Social Psychology Ch. 4 Flashcards
Social Categorization
The process of forming categories of people based on their common attributes.
Social Cognition
The way in which we interpret, analyze, remember, and use information about the social world.
Prototype
The most representative member of a category.
Schema
A Schema is an organized structure of knowledge about a stimulus that is built up from experience and that contains causal relations; it is a theory about how the social world operates.
Gender Schema
A cognitive structure for processing information based on its perceived female or male qualities.
Script
A Schema that describes how a series of events is likely to occur in a well-known situation and which is used as a guide for behavior and problem solving.
Priming
The process by which recent exposure to certain stimuli or events increases the accessibility of certain memories, categories, or schemas.
Heuristics
Time-saving mental shortcuts that reduce complex judgments to simple rules.
Representativeness Heuristic
The tendency to judge the category membership of things based on how closely they match the “typical” or “average” member that category.
Availability Heuristic
The tendency to judge the frequency or probability of an event in terms of how easy it is to think of examples of that event.
Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic
A tendency to be biased toward the starting value or anchor in making quantitative judgments.
Hindsight Bias
The tendency to, once an event has occurred, to overestimate our ability to have foreseen the outcome.
Counterfactual Thinking
The tendency to evaluate events by imagining alternative versions or outcomes to what actually happened.
Thought Supression
The attempt to prevent certain thoughts from entering consciousness.
Person Perception
The process by which we try to detect other people’s temporary states and enduring dispositions (also called Social Perception)
Central Trait
Traits that exert a disproportionate influence on people’s overall impressions, causing them to assume the presence of other traits.
Implicit Personality Theories
A type of Schema people use to organize and make send of which personality traits and behaviors go together.
Confirmation Bias
The tendency to seek information that supports our beliefs while ignoring disconfirming information.
Attribution
The process by which people use information to make inferences about the causes of behavior or events.
Internal Attribution
An attribution that locates the cause of an event to factors internal to the person, such as personality traits, moods attitudes, abilities, or effort.
External Attribution
An attribution that locates the cause of an event to factors EXTERNAL to the person, such as luck, or other people, or the situation.
Fundamental Attribution Error
The tendency to over-estimate the impact of dispositional causes and underestimate the impact of situational causes on other people’s behavior.
Actor-Observer Effect
The tendency for people to a attribute their own behavior to EXTERNAL causes BUT that of others to INTERNAL factors.
Dual-Process Models of Attribution
Theories of attribution that propose that people initially engage in relatively automatic and simple attributional assessment but then later consciously correct this attribution with more deliberate and effortful thinking.
