Social Cognition and Perception

Question 1

Describe:

• Social
• Cognition
• Social cognition

Answer 1

• Society living and acting together
• Thinking, conscious mental thoughts
• Encoding, processing, remembering, using info to make sense of the behaviour of others

Question 2

Describe:

• Cognitive Miser
• Naive Scientist

Answer 2

Cognitive Miser:

• Thinks in active way
• Using mental shortcuts
• Fast time judgements

Naive Scientist:

• Combines info in a systematic way
• Rational and logical
• Desire to make sense of the world

Question 3

Describe heuristics

Answer 3

• Mental shortcuts that reduce complex judgements
• Saves time
• Helps overcome limited cognitive capacity
• Reduces amount of info we have to deal with
• Allows us to go beyond to info provided using our existing knowledge

Question 4

What are the types of heuristics

Answer 4

• Schemas
• Categorisation
• Representativeness
• Availability
• Anchoring

Question 5

Describe schemas

Answer 5

Organise knowledge and provide a framework for understanding the world
- Enables new info to be incorporated into LTM

Question 6

Describe categorisation

Answer 6

• Group related things e.g. dogs, furniture
• Allows for quick access to understanding
• Clarifies and refines our perception of the world

Question 7

Describe representativeness

Answer 7

• Tendency to judge a person/object by ow similar we imagine it to be
• Base rate fallacy = ignoring statistical info in favour of stereotypes
• Illusory correlation = when people overestimate a degree of correlation or seeing one when one doesn’t exist

Question 8

Describe availability

Answer 8

• Tendency to base judgements on info/knowledge that is readily available rather than examining alternatives
• The False Consensus Effect = tendency to extraggerate how common own opinions are

Question 9

Describe anchoring

Answer 9

• Tendency to be biased towards starting values in making quantitative judgements

Question 10

Describe the process of social perception

Answer 10

1. Impression formation
   - What others are like
2. Perception
   - Thinking, making judgements, feeling, knowing
3. Social perception
   - How we use our social knowledge

Question 11

Describe impression formation

Answer 11

• We regularly make inferences about people base on first impressions
• E.g. how they look, how they behave

Question 12

Describe attribution theory

Answer 12

• Created by Heider, 1958
• When we construct explanations/theories of why people behave in certain ways
• Internal attribution = temperament, personality, emotional state
• External attribution = situational/environmental factors
• Fundamental attribution error = tendency to overestimate the importance of people’s personal dispositional causes in comparison to situational causes of behaviour