Social cognition and attribution Flashcards
What is the difference between “thought” and “cognition”?
We are often conscious of thought, it is internal language and symbols we use; cognition is broader, mental processing is mainly automatic, we are unaware of it.
What is the brief history of studying cognition?
Wundt studied subjective experiences through introspection; behaviorists only studied observable behavior (couldn’t explain language), so in 1960s people started being interested in cognition again
What are the 4 guises of cognition in social psychology?
Cognitive consistency, naive scientist, cognitive miser, motivated tactician.
Explain the “cognitive miser” part of cognition in social psychology.
Model of social cognition that characterizes people as using the least complex and demanding cognitions that are able to produce generally adaptive behaviors - uses shortcuts. Errors are innate to social thinking.
Explain the “motivated tactician” part of social cognition.
Model that suggests that people have multiple cognitive strategies available and which they choose they base on their needs, goals, and motives.
What is the Solomon-Asch configural model?
It is a Gestalt-based model of impression formation, where central traits play a disproportionate role in configuring the final impression.
What are peripheral traits compared to central traits?
They have an insignificant influence on configuration of the final impression.
Explain recency and primacy in terms of biases when forming an impression.
Depending on when the information is presented it has a disproportionate effect on forming the impression.
Explain positivity and negativity in terms of biases when forming an impression.
Negative impressions are harder to change than positive ones, even when presented with positive information and vice versa.
What is “personal constructs” theory?
People have individual sets they develop in forming an impression, they are adaptive and resistant to change. - Two people can have a different impression of the same person.
What is “implicit personality theories”?
People have their own set of ideas of which characteristic go well with others and based on those they form impressions about people they have limited information about. (underlying process of stereotyping)
What is the “Halo effect” theory?
People generally tend to associate good traits with attractive people.
What is “social judgeability”?
The perception of people whether it is socially acceptable to judge someone. People will not, if they perceive it as immoral.
What is a “schema”?
A set of interrelated cognitions (knowledge about a concept, stimulus, etc.) that allows people to quickly make sense of a person/situation/etc based on limited information.
What is required to activate a scheme?
A cue. Then, the schema fills in the missing details.
What types of schemas do we know + offer brief description.
Person schemas, role schemas, scripts, content-free schemas (limited no. of rules for processing information without any specific category), self-schemas.
Explain “social categorization”.
It is the tendency to assign people into categories/groups based on shared characteristics common to them. - simplification, order
Define what a “prototype” is.
It is a cognitive representation of the typical/ideal defining features of a category.
What is “family resemblance”?
It is the defining property of a category membership.
Do people prefer more exclusive or inclusive categories when describing things?
Neither. Intermediate-level. (vehicle/audi - car)
What is an “exemplar”?
It is a specific instance of a member of a category.
What does Breuer (1988) tell us about exemplars?
The more familiar a person is with a category, they shift from a prototypical to an exemplar representation.
What do Jude and Park (1988) tell us about prototypes and exemplars?
That people use both prototypes and exemplars to describe group membership but only exemplars to represent out-groups.
What are associative networks?
We can call categories also associative networks.
What is the difference between prototypes and schemas?
Prototypes are unorganized, fuzzy representations of categories, schemas are highly organized specifications of features and their interrelationships.
What is the “accentuation principle”?
The differences between categories are exaggerated and within categories minimised due to categorisation. The effects are amplified when the categorisation has any importance to the person.
Explain “self-categorization” theory.
Process of categorizing oneself as a group member - produces social identity and group/intergroup behaviors.
Explain “social identity theory”.
Individuals create/define their place in society based on social categorization, social comparison and social identification.
What are some differences in cognition on base of which people tend to use different schemas?
accessibility, attributional complexity, uncertainty orientation, need for cognition, need for cognitive closure, cognitive complexity
What are the 3 ways of changing a schema?
bookkeeping (slow, gradual change through accumulation of schema-inconsistent information), conversion (sudden schema change due to accumulation of schema-inconsistent information), subtyping (schema change that leads to the formation of subcategories)
What are the 4 stages of social encoding?
