient because they
a do not fit prior expectation
b are novel or figural (bright t-shirt) in the immediate context
c imortant for your goal and you are told to pay attention to them

Question 19

Vividness ( Intensität)

Answer 19

an intrinsic (innewohnend) property of the stimulus itself
vivid stimuli are ones that are
- emotionally attention grabbing (terror attack)
- concrete and image-provoking
- close to you in time and place

Question 20

Priming

Answer 20

activation of accessible categories or schemas in memory that influence how we process new information

Question 21

normative models

Answer 21

ideal processes of making accurate social inferences

Behavioral decision theory : set of ideal processes for making social inferences

Question 22

illusionary correlation

Answer 22

when people assume that a relationship exists between two variables, they tend to overestimate the degree of correlation or set a correlation where none actually exists (bacon/egg)

Question 23

the two bases of illusionary correlation :

Associative meaning and Paired distinctiveness

Answer 23

associative meaning : illusionary correlation in which items are seen as belonging together because they ‘ought to’ on the basis of prior expectations
paired distinctivness: ic in which items are seen as belonging together because they share some unusual features

Question 24

Heuristics definition

Answer 24

cognitive short-cuts that provide adequately accurate inferences for most of us most of the time

Question 25

Representativeness heuristic

Answer 25

a cognitive short-cut in which instances are assigned to categories or types on the basis of overall similarity to the category

Question 26

Availability heuristic

Answer 26

a cognitive short-cut in which the frequency or likelihood of an event is based on how quickly instances or associations come to mind

Question 27

Anchoring and adjustment

Answer 27

for making inferences we need a starting point an anchor , a heuristic that ties inferences to initial standards

Question 28

Affect-infusion model

Answer 28

describes the effects of mood on social cognition
four different ways in which people process information about one another :
1 direct access
2 motivated processing
3 heuristic processing
4 substantive processing