Social Cognition Flashcards
Chapter 2 and 3
cognitive consistency
- general need to have consistency among your beliefs and thoughts, relationships and attitudes, to avoid cognitive dissonance.
Illusionary Correlation ?
- assumption of the correlation of two variables - that do not correlate to each other for real.
- -> example : placebo - illusionary correlation of some sort of treatment / medicament and the result / being cured.
How can you distinguish a prototype to a schema ?
- the ideal image / representation of a group
- distinction : ideal- not known yet, usually of things you haven’t experienced so far.- no real experiences , knowledge are connected as with a schema.
Salience
- if something stands out and attracts your attention it is due to salience
Schema ?
- A set of knowledge concerning an event , thing or a person .
- organised like a mindmap that connects different aspects of that person or topic and experiences you have made.
- we use it organise and understand the world
Script ?
- A fuzzy set of Information, that is created mostly about persons or jobs
What distinguishes a script to a schema ? ???
- schema is more ordered and also about a situation / event.
- script is rather a fuzzy set , and more about persons
Self categorisation theory
- We put our self into a category with the same manner that we put others into a category.
Accessibility
- the ease with wich a schema is brought to mind and used to make judgement- > what is most accessible about a certain topic/ person will be used.
How are accessibility and priming connected?
-priming describes the process of having a high accessibility for a particular topic , due to prior experience with that topic/ person that changes future processing of information concerning that topic.
–> being pregnant and seeing babies everywhere
Which effect explains that a judge can never be eternally objective?
- the affect infusion theory
- -> the judgement you make always reflects your current mode
Anchoring and adjustment
- the first schema / impression you have serves as a kind of anchor that you will always refer to when making a judgement about a person / situation . –> first impression has the biggest influence!
Associative meaning
- illusionary correlation between things that should belong together because you have the expectation they do.
Associative network model ?
- a model of what our memory looks like. A connection of associations building a network with pathways that are connected with links and shortcuts that need cognitive activation to be spread.
What the heck is an attribution?
- the process in which we connect a cause to our own behaviour or the one of others.
Availability heuristic
- how often a behaviour and a certain event will appear depends on how fast it comes to mind and how available it is.
- -> the more present a phobia in your mind is the more you will encounter situations that evoke this fear.
What do people mostly not when it comes to judging about a class of events?
- Base rate information: which is the factual and statistical sum of information gathered concerning a certain class of events.
- people mostly judge with the first impression and have scripts about a class of events.
Behavioural decision theory
- a set of models concerning the topic of :
- how one can make adequate decisions / evaluations of social interaction
Behaviourism
- the psychological direction of explaining the occurrence of behaviour through the mean of the different forms of conditioning.
- also known as reinforcement theory
What does a human keep book of in the process of Bookkeeping?
- of things that are contradictory/ inconsistent to his/ her schema
- -> this changes the schema bit by bit over a longer period of time.
What are the traits called that have due to Asch’s impression formation model the greatest influence on the impression formation? What is the Model called like that he describes ?
- central traits
- configural model
Cognitive Algebra ?
- term that defines the cognitive process of evaluating the influence of certain traits of information’s through comparing them amongst each other in order to weigh out whether it is a positive or negative impression , schema, script or important or not.
What does it mean to say that people are cognitive misers?
- this term describes the natural laziness of the human brain to solve problems in the simplest way by using things as heuristics and the attributional biases regardless of intelligence.
Conversion
- accumulation of schema different aspect which leads to a sudden change of attitude .
Exemplars
- a specific representative of a member of a category
Family resemblance
- defining the substance of a category membership
gestalt psychology
- theory which claims that ,the whole influences the little parts instead of vice versa .
Heuristics
- mental short cuts that provide us with assumptions, inferences, schemas and all such stuff most of the time.
Illusory correlation
- if we assume that two things occur more often with each other than they do in reality .
- or if they don’t even occur with each other and assumed that out of prior expectations/ knowledge
Implicit personality theories
- an individual approach to identifying people`s traits and characteristics and explaining their behaviour.
Motivated tactician
- People have different cognitive strategies available according to their goals they decide which one to choose.
naive psychologist (or scientist)
- a model of social cognition which claims that people use research like tactics to make sense of their surrounding and analyse the behaviour of themselves and others.
normative model
- ideal model of making accurate inferences
peripheral traits
- traits that have no big influence on the final impression
personal constructs
- personal ways of characterising people
primacy
- the order of the impressions that were taken is important for the final formation of an impression
- the first informations usually often make the biggest impression.
priming
- we activate impressions and memories when processing new information
- -> has an influence on how we influence the information
Recency
- the contradicting effect to primacy
- the later information has a bigger effect on the final impression.
Reductionism
- explaining a phenomena in reducing the phenomena on a from scientists of that field to easy level .
Regression
- the first observation is more extreme than the following
Representativeness heuristic
- a short cut where the brain associates instances ( circumstances ) to categories / types because those resemble the categories .
Roles
- Patterns of behaviour that distinguish between different tasks/ positions in a group.
Script
a schema about an event- merken : look at the script- scene in theatre ( event)
Social cognition
- the cognitive processes behind our behaviour
- > influence and are influenced by
Social identity theory
- the membership in a group is based on the self categorisation, the social comparison and the identification with the group.
Social judgability
- if it is socially accepted to judge a certain intention/ target.
Social neuroscience
- explanation of brain activity associated with the behaviour / actions of humans.
Stereotype
- widely shared and simplified picture of an evaluated group.
Subtyping
- gradual change of an attitude due to accumulation of inconsistent information over a longer period of time.
Summation
referring to cognitive algebra
- forming a positive/ negative impression by adding up pos/ neg attributions of a person
Vividness
- Part of salience , intrinsic characteristic that makes the stimulus stand out.
Weighted averaging
- weighing and calculating the valence ( attractiveness ) pf the attributions of a person.
Actor–observer effect
- tendency to say that the others act due to internal attributions and you act due to external ones .
Attribution
- a cause to our own behaviour and that of others
Attributional Style
- an individual favour to make a certain kind of causal attribution
belief in a just world
- the belief that everyone gets what he/ she deserves in this world.
Causal Schemata
- how certain types of causes interact - to produce a certain effect .
- -> arises from experience
Cognitive miser
- use the least cognitive effort that is still able to produce generally adaptive behaviour.
Consensus information
- information about how much people tend to react the same to a certain stimulus
Consistency information
- extent to which a stimulus with a certain behaviour
- going to the toilet and flushing the toilet afterwards 100%
Conspiracy theory
- Verschwörungstheorie
- a good organised group spreads a lie that contradicts the truth or the standard opinion concerning that topic.
Correspondence inference
- behaviour is caused by underlying attributions
f. e. cleaning the house because you want to be seen as a clean person.
paired distinctiveness
two items seem to belong together because they both share some unusual items . But the do in fact NOT ;)
