Topic 3 - Social cognition & Perception

Question 1

Social cognition

Answer 1

Social cognition is the unconscious mental thought process of how we think of our complex social world

Question 2

Social perception

Answer 2

is the way we try to understand people, cause-and-effect, why people do what they do and make *attributions based. It is how we *specifically explain why people behave how they behave

Question 3

[cognition processes to help in our automatic processing]

heuristic

Answer 3

Cognitive shortcuts where we apply basic rules when deciding something or making a judgement (reduce mental effort, fast and frugal, attribute substitution)

1. Representativeness: compare aspects of the individual to mental prototype examples
   Bias: ignores base rates and contrary information
2. Availability: the easier one thinks of it, like quickly remembering
   Bias: self relevant information is more easily and frequently available
3. Anchoring & adjustments: influenced by the first bit of information we hear/learn
   Bias: adjustments aren’t enough to override the impact of the anchor
4. Status quo: the current is good, feels if things change they mights lose status quo
   Bias: new things/change can be better

Question 4

[cognition processes to help in our automatic processing]

2. Schemas

Answer 4

Mental representation (connected thoughts/attitudes/beliefs) of a part of the social world. Cognitive framework and concept.

• Person schema: appearance, personality, preferences, behavior
• Role schema: roles, doctors, prostitutes, government, police, knowledge annd structure about role occupants
• Script (event) schema: professionalism, handshake, business suit, portfolio, how an event should unfold
• Content-free schemas: based on rules or attributing a cause to an individual’s behaviour, rules for processing information
• Self schema: future job, hates broccoli, smart, brat, knowledge about ourselves

Question 5

[cognition processes to help in our automatic processing]

3.Biases: It’s hard to change schemas once we have them that is due to…?

Answer 5

1) Our limited information

2) Self-fulfilling/perpetuating beliefs

Question 6

Schemas influence our..?

Answer 6

1) Attention- what we notice
2) Encoding- what information we store
3) Retrieval- how we recover information to use it

Question 7

internal attribution

Answer 7

from the person’s own traits, motives, beliefs, attitudes, values and intentions

Question 8

external attributions

Answer 8

from different things in the person’s world, environment and situation

Question 9

How we explain and apply our attributions to a behaviour

Answer 9

Consensus: do other people react the same way
Consistency: does the person react like this all the time
Distinctiveness: do they react the same way to different situations
Controllability: how controllable are the causal factors? Can an individual change the causal factors?
Stability: how stable are the causal factors overtime? Does the factors change or stay the same?

Question 10

schemas

Answer 10

a mental representation that represents attitudes and beliefs of a certain stimulus / concept / relations

Question 11

prototypes

Answer 11

categorization based on similarity of object to the prototype of a category

Question 12

exemplars

Answer 12

categorization based on total similarity of object to exemplars of the category versus total similarity

Question 13

stereotypes

Answer 13

a schema applied to a social group and its members

Question 14

2 attributional biases

1. Actor-observer effect:

Answer 14

We tend to make internal attributions for other people’s behaviours BUT we tend to make external attributions for our own behaviour

Why?

• We focus on the person than the situation when observing a behavior
• assuming a person’s behavior reflects his/her internal characteristics
• we are aware of external factors when it comes to our behavior

Question 15

Self-serving biases

Answer 15

When we have positive outcomes (or do positive behaviours), we attribute it to internal causes BUT…. When we have negative outcomes (or do negative behaviours), we attribute it to external causes

Why?

• we expect to succeed in life
• we want to feel good

Question 16

Cognitive consistency

Answer 16

People are uncomfortable when their thoughts are contradictory, and engage in all manner of behaviours and rationalisation to resolve the inconsistency

Question 17

Naive scientists

Answer 17

characterising people as having a need to attribute causes to behaviours to render the world a meaningful place

Question 18

Attribution

Answer 18

The process of attributing a cause to our own behaviour, and that of others

Question 19

Cognitive misers

Answer 19

describes the ability and tendency of the human brain to problem solve in the most simple and straight-forward ways rather than utilizing more sophisticated and effort-intensive ways. By doing this the brain conserves energy.

Question 20

Motivated tactician

Answer 20

A model of social cognition that characterises people as having multiple cognitive strategies available, which they choose among on the basis of personal goals, motives and needs

Question 21

Social neurosciences

Answer 21

The exploration of the neurological underpinnings of the processes
traditionally examined by social psychology. Increased

• fMRI
• neural activity in specific areas

Question 22

Affect-infusion model

Answer 22

cognition is infused with affect such that social judgements reflects current mood.

to prevent:

1. think longer
2. actively elaborate the details

Question 23

Appraisals leading to emotional responses

Smith & lazarus, 1990

Answer 23

Primary appraisals: whether a stressor poses a threat to own needs and goals

secondary appraisals: individuals evaluation of resources and coping strategies, ‘am I responsible?’

