Week Eight Social Cognition

Question 1

Define social cognition

Answer 1

How individuals analyse information about social situations and how that information is processed

Question 2

What was the key finding of McArthur and Post’s - think post- post a photo = superficial (1977) study?

Answer 2

Superficial things e.g. colour of someones shirt motivated participants when determining who they thought was the most influential figure in a discussion

Question 3

What was the key finding of Barlett (1932)?

Answer 3

Memory is a process of reconstruction; people shifted the story they’d been previously told to fir their own cultural norms

Question 4

Define bottom-up processing

Answer 4

Sensory information processed more specifically by brain in order to make senes of it

Question 5

Top-down processing

Answer 5

Processing driven by past experiences and is more overarching

Question 6

What were the key findings of von Hippel et al. (1993)?

Answer 6

Group that was given the title of a scenario more likely to think in top-down way, people not given title more likely to think in bottom-up way

Question 7

Name the dependent variable in von Hippel’s study of top/bottom processing

Answer 7

Number of word fragments solved with words from scenario

Question 8

What are the two kinds of knowledge that schemas contain?

Answer 8

1. Attributes
2. Relationship among attributes e.g. how these attributes work together

Question 9

What was the aim of Asch (1946) research?

Answer 9

To see the impact of the descriptor ‘warm’ or
‘cold’ on overall evaluation of a person vs ‘polite’ or ‘blunt’ later on

Question 10

Which set of descriptors had the most pronounced affect?

Answer 10

‘Warm’ or ‘cold’

Question 11

Thus what was their key finding?

Answer 11

Some traits are more pronounced than others

Question 12

How was Kelley (1950) study different to Asch’s?

Answer 12

Conducted in naturalistic setting in a university

Question 13

What was the key finding of Kelley’s study?

Answer 13

Students rated cold lecturer as more unsociable, self-centred, unpopular merely after him being introduced as ‘cold’

Question 14

Define priming in the context of stimulus

Answer 14

Introduction of one stimulus influences how people respond to subsequent stimulus

Question 15

How does priming relate to schemas?

Answer 15

Been suggested that it makes schemas more salient, rate at which they come to mind, and frequency at which they are used

Question 16

What were the key findings of Correll et al. (2002)?

Answer 16

Participants more likely to shoot quicker if target in game was African American
Longer to determine whether target had gun if they were African American

Question 17

Key finding of Fishschoff (1975). What did they reveal?

Answer 17

Greater certainty of events related to Nixon’s trip to China and USSR for events that occured than those that didn’t (revealed hindsight bias)

Question 18

What were the key findings of Darley and Gross (1983)?

Answer 18

Higher expectation that Hannah who performed averagely academically would peform better if participants were told she came from a more well off background

Question 19

Outline the egocentric bias (Ross & Sicoly, 1979)

Answer 19

People tend to have a higher opinion of oneself and rely more heavily on their own perspective than reality

Question 20

What was the key finding from Miller & Ross, 1975

Answer 20

We take responsibility for positive outcomes and deny responsibility for negative ones

Question 21

How did Rosenthal & Jacobson’s (1958) study explain self fulfilling prophecy?

Answer 21

SFP: perceived outcome can lead to actual outcome
- way teachers taught the children in accordance with their IQ goals led to them reaching those same performance outcomes

Question 22

What is meant by the discounting principle?

Answer 22

If there is a sufficient explanation for an effect, people will discount other potential factors as irrelevant

Question 23

What is the Fundamental attribution error and what study was it consistent with?

Answer 23

Ignoring of situational constraints and instead the favouring of internal explanations. Jones and Harris

Question 24

Define what is meant by Kelleys covariation theory

Answer 24

Assumes we use the level of consensus, distinctiveness and and consitency (these are the criteria for attributions) of someone’s behaviour to explain it

Question 25

What is the augmentation principle?

Answer 25

Tendency to attach greater importance to a potential cause of behaviour if it occurs depsite presence of other inhibitory causes – > relates to more negative behaviour

Question 26

What is meant by Berns (1967) self-perception theory?

Answer 26

We infer our own attributions from attributions of others
- occurs when we have problems with our own internal emotional cues

Question 27

Key finding of Madaras and Ben (1968)

Answer 27

Participants rated electric shocks as more uncomfortable if they escaped them vs if they did not

Question 28

What were the key findings for the study on induced compliance (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959)

Answer 28

After performing boring task for one hour, participants changed their evaluation of whole task (dissonance) when asked to tell others about it