Week 2 (Social Cognition)

Question 1

_____________ ______________ is how people think about themselves and the social world; more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgements and decisions.

Answer 1

Social cognition

Question 2

______________ thinking is thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless.

Answer 2

Automatic

Question 3

Forming impressions of people quickly and effortlessly, without much conscious analysis of what we are doing is an example of ________________ thinking.

Answer 3

automatic

Question 4

_____________ are mental structures people use to organise their knowledge about the social world around themes or subjects and that influence the information people notice, think about, and remember.

Answer 4

Schemas

Question 5

__________________ __________________ is a neurological disorder where people lose the ability to form new memories and must approach every situation as they were encountering it for the first time.

Answer 5

Korsakov’s syndrome

Question 6

The more ambiguous our information is, the _______ we use schemas to fill in the blanks.

Answer 6

more

Question 7

The schema that comes to mind and guides your impressions of a person can be affected by _____________, which is the extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people’s minds and are therefore likely to be used when making judgements about the social world.

Answer 7

accessibility

Question 8

The accessibility of a schema can be affected by ____________ _____________, this makes the schemas chronically accessible and ready to use to interpret ambiguous situations.

For example, if there is a history of alcoholism in your family, traits describing a person with alcoholism are likely to be chronically accessible to you, increasing the likelihood that you will assume that the man on the bus has had too much to drink.

Answer 8

past experiences

Question 9

Accessibility can also be affected by the ______________ _____________ of an individual. For example, if you are studying for a test in abnormal psychology and need to learn about different kinds of mental disorders, this concept or schema may be _____________ accessible.

Answer 9

current goals, temporarily

Question 10

Schemas can be momentarily accessible because of ____________ _____________. This means that a particular schema or trait happens to be primed by something people have been thinking of doing before encountering an event.

Answer 10

recent experiences

Question 11

______________ is the process whereby recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, or concept.

Answer 11

Priming

Question 12

Priming is an example of ________________ thinking, it occurs quickly, unintentionally, and unconsciously.

Answer 12

automatic

Question 13

A _______________ _______________ is where people have an expectation about what another person is like, which influences how they act towards that person. This causes that person to behave consistently with people’s original expectations, making the expectations come true.

Answer 13

self-fulfilling prophecy

Question 14

One study found that if first-grade teachers had overly low expectations of their students, those students did worse on standardized tests of math, reading, and vocabulary 10 years later - especially if those children came from poor families. This may be due to the phenomenon of a ________________ ________________.

Answer 14

self-fulfilling prophecy

Question 15

______________ ____________ _______________ is a type of automatic thinking in which our nonconscious minds chooses the goal for us, basing decisions in part on which goal has been recently activated or primed.

Answer 15

Automatic goal pursuit

Question 16

Automatic thinking is also known as ____________ ___________ thinking.

Answer 16

System 1

Question 17

Senses can also play a part in decision-making in automatic thinking. For example, if you smelled something rotten and dirty before being asked to help out on something you are ________ likely to help out.

Answer 17

less

Question 18

____________ about the body and social judgements can influence our judgement and decisions. For example, cleanliness is usually associated with morality, and dirtiness with immorality.

Answer 18

Metaphors

Question 19

Priming metaphors about the ________________ between the mind and the body can influence our judgements and behaviour.

Answer 19

relationships

Question 20

Sometimes people use _____________ _____________ such as narrowing down their choices to a smaller number of options rather than building an exhaustive list which can be time-consuming and mentally exhausting.

Answer 20

mental shortcuts

Question 21

__________________ are mental shortcuts people use to make judgements quickly and efficiently.

Answer 21

Heuristics

Question 22

The __________________ ________________ is a mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgement on the ease of which they can bring something to mind.

Answer 22

availability heuristic

Question 23

The __________________ __________________ is a mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case.

Answer 23

representativeness heuristic

Question 24

__________________ _________________ information is information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population.

Answer 24

Base rate

Question 25

The ____________ ______________ is an example of a representativeness heuristic. This occurs when statements are vague enough that virtually everyone can find a past behaviour that is similar to (representative of) the feedback.

Answer 25

Barnum effect

Question 26

Horoscopes are an example of the _________________ _______________.

Answer 26

Barnum effect

Question 27

The content of our schemas is influenced by the ___________ in which we live. For example, a Scottish settler and a local Bantu herdsman in Swaziland, a small country in south-eastern African, had different methods of recalling cattle transactions.

Answer 27

culture

Question 28

Schemas are a very important way by which cultures exert their influence, they do so by instilling _____________ ______________ that influence the very way we understand and interpret the world.

Answer 28

mental structures

Question 29

A/an ______________ thinking style is a type of thinking in which people focus on the properties of objects without considering their surrounding context; this type of thinking is common in Western cultures.

Answer 29

analytic

Question 30

A/an _______________ thinking style is a type of thinking in which people focus on the overall context, particularly the ways in which objects relate to each other; this type of thinking is common in East Asian cultures.

Answer 30

holistic

Question 31

You run into a classmate who was surrounded by a group of friends, you focus on your classmate's face to judge how he or she is feeling. From this situation, you likely have a/an ____________ thinking style.

Answer 31

analytic

Question 32

You run into a classmate who was surrounded by a group of friends, you scan everyone's faces in the group and use this information to judge how your classmate is feeling. From this situation, you likely have a/an ____________ thinking style.

Answer 32

holistic

Question 33

Research suggests that people in all cultures are capable of thinking both holistically or analytically, but that the _____________ in which people live, or which ______________ has been recently primed, triggers a reliance on one of the styles.

Answer 33

environment

Question 34

______________ thinking is thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful.

Answer 34

Controlled

Question 35

Controlled thinking is also known as _____________ ____________ thinking.

Answer 35

System 2

Question 36

_______________ thinking can usually be turned on and off at will, people are usually fully aware when performing this kind of thinking.

Answer 36

Controlled

Question 37

_____________ thinking is the ability to think quickly and nonconsciously, at times it can be critical to our survival as we may need to assess dangerous information in a limited amount of time.

Answer 37

Automatic

Question 38

In the case of facilitated communication, where communication-impaired people used a trained facilitator to type on the keyboard as a form of communication, the method was discredited when further research proved that the facilitator was not typing what the communication-impaired wanted to speak but only what the facilitator assumed the communication-impaired wanted to say. This is an example that there is a _____________ between our conscious sense of how much we are causing our own actions and how much we really are causing them.

Answer 38

disconnect

Question 39

The more people believe in free will, the _______ willing they are to help others in need and _______ likely to engage in immoral actions.

Answer 39

more, less

Question 40

_________________ thinking is the process of mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been.

Answer 40

Counterfactual

Question 41

"If only I hadn't erase my first answer to Question 17 and circled the wrong one instead, I might have gotten a better grade on my test." This statement is an example of ________________ thinking.

Answer 41

counterfactual

Question 42

Counterfactual thoughts can have a big influence on our emotional reactions to events. The easier it is to mentally undo an outcome, the ______the emotional reaction to it. An example of this is when silver medalists are often less happy then bronze medalists, as they can easily imagine how they might have come in first and win gold.

Answer 42

stronger

Question 43

_______________ is when people repetitively focus on negative things in their lives instead of positive things.

Answer 43

Rumination

Question 44

_________ ________ is the tendency for people to be overly optimistic about how soon they will complete a project, even when they have failed to get similar projects done on time in the past.

Answer 44

Planning fallacy

Question 45

The planning fallacy may occur as people may forget that different events such as, other classes, weekend trips, social activities, can ___________ one from finishing an assignment.

Answer 45

sidetrack