Week Eight Social Cognition Flashcards
Define social cognition
How individuals analyse information about social situations and how that information is processed
What was the key finding of McArthur and Post’s - think post- post a photo = superficial (1977) study?
Superficial things e.g. colour of someones shirt motivated participants when determining who they thought was the most influential figure in a discussion
What was the key finding of Barlett (1932)?
Memory is a process of reconstruction; people shifted the story they’d been previously told to fir their own cultural norms
Define bottom-up processing
Sensory information processed more specifically by brain in order to make senes of it
Top-down processing
Processing driven by past experiences and is more overarching
What were the key findings of von Hippel et al. (1993)?
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
Name the dependent variable in von Hippel’s study of top/bottom processing
Number of word fragments solved with words from scenario
What are the two kinds of knowledge that schemas contain?
- Attributes
- Relationship among attributes e.g. how these attributes work together
What was the aim of Asch (1946) research?
To see the impact of the descriptor ‘warm’ or
‘cold’ on overall evaluation of a person vs ‘polite’ or ‘blunt’ later on
Which set of descriptors had the most pronounced affect?
‘Warm’ or ‘cold’
Thus what was their key finding?
Some traits are more pronounced than others
How was Kelley (1950) study different to Asch’s?
Conducted in naturalistic setting in a university
What was the key finding of Kelley’s study?
Students rated cold lecturer as more unsociable, self-centred, unpopular merely after him being introduced as ‘cold’
Define priming in the context of stimulus
Introduction of one stimulus influences how people respond to subsequent stimulus
How does priming relate to schemas?
Been suggested that it makes schemas more salient, rate at which they come to mind, and frequency at which they are used
What were the key findings of Correll et al. (2002)?
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
Key finding of Fishschoff (1975). What did they reveal?
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)
What were the key findings of Darley and Gross (1983)?
Higher expectation that Hannah who performed averagely academically would peform better if participants were told she came from a more well off background
Outline the egocentric bias (Ross & Sicoly, 1979)
People tend to have a higher opinion of oneself and rely more heavily on their own perspective than reality
What was the key finding from Miller & Ross, 1975
We take responsibility for positive outcomes and deny responsibility for negative ones
How did Rosenthal & Jacobson’s (1958) study explain self fulfilling prophecy?
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
What is meant by the discounting principle?
If there is a sufficient explanation for an effect, people will discount other potential factors as irrelevant
What is the Fundamental attribution error and what study was it consistent with?
Ignoring of situational constraints and instead the favouring of internal explanations. Jones and Harris
Define what is meant by Kelleys covariation theory
Assumes we use the level of consensus, distinctiveness and and consitency (these are the criteria for attributions) of someone’s behaviour to explain it
What is the augmentation principle?
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
What is meant by Berns (1967) self-perception theory?
We infer our own attributions from attributions of others
- occurs when we have problems with our own internal emotional cues
Key finding of Madaras and Ben (1968)
Participants rated electric shocks as more uncomfortable if they escaped them vs if they did not
What were the key findings for the study on induced compliance (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959)
After performing boring task for one hour, participants changed their evaluation of whole task (dissonance) when asked to tell others about it
