unit 3- social cognition

Question 1

What is social cognition?

Answer 1

How people think about themselves and the social world, or more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgements and decisions.

Question 2

What are the two kinds of social cognition?

Answer 2

1. Quick and automatic
2. controlled thinking

Question 3

What is quick and automatic thinking ?

Answer 3

without consciously deliberately one’s own thoughts, perceptions, and assumptions

Question 4

What is controlled thinking?

Answer 4

effortful and deliberate, pausing to think about self and environment, carefully selecting the right course of action

Question 5

What is “need for cognition”

Answer 5

An individual difference variable that tries to get at differences in personality related to how “painful” deliberate thought is

Question 6

What is low-effort thinking?

Answer 6

The ability of people to size up a new situation quickly: they figure out who is there, what is happening, and what might happen next. (ex. you can tell the difference between a college classroom and a party without having to think about it)

Question 7

Examples of automatic thinking?

Answer 7

Forming impressions of people quickly and effortlessly and navigating new roads while driving

Question 8

What are schemas?

Answer 8

Mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social world around themes or subjects and that influence the information people notice, think about, and remember

Question 9

Schemas affect:

Answer 9

• how we interpret information
• how we store information
• how we make decisions

Question 10

Types of schemas

Answer 10

-Person schemas
-social schemas
-self-schemas
-event schemas

Question 11

Our schemas contain…

Answer 11

our basic knowledge and impressions that we use to organize what we know about the social world and interpret new situations

Question 12

What are schemas referred to as when applied to members of a social group like gender or race?

Answer 12

stereotypes

Question 13

What is the purpose of schemas?

Answer 13

• They are typically useful for helping us organize and make sense of the world to fill in gaps of our knowledge
• schemas help us reduce ambiguity

Question 14

Which schemas are applied?

Answer 14

Accessibility and priming

Question 15

Accessibility schemas

Answer 15

the extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people’s minds and are therefore likely to be used when we are making judgements about social world

Question 16

Priming schemas

Answer 16

The process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, or concept

Question 17

Something can be accessible for three reasons:

Answer 17

1. some schemas are chronically accessible due to past experience (long duration)
2. something can become accessible because it is related to a current goal (medium duration)
3. schemas can become temporarily accessible because of our recent experiences. For example, seeing an ad for vodka prior to getting on the bus (short duration)

Question 18

What is the self-fulfilling prophecy?

Answer 18

The case whereby person A
1) has an expectation of what person B is like, which
2) influences how person A acts towards person B
3) causes person B to behave consistently with person A’s original expectations, making the expectations come true

Question 19

Behavioral confirmation

Answer 19

acting in such a way as to make your belief true

Question 20

What are judgmental heuristics?

Answer 20

mental shortcuts people use to make judgements quickly and efficiently

Question 21

Base-rate fallacy:

Answer 21

overestimating the rate at which events occur

Question 22

What is the availability heuristic?

Answer 22

A mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgement on the ease with which they can bring something to mind

Question 23

What is the representative heuristic?

Answer 23

A mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case

Question 24

Base rate information

Answer 24

information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population

Question 25

What is counterfactual reasoning?

Answer 25

Mentally changing some aspect of the past in imagining what might have been (ex. if only I had answered that one question differently, I would have passed the test)

Question 26

What is rumination?

Answer 26

people repetitively focusing on negative things in their lives

Question 27

What is thought suppression?

Answer 27

The attempt to avoid thinking about something we would prefer to forget

Question 28

What is the overconfidence barrier?

Answer 28

The fact that people usually have too much confidence in the accuracy of their judgements