Social Cognition and Perception Flashcards
What is social cognition?
How attitudes, perceptions, judgments and expectations influence our beliefs, intentions and behaviour.
What is one assumption of social cognition?
People are rational and our thinking adopts an information processing perspective.
People are thought to be cognitive misers and take cognitive shortcuts. Why is this?
To simplify all the incoming information. One way of doing this is categorisation.
How do we categorise? Who suggested the rule based approach.
Bruner et al 1956
Other than the rule based approach, what are 3 other approaches to categorisation?
- Prototypical approach- members share something in common centring around a prototype.
- Exemplar approach-specific instances of a category
- Associative networks- network of linked attributes centring around an exemplar
Once categorisation occurs, a schema is invoked. What is a schema?
A cognitive representation.
What is the name for a schema about events?
Scripts
Schemas can be activated implicitly and affect judgement and behaviour. What factors affect which schemas are activated?
Salience, relevance and personal importance.
What are the 3 types of heuristics? Tversky and Kahneman (1974)
Availability,
Representativeness,
Anchoring and adjustment
Define attribution.
Attribution is the process of assigning causes for our own behaviour to that of others.
Most people are described as naïve scientists (Heider, 1958). What does this mean relating to attribution?
People tend to infer causes for the behaviour of others in order to predict and control our behaviour. Dispositions and situations are compared.
Kelley’s Covariation Model is the most influential of all models of…?
attribution
According to Kelley’s Covariation Model, people use the covariation principle to decide what?
Whether the cause is internal or external. Situational attribution vs personality attribution.
What are 3 key factors in a given situation according the Covariation Model?
- Consistency- does the person regularly behave this way in this situation?
- Consensus- Do other people regularly behave this way?
- Distinctiveness- Does this person behave this way in other situations?
Tendency to overestimate dispositional and underestimate situational factors. What type of error is this?
Fundamental attribution error
Tendency to make dispositional attributions for others and situational attributions for ourselves. What type of effect is this?
Actor-observer effect
Tendency to take credit for dispositional attributions for successes but not for failures (make situational attributions). What is this called?
Self-serving bias
What is the relationship between knowledge and attitudes (Evans and Durant, 1995)?
Knowledge positively correlates with attitudes for useful research (R=0.30).
As well as knowledge, what else affects public perception?
Social mistrust
There are 2 main dimensions of risk perceptions. What are they?
Dread and Unknown.
Dread risks correlated highly with overall perceived risk.
Describe dread risks.
Dread risks are uncontrollable, have severe consequences and are involuntary.
Describe unknown risks.
Unobservable, unfamiliar and have delayed effects.
Risks that are both unknown and dreaded have ‘high signal potential’.
What is signal potential?
the idea that a risk occurring would have further impacts beyond immediate shocks.
Finucane et al., 2000 Affect heuristic states that judgements of risk and benefit stem from what?
An affective feeling about the behaviour.
