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.