Question 24

Central traits

Answer 24

Traits that have a disproportionate influence on the configuration model of impression formation

Question 25

Peripheral traits

Answer 25

Traits that have an insignificant influence o the configuration of final impressions in Asch’s conn figural model of impression formation

Question 26

Personal constructs

Answer 26

(George Kelly, 1955) idiosyncratic and personal ways of characterising other people,

Question 27

Implicit personality theories

Answer 27

(David Schider, 1973) people are philosophical and enduring, we characterise people and explain their behaviour

Question 28

Primacy effect

Answer 28

the first things you lear about a person disproportionately affect your overall impression

Question 29

Recency effect

Answer 29

Later presented information having a disproportionate influence on social cognition

Question 30

Ethnocentric

Answer 30

the attitude that one’s own group, ethnicity, or nationality is superior to others Yet Brumidi was ignored, the victim of ethnocentrism and snobbery.

Question 31

Accentuation principle

Answer 31

Categorisation accentuates perceived similarities within and differences , correlated with the categorisation.

Question 32

Basic-level categories

Answer 32

Middle range categories that have cognitive priority because they are the most useful, e.g. a ‘chair’ rather than ‘furniture’ or a ‘rocker’.

Question 33

Optimal distinctiveness

Answer 33

a conceptual analysis that assumes individuals strive to maintain a balance between three basic needs: the need to be assimilated by groups to which they belong, the need to be connected to friends and loved ones, and the need for autonomy and differentiation.

Question 34

social encoding

Answer 34

process of representing external social stimuli in our minds (Bargh, 1984)

1. Pre-attentive analysis – an automatic, non-conscious scanning of the environment.
2. Focal attention – once noticed, stimuli are consciously identified and categorised.
3. Comprehension – stimuli are given meaning.
4. Elaborative reasoning – the stimulus is linked to other knowledge to allow

Question 35

Salience

Answer 35

property of a stimulus that makes it stand out in relation to other stimuli

Question 36

Priming

Answer 36

Activation of accessible categories or schemas in memory that influence how we process new information.

Question 37

Associative network

Answer 37

Model of memory in which nodes or ideas are connected by associative links along which cognitive activation can spread

Question 38

Illusory correlation

Answer 38

Cognitive exagerration of the degree of co-occurence of two stimuli of events, or a perception of a co-occurence where none exists

Question 39

Heuristics

Answer 39

cognitive shortcuts that provide adequately accurate inferences

Question 40

Representativeness heuristic

Answer 40

cognitive short cut in which we group similarity or resemblance to their categories

Question 41

Availability heuristic

Answer 41

cognitive shortcuts in which the frequency or the likelihood of an event is based on how quickly instances come to mind

Question 42

Anchoring and adjustments

Answer 42

a cognitive shortcut in which inferences are tied to initial standards or schemas

Question 43

Internal attribution / dispositional

Answer 43

Process of assigning the cause of our own or others’ behaviour to internal or dispositional factors.

Question 44

External attribution / situational

Answer 44

Assigning the cause of our own or others’ behaviour to external or environmental factors.

Question 45

Covariation Model

Answer 45

is an attribution theory in which a person tries to explain others’ or her certain behavior through multiple observations

It deals with both social perception and self-perception of the person. It was proposed by Harold Kelley.

Question 46

How we attribute someone’s task achievement:

Answer 46

• Locus – is the performance caused by the actor (internal) or the situation (external)?
• Stability – is the internal cause a stable or unstable one?
• Controllability – to what extent is future task performance under the actor’s control?

Question 47

Self perception theory

Answer 47

(1) we make attributions for our own behaviour in the same way as we make attributions for others’ behaviour; and (2) it is through internal attribution of our own behaviour that we gain knowledge about ourselves, our self-concept and identity

Question 48

correspondent inference

Answer 48

Causal attribute of behaviour to underlying dispositions

Question 49

correspondence bias

Answer 49

A general attribution bias in which people have an inflated tendency to see behaviour as reflecting (corresponding to) stable underlying personality attributes.

Question 50

Essentialism

Answer 50

tendency to consider behaviour to reflect underlying and immutable, often innate, properties of people or the groups they belong to.

Question 51

Actor-observer effect

Answer 51

Tendency to attribute our own behaviours externally and others’ behaviours internally.

• focus of attention
• asymmetry of information

Question 52

False consensus effect

Answer 52

Seeing our own behaviour as being more typical than It really is, assuming others behave the same way

Question 53

Self-serving bias

Answer 53

Attributional distortions that protect or enhance self-esteem or the selfconcept.

Self-serving biases are also framed by our need to believe the world is a just place in which we have some control over our destiny. We cling to an illusion of control (Langer, 1975) by having a belief in a just world (Furnham, 2003) in which ‘bad things happen to bad people’, ‘good things to good people’

Question 54

self-handicapping

Answer 54

Publicly making advance external attributions for our anticipated failure or poor performance in a forthcoming event.

Question 55

Ultimate attribution error

Answer 55

Tendency to internally attribute bad outgroup and good ingroup behaviour, and to externally attribute good outgroup and bad ingroup behaviour.

Question 56

Intergroup attributions

Answer 56

Process of assigning the cause of one’s own or others’ behaviour to group membership.

Question 57

ideology

Answer 57

A systematically interrelated set of beliefs whose primary function is explanation. It circumscribes thinking, making it difficult for the holder to escape from its mould.

Question 58

social representation theory

Answer 58

specifies how collective cognitions are produced and transformed through communication with a focus on the socio-cognitive processes or mechanisms involved.