Social Cognition & Perceptions Flashcards
What is the dominant approach in social psychology?
Social cognition
What is social cognition?
How attitudes/perceptions of ourselves and others/judgements/stereotypes/expectations influence our beliefs and behaviour.
What is a critique of social cognition?
Assumes we are all rational decision makers when we might not all be!!
What is a cognitive miser?
When a person makes cognitive shortcuts
- eg. sterotypes
What can social cognition affect/be affected by?
Context
What is one way of simplifying perceptions?
Categorisation
How does categorisation happen?
A rule-based approach
- Every category is represented by a set of features
- Can be hard to define rules
- People can disagree
- Doesn’t indicate how well something represents the category
What are 3 critiques of a rule-based approach for categorisation?
- Can be hard to define rules
- People can disagree
- Doesn’t indicate how well something represents the category (eg. something is in or out)
What is the prototypical approach for categorisation?
Grouping can occur just by how similar things are.
(Centred around a prototype)
What is the exemplar approach for categorisation?
A specific instance of a category.
(Bambi as a deer)
What is the associative network approach for categorisation?
Network of linked associations between stimuli, activated through spreading activation.
What is a schema?
A highly organised cognitive representation
- specifies relationships between stimuli
How are schemas developed?
Through a person’s personal experiences
What are the 3 dimensions associated with entrepreneurship schemas?
- Scanning and search
- Association and connection
- Evaluation and judgement
What is more important for entrepreneurship, breadth or depth of cultural experiences?
Breadth of cultural experiences
(provides diverse stimuli to encourage our brains to develop new ideas)
What are 3 categories of heuristics?
- Anchoring & adjustment - idea you will make a judgement based on a starting point
- Availability - judging frequency of event based on number of events brought to mind
- Representativeness - how relevant it is
What is attribution?
Idea that we assign cause from our own behaviour to that of others.
What is causal attribution?
We infer causes from observable behaviour to predict/control our own environment.
What are dispositions? What are situations?
Dispositions: Internal (personality/characteristics)
Situations: External (weather/other people)
What is the most influential model of attribution?
Kelley’s (1967) Covariation Model
What is Kelley’s (1967) Covariation Model?
We ask 3 questions in a situation:
1. Does the person always behave this way?
2. Do other people regularly behave this way?
3. Does the person behave this way in other situations?
What 3 things does Kelley’s (1967) Covariation Model look for?
- Consistency
- Consensus
- Distinctiveness.
What are 3 critiques of Kelley’s (1967) Covariation Model?
- We need multiple observations
- Do we have the time to make these judgements?
- False consensus bias (assuming everyone is like us)
What is the fundamental attribution error?
We have a tendency to overestimate dispositional and underestimate situational factors.
What is the actor-observer effect?
We have a tendency to make dispositional attributions for others and situational attributions for ourselves.
What can the actor-observer effect be reduced by?
Perspective taking
Victims tend to _______ the intentions of transgressors and ________ the guilt and how much people want to be forgiven.
Overestimate, underestimate.
What is the self-serving bias? What does this do?
Tendency to make dispositional attributions for successes but not for failures.
This protects our self-esteem.
What is ethnocentrism?
The belief that positive behaviour by our in-group or negative behaviour by our out-group is dispositional.
What is the public deficit model?
The relationships between perceptions and knowledge.
What is upstream engagement?
Feeding public opinion into research development.
What are 4 types of psychological distance?
- Uncertainty
- Geographic distance
- Social distance
- Temporal distance
What are the 2 levels of Construal Level Theory?
- Psychologically close
- Psychologically distant
(eg. planning a holiday)
How can developmental theory explain Construal Level Theory?
As children grow up, they develop planning skills.
How can evolution explain Construal Level Theory?
Development of complex social structures/groups - helps us to plan.
What were the findings from the Psychological Distance study (Bar-Anan et al, 2007)?
Reaction time is better when:
- High certainty
- Close in time
- Closer spatial distance
- Closer social distance
Imagine meeting a new flatmate tomorrow or in 6 months; when would they be more familiar?
More familiar tomorrow (closer social distance)
What were the findings of perceived impacts of climate change? (Spence et al., 20120)
People believed that:
- Distant locations would have more severe effects from climate change (geographic distance)
- More likely to affect developing countries (social distance)
- People felt more severe effects are likely to occur in the future (temporal distance)
- Some uncertainty of the extent of future effects
What caused people to be more prepared to act about climate change?
A lower psychological distance & higher concerns
What is a problem with psychological distance?
It promotes more abstract thinking.
What type of events will we be more confident about? Why is this?
Events in the distant future.
This is because we think about these events in an abstract way.
