Social Cognition

Question 1

Attribution

Answer 1

process of assigning cause to our own and others behaviour

Question 2

Primacy effect

Answer 2

earlier information has more influence

Question 3

Recency effect

Answer 3

Later information has more impact (when distracted or not fully engaged )

Question 4

Personal construct

Answer 4

we have personal ways of characterising people that are resistant to change

Question 5

Stereotypes

Answer 5

Widely shared assumptions about personalities/behaviour based on group membership. Schema about a social group

Question 6

Categories

Answer 6

• Categorise in order to apply schmeatic knowledge
• Prototypes
• Exemplars
• Accentuation principle

Question 7

Salience

Answer 7

Stimulus outstanding in relation to others

Question 8

Priming

Answer 8

Activation of accessible categories/schemas

Question 9

Implicit personality theory

Answer 9

• personal way of characterising people and explaining their behaviour
• general expectations that we build after learning something about central traits (e.g. a happy person is a friendly person)

Question 10

Physical appearance

Answer 10

first imformation gathered, very influential

attractive vs unattractive

Question 11

Social judgeability

Answer 11

Perception whether or not it is socially acceptable to judge a specific target has an influence
-if acceptable : judgements are more polarised

Question 12

Schema

Answer 12

• Templates for the interpretation of stimuli and planning of action
• Cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept/ type of stimulus including its attributes and the relations among these attributes-that fills in the gaps (built upon experiences and knowledge )
• Stereotype
• Person schema
• role schema (about role occupant)
• Content-free schema

Question 13

Script

Answer 13

event schema

Question 14

Categories

Answer 14

• Categorise in order to apply schmeatic knowledge
• Prototypes
• fuzzy sets (features organised around a prototype

Question 15

Affect-infusion model

Answer 15

= describes effects of mood on social cognition (social judgements reflect current moods)
= better recall current-mood-congruent information
- 4 ways of processing information
1) Direct access: schemas/judgements stored in memory
2) Motivated processing: judgement based on specific motivation to achieve a goal
3) Heuristic processing: reliance on short-cuts
4) Substantive processing: carefully construct judgement from variety of informational sources

Question 16

Heuristic

Answer 16

= cognitive shortcuts that provide adequately accurate inferences most of the time. Help navigating overwhelming amount of social information in our environment.

Question 17

Representativeness heuristic

Answer 17

= instances are assigned to categories or stereotypes based on overall similarity/resemblance
- Disregards base-rate information

Question 18

Social inference

Answer 18

= how we sample and combine information to form impressions and make judgements
- First stage: gathering data and sampling info
o Rely too much on schemas (clinical judgement)
- Overly influenced by extreme examples/ small samples
- Top-down deductive: automatically rely on schemas/stereotypes
- Bottom-up inductive: rely on specific instances

Question 19

Covariation judgements

Answer 19

= how strongly are two things related?

• Fall short of normative information because influenced by prior assumptions
• Illusory correlation: cognitive exaggeration of degree of co-occurrence of two events/stimuli thus expected co-occurrence where none exists
  1) Associative meaning: items seen as belonging together because they ought to based on prior expectations
  2) Paired distinctiveness: items thought to go together because they share an unusual feature

Question 20

Naive Psychologist theory

Answer 20

= describes people as using rational, scientific-like cause-effect analysis to understand their world

 People have a pervasive need for causal explanation (own behaviour motivated so look for cause in others)
 Look for stable & enduring properties of people/ world around us to construct theories in order to predict and control
 Distinguish between two factors
o Internal (dispositional) attribution: assigning cause to personal factors
o External (situational) attributions: assigning cause to environmental factors

Question 21

Theory of correspondent inference

Answer 21

= “people like to make correspondent inferences (dispositional attributions) because it makes behaviour predictable and thus gives us sense control over the world”

When do we conclude whether someone’s behaviour corresponds to his/her dispositions?
5 sources of information that make correspondent inference likely
1) Act freely chosen (no external threats)
2) Act produced non-common effect (unexpected choice)
Outcome bias- false belief that outcome was intended by actor
3) Act is low in social desirability (counter normative)
4) Act hedonically relevant (behaviour impacts actor)
5) Behaviour seems to directly benefit/harm us thus high in personalism

Question 22

Correspondence bias

Answer 22

= people have an inflated tendency to see behaviour as reflecting (corresponding to) stable underlying personality attributes
 Three possible explanations
o Focus of attention: behaviour attracts more attention than background
o Differential forgetting: tend to forget situational causes
o Linguistic facilitation: easier to describe disposition than situation

Question 23

Fundamental attribution error

Answer 23

= attributing another’s behaviour more to internal then external causes
 Over-/underestimate behaviour and see what we want to see
 Operate on auto pilot and make have expectations

Question 24

Actor-observer effect

Answer 24

= tendency to attribute own behaviour externally and other’s internally
 More dispositional attributions for socially desirable behaviour
 Explanation: point of view (can’t see myself doing it) and informational differences (know more about my own background)

Question 25

False-consensus effect

Answer 25

= seeing own behaviour as more typically than it actually is (assume others would behave the same)

Question 26

Self-serving bias

Answer 26

= attributional distortion (Verzerrung) that protects/enhances self-esteem/-concept

 Self-enhancing bias: take credit for positive behaviour as reflecting who we are and our intention to do positive things
 Self-protecting bias: explain away failures/negative behaviour as being due to situational factors
 Self-handicapping: publicly making external attributions for poor behaviour in advance to reduce responsibility
 Illusion of control: belief that we have more control over our world than we do
 Belief in a just world: good things happen to good people and vice versa