Social Cognition

Question 1

Social cognition

Answer 1

A large topic within social psychology concerned with understanding how we think about ourselves and other people and how the processes involved impact upon our judgments and behaviour in social contexts.

Question 2

Automatic process

Answer 2

A process that occurs without intention, effort or awareness and does not interfere with other concurrent cognitive processes.

Question 3

Controlled process

Answer 3

A process that is intentional, under the individual’s volitional control, effortful and entailing conscious awareness.

Question 4

Schema

Answer 4

A cognitive structure or mental representation comprising pre-digested information or knowledge about objects or people from specific categories, our expectancies about objects or groups, and what defines them.

Question 5

Heuristic

Answer 5

A well-used, non-optimal rule of thumb used to arrive at a judgment that is effective in many but not all cases: stereotypes are often said to function as heuristics.

Question 6

Stereotype

Answer 6

A cognitive structure that contains our knowledge, beliefs and expectancies about some human social group.

Question 7

Categorization

Answer 7

The tendency to group objects (including people) into discrete groups based upon shared characteristics common to them.

Question 8

Priming

Answer 8

Activating one stimulus (e.g., bird) facilitates the subsequent processing of another related stimulus (e.g., wing, feather).

Question 9

Accessibility

Answer 9

The extent to which information is easily located and retrieved.

Question 10

Lexical decision task

Answer 10

A cognitive measure of how quickly people classify stimuli as real words or nonsense words that enables researchers to assess if some categories of words are made more accessible as a result of an experimental manipulation/processing goal. Quicker responses to certain word categories indicate increased accessibility.

Question 11

Encoding

Answer 11

The way in which we translate what we see into a digestable format to be stored in the mind.

Question 12

Representativeness heuristic

Answer 12

A mental shortcut whereby instances are assigned to categories on the basis of how similar they are to the category in general.

Question 13

Base rate information

Answer 13

Information that gives us an idea about how frequent certain categories are in the general population.

Question 14

Availability heuristic

Answer 14

A cognitive shortcut that allows us to draw upon information about how quickly information comes to the mind about a particular event, to deduce the frequency or likelihood of that event.

Question 15

Cognitive miser

Answer 15

A view of people as being often limited in processing capacity and apt to take shortcuts where possible to make life simple.

Question 16

Anchoring/adjustment heuristic

Answer 16

A cognitive heuristic that makes us place weight upon initial standards/schemas (anchors) and as a result means we may not always adjust sufficiently far from these anchors to provide accurate judgements.

Question 17

Goal

Answer 17

A positively valued behavioural end-state that encompasses the purposeful drive/motivation to engage in a behaviour/action/judgment.

Question 18

Implicit goal operation

Answer 18

The process whereby a goal that enables people to regulate responses (e.g., to overcome stereotyping) is engaged without conscious awareness.

Question 19

Goal dependent

Answer 19

Where an outcome is conditional upon a specific goal being in place (e.g., goal-dependent automatic stereotype activation).

Question 20

Individuating information

Answer 20

Information about a person’s personal characteristics (not normally derived from a particular category membership).

Question 21

Continuum model of impression formation

Answer 21

Views impression formation as a process going from category-based evaluations at one end of the continuum to individuated responses at the other, dependent on the interplay of motivational and attentional factors.

Question 22

Outcome dependency

Answer 22

A motivational objective in which participants believe they will later meet a target and work together on a jointly judged task: shown to lead to less stereotypical target impressions.

Question 23

Accountability

Answer 23

A processing goal whereby perceivers believe they will have to justify their responses to a third party and be held responsible for their impressions: this typically leads to less stereotypical impressions.

Question 24

Probe reaction task

Answer 24

A simple reaction time task that assesses residual attentional capacity, that is, the amount of attention that is left over from performing the primary task. This task does not take away attention from the primary task (it is not a resource depleting task).

Question 25

Dissociation model

Answer 25

Proposes that two different processes can occur independently, and that one does not inevitably follow from the other (e.g., Devine’s proposed dissociation between automatic and controlled processes in stereotyping).

Question 26

Stereotype suppression

Answer 26

The act of trying to prevent an activated stereotype from impacting upon one’s judgments about a person from a stereotyped group.

Question 27

Rebound effect

Answer 27

Where suppression attempts fail: used here to demonstrate how a suppressed stereotype returns to have an even greater impact upon one’s judgments about a person from a stereotyped group.