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)