- pre-attentive analysis (automatic, unconscious scanning of the environment), 2. focal attention (once noticed, stimuli are consciously identified, categorised), 3. comprehension (stimuli are given meaning), 4. elaborative reasoning (the stimulus is linked to others to allow complex inferences)
What is “salience” of a stimulus?
Property of a stimulus that makes it stand out in relation to other stimuli and attract attention.
When are people most salient?
when they are novel, behaving opposed to expectations, important to one’s goals/ dominating the visual field, someone said to pay attention
What is “vividness” of a stimulus?
A property of a stimulus on its own that makes it stand out and attract attention.
When are stimuli vivid?
When they are attention-grabbing, graphic, close to time and place.
Define top-down deductive social inference.
Happens automatically, based on schemas and stereotypes.
Define a bottom-up inductive social inference.
Based and relying o specific instances.
What are “normative models”?
Ideal processes for making accurate social inferences.
What is “behavioral decision theory”?
Set of normative models for making accurate social inferences.
What is a “heuristic”?
Cognitive shortcut that provides adequately accurate inferences most of the time.
What is “representativeness heuristic”?
Instances are assigned to categories or types on the basis of overall similarity/resemblance to the category.
What is “availability heuristic”?
The frequence of an event is based on how quickly associations come to mind.
What is “anchoring and adjustment”?
Inferences are tied to initial standards or schemas.
What is “attribution”?
It is the process of assigning a cause to our own or other’s behavior.
What is the difference between “external” and “internal” attribution.
Internal - attributing behavior to person’s character. External - attributing behavior to external factors.
What do people draw on to draw “correspondent inferences”?
The choice, non-common effects, social desirability, hedonic relevance, personalism.
What are “non-common effects”?
It is behavior that has few or no alternative explanations.
What is “outcome bias”?
Belied that the outcome was intended by the person.
What is “hedonic relevance”?
IT is the idea that people tend to attribute behavior to a dispositional cause when it affects them personally.
What is meant by “personalism”?
It is the tendency to attribute behavior to dispositional causes rather than situational factors.
What are the 3 classes of information used to attribute behavior?
Consistency (if reaction occurs regularly in same situation), distinctiveness(if reaction is unique to the situation or occurs other times) and consensus(if others in the same situation behave similarly).
What is “discounting” in relation to attribution?
It is the tendency of people to looks for an alternative explanation for a behavior if the consistency is low.
What is the “augmenting principle”?
An assumption that a possible cause must be the cause.
Describe “self-perception theory.”
Individuals make inferences about their own beliefs and attitudes by observing their own behavior and the context in which it occurs.
What are the three performance dimensions for “task-performance attribution theory”?
The locus (internal/external to the person), stability (cause stable/unstable over time) and controllability (within the person’s control/not).
What is “correspondence bias” attribution bias?
The inflated tendency to see behavior as reflecting stable underlying personality traits.
Explain the fundamental attribution error.
It is attributing undesirable behavior of other more to internal than external causes.
What is “essentialism” in attribution biases?
The belief that behavior is considered to reflect underlying and innate essences of people or the groups they belong to.
What are the explanations for correspondence bias?
The focus of attention of individuals is more on the behaviors of people, rather than situational factors. The language we use explains behavior in dispositional ways rather than situational.
What is the “actor-observer effect”?
It is the tendency to attribute our behavior externally and others’ internally.
What is the “false consensus effect”?
It is our tendency to see our behavior as more common than it actually is.
What is “self-serving” bias?
It is the tendency for individuals to attribute their own successes to internal factors, and failures to external factors.
What is the “intergroup attribution”?
It is the tendency to attribute a person’s behavior to their group membership.
What is “ethnocentrism”?
It is the preference in all aspects of an individual to prefer one’s group compared to others,
What are the 2 processes responsible for ethnocentrism?
Social categorization (expectations+stereotypes), a self-esteem process (we make self-favoring comparisons between ingroup and outgroups.)
What is the “ultimate attribution error”?
Attributing good ingroup and bad outgroup behavior internally, and bad ingroup and good ingroup behavior externally.
