Week 4 - Social Cognition

Question 1

automatic thinking

Answer 1

a type of decision-making process that occurs at an unconscious or automatic level and is entirely effortless and unintentional

Question 2

heuristics

Answer 2

mental shortcuts that are often used to form judgements and make decisions

Question 3

controlled or effortful thinking

Answer 3

thinking thats effortful, conscious, and intentional

Question 4

social cognition

Answer 4

how people think about the world, and in particular how people select, interpret, and use info to make judgements about the world

Question 5

intuition

Answer 5

a decision-making shortcut in which we rely on our instinct instead of relying on more objective info

Question 6

availability heuristic

Answer 6

a mental shortcut in which people make a judgement based on how easily they can bring something to mind

Question 7

schemas

Answer 7

mental structures that organize our knowledge about the world and influence how we interpret people and events

Question 8

person schemas

Answer 8

beliefs about other people, their traits, and goals

Question 9

self schemas

Answer 9

our memory, inferences and info about ourselves

Question 10

role schemas

Answer 10

behaviours that are expected of people in particular occupations or social positions

Question 11

event schemas

Answer 11

scrips that people have for well-nown situations which help them prepare for the expected sequence of events

Question 12

content-free schemas

Answer 12

rules about processing info

Question 13

priming

Answer 13

increase accessibility to a given concept or schema due to a prior experience

Question 14

representativeness

Answer 14

the tendency to perceive someone or something based on its similarity to a typical case

Question 15

base-rate fallacy

Answer 15

an error in which people ignore the numerical frequency, or base rate, of an event in estimating how likely it is to occur

Question 16

anchoring and adjustment

Answer 16

a mental shortcut in which people rely on an initial starting point in making an estimate but then fail to adequately adjust from this anchor

Question 17

counterfactual thinking

Answer 17

the tendency to imagine alternative outcomes to various events

Question 18

contrast effect

Answer 18

the relative difference in intensity between two stimuli and their effect on each other

Question 19

framing heuristic

Answer 19

the tendency to be influenced by the way an issue is presented

Question 20

implicit personality theory

Answer 20

the theory that certain traits and behaviours go together

Question 21

primacy effect

Answer 21

the tendency for info that is presented early to have a greater impact on judgement than info that is presented later

Question 22

trait negativity bias

Answer 22

the tendency for people to be more infused by negative traits than by positive ones

Question 23

illusory correlation

Answer 23

the tendency to see a correlation between two events when in reality there is no association between them

Question 24

unrealistic optimism

Answer 24

the tendency for people to see themselves as less likely than others to suffer bad events in the future

Question 25

illusory superiority

Answer 25

an unrealistically positive view of the self

Question 26

hindsight bias

Answer 26

the tendency of people to see a given outcome as having been inevitable once they know the actual outcome

Question 27

belief perseverance

Answer 27

the tendency to maintain, and even strengthen, beliefs in the face of disconfirming evidence

Question 28

behavioural confirmation/self-fulfilling prophecy

Answer 28

the process by which peoples expectations about a person lead them to elicit behaviour that confirms those expectations

Question 29

field dependent

Answer 29

having more difficulty in identifying an embedded figure in a larger background but greater ability to perceive an image as one holistic figure

Question 30

field independent

Answer 30

having the ability to identify an embedded figure and separate it from a larger background