Week 9 - The cognitive perspective Flashcards
Two assumptions of the cognitive perspective on personality
To have broader experiences, you integrate and organize the bits of information the world provides you.
life involves an elaborate web of decisions (conscious and not).
The core assumption of the cognitive view of personality
Cognitive psychologists are interested in how people organize, store, and retrieve memories of their experiences. How do we do these things? [is this card complete?]
Schema
An organization of knowledge in memory.
Exemplar
A specific example of a category member.
Prototype
The representation of a category in terms of the best member of the category.
Fuzzy set
A category defined by a set of attributes that aren’t absolutely necessary for membership.
Default
Something assumed to be true until you learn otherwise.
Semantic memory
Memory organized according to meaning.
Episodic memory
Memory organized according to sequences of events.
Script
A memory structure used to represent a highly stereotyped category of events.
Feeling qualities seem especially likely to be part of a schema when the feeling is one of ___ because ____
threat. Presumably, this is because sensing threat is so important for survival that we preferentially code information about it.
Procedural knowledge
Knowledge about doing, about engaging in specific behaviors and mental manipulations.
Social cognition
Cognitive processes that focus on socially meaningful stimuli.
Self-schema
The schematic representation of the self.
Self-complexity
The degree to which your self-schema is differentiated and compartmentalized.
Possible self (and 5 types)
An image of yourself in the future (expected, desired, feared, etc.).
expected,
liked,
feared,
disliked,
obligated.
Outcome of Entity vs Incremental mindsets (on ability)
When people have an entity view, performing a task is about proving their ability. If they do poorly, they become distressed and want to quit.
When people have an incremental view, performing a task is about extending their ability. If they do poorly, they see it as a chance to increase the ability.
Attribution
The process of making a judgment about the cause or causes of an event.
Successes and failures can have many causes, but research has focused on four of them:
ability,
effort,
task difficulty,
and luck or chance factors.
Node
An area of memory that stores some element of information.
Priming
Activating an element in memory by using the information contained in it, leaving it partly activated.
If you prime dishonest, for instance, it won’t influence your judgments of athletic ability. On the other hand, priming seems to activate the full dimension, not just the end that’s primed
Connectionism
An approach to understanding cognition based on the metaphor of interconnected neurons.
Dual-process models
Models assuming two different modes of cognition—one effortful, one automatic.
What are different dual-process models
Epstein’s cognitive–experiential self-theory
Metcalfe and Mischel (1999) proposed that there’s a “hot” system that’s emotional, impulsive, and reflexive and operates in a connectionist manner. There’s also a “cool” system that is strategic, flexible, slower, and unemotional.
Strack and Deutsch (2004) also proposed a dual-process model of social behavior in which action is seen as a joint output of two modes of functioning: reflective and impulsive.
Epstein’s cognitive–experiential self-theory assumes that we experience reality through two systems. The rational system operates mostly consciously, uses logical rules, and is fairly slow. This is the symbolic processor that we think of as our rational mind. The experiential system is intuitive. It’s a “quick and dirty” way of assessing and responding to reality. It relies on shortcuts and readily available information. It functions automatically and largely outside consciousness.
Metcalfe and Mischel (1999) proposed that there’s a “hot” system that’s emotional, impulsive, and reflexive and operates in a connectionist manner. There’s also a “cool” system that is strategic, flexible, slower, and unemotional. This line of thought derives, in part, from a long line of research on delay of gratification
Implicit knowledge
Associations between things in memory that aren’t directly accessible.
Implicit self-esteem
relates to negative feeling states in day-to-day life apart from any role of explicit self-esteem
Of particular interest is the fact that implicit self-esteem isn’t very highly correlated with explicit self-esteem (the self-esteem that’s reported on self-report scales).
In introducing this topic, we said that implicit and explicit attitudes may relate to dual-process models of cognition. It seems possible that what we are referring to here as implicit knowledge is the associative system that others have termed an experiential or reflexive or intuitive system. Explicit knowledge seems more related to a rational, deliberative system.
cognitive–social learning person variables (Mischel, 1990 - intended to replace traits)
- competencies
- encoding strategies and personal constructs (covers schemas - Two people react to the same situation differently because they literally experience it differently.)
- expectancies (One expectancy is an anticipation that one kind of event typically leads to another event, including behaviour-outcome.)
-subjective values ( These values are what cause people to use their expectancies in action.)
-Self-regulatory systems and plans (People set goals, make plans, and do the various things that need to be done to see that the plans are realized in action.)
cognitive–affective processing system.
The linking of cognitive to affective in this term reflects the recognition that emotion plays a key role in much of cognitive experience.
people think conditionally about themselves and others.
In this view, individuality arises from two sources. First, people differ in the accessibility of their various schemas and the cues that evoke them. Thus, different schemas are likely to pop up for different people in a given setting. People literally perceive different things in the same situation.
Second, people differ in their if … then profiles. When a schema is active, the person will act in ways that fit it. But that may mean different actions for different people.
Behavioral signature
The pattern of situation–behavior links the person has established over experiences in some specific domain.
To predict consistency of action in cognitive-affective processing system, you need to know two things.
First, you need to know how the person construes the situation (which depends on the person’s schemas and their accessibility).
Second, you need to know the person’s if … then profile. The unique profile of if … then relations is called a behavioral signature for a person’s personality
Cognitive assessment (4 e.g.)
Procedures used to assess cognitive processes, mental structures, and contents of consciousness.
e.g. Interviews, think-aloud protocols, self-reports, experience sampling.
event recording or self-monitoring,
think-aloud approaches are used to assess cognition during…
problem solving
Another aspect of the cognitive view on assessment is the idea that personality should be assessed for specific classes of contexts. This element is shared with the cognitive–social learning view
Why do people deploy their attention in ineffective ways? Their schemas lead them to do so. Recall that one effect of schemas is to tell you where to look for information in a new event: You look for information that fits the schema. Thus, a biased schema can bias the search for cues, which can lead to incorrect inferences and inappropriate actions.
Automatic thoughts
Self-related internal dialogue that often interferes with behavior.
Cognitive triad
Negative patterns of thinking about the self, the world, and the future.
Cognitive restructuring or reframing
The process of taking a different and more positive view of your experience.
Cognitive therapies
Procedures aimed at reducing cognitive distortions and the distress that results from them.
The cognitive viewpoint on personality is part of a broad attempt to understand the operating characteristics of the mind. A better understanding of those characteristics can’t help but illuminate important aspects of personality. From this view, the intrapersonal functioning of personality is a reflection of the complexities of the mind and its workings. It’s not possible to fully understand the former without understanding the latter.
