Social Cognition and Perception Flashcards
Social _______ examines the ways in which people make judgments about the world through selecting, interpreting, and using information available to them.
cognition
People use ________ to organize information about the social world, based on their knowledge and experience, into themes and subjects. For example, a person’s schema about teenagers may include that they are lazy and noisy. This affects how they interact with teenagers.
schemas
When people are faced with information which contradicts their schemas, they can ______ out this information to prevent it clashing with their ideas.
filter
Explanation:
The culture in which a person grows up in can affect the type of schemas which they develop. Often people have different schemas due to differences in their upbringing. For example, American football is very important for many Americans, but for a person from a culture who has never seen American football, it is less important.
In some situations, a person may not remember exact _______. Instead, new details are unknowingly added to a memory resulting in an altered memory. In this way, the human memory is reconstructive.
details
When a person meets another person for the first time, they develop an impression of the person which they use to interpret later interactions with that person. This is referred to as the _______ effect.
primacy
People form schemas using the first information they receive. Therefore, when meeting a person for the first time, people tend to form a schema about that person. This schema is then used in later meetings with the person. Behavior which _____________ the schema is generally either ignored or reinterpreted to suit the schema.
contradicts
Sometimes evidence proves a person’s schema wrong. However, despite this, sometimes the schema continues to guide the person’s ideas. This is referred to as the ____________ effect.
perseverance
_______________ prophecies occur when a person’s behavior reinforces their belief in their schema by creating evidence.
Self-fulfilling
Explanation:
For example, if a teacher believes male students are smarter than females, they may give more attention to males, which in turn may cause them to be better students. This reinforces the teacher’s schema that males are smarter.
In order to make decision making easier and more efficient, people use ______ shortcuts, which reduce the amount of information a person has to go over to come to a decision.
mental
Explanation:
Mental shortcuts do not always give the best decision, but they tend to give a good decision in a reasonable amount of time.
Judgmental heuristics are shortcuts used to make judgments about certain situations based on _____. Different types of heuristics are used depending on the situation, and they do not always result in good judgments.
rules
The availability heuristic is a mental rule of thumb in which people tend to rely on the _____ information they can recall to make a decision. This can lead to faulty decisions if the recalled information is not the most relevant or typical bit of information for the situation.
first
People often undertake a mental process in which they think about how certain situations may have turned out if different events took place in the past. This is known as ____________ thinking.
counterfactual
______________ heuristics is a mental shortcut which people use to classify things. For example, a person may classify a relaxed, tan, blonde boy as a Californian as this is a stereotype of Californian people.
Representative
Sometimes people make decisions about which group another person belongs to depending on what they know about the _________ of individuals in different groups within the population. During this type of decision making, people are using base rate information to make a decision.
frequency
_______ sampling occurs when people make generalizations about certain things using samples of information which are not typical or representative.
Biased
People often use biased information about something such as a place, situation, or person, to generalize about that thing. This can often lead to wrong judgments as the information is not truly _____________.
representative
When thinking occurs without conscious or voluntary effort, it is referred to as _________ processing.
automatic
People can develop automatic processing by __________ to think in a certain way. This makes it easier to undertake that kind of thinking, and eventually, the process becomes automatic.
practicing
When people make judgments on things they care little about, they tend to use simple ________________ to make quick decisions. However, if they care about the thing they are judging, people tend to be flexible thinkers, and choose from a variety of mental shortcuts in order to make a more informed decision.
mental shortcuts
