PSY2203 Lecture 1: Intro to Social Cognition/ The 'Why' Question Flashcards
What is a schema?
Cognitive structure/ mental representation comprising of our pre-digested info about thing, our expectancy about thing, what defines them. For example, our schema of a horse is big, tail, four legs.
What is categorization?
The tendency to group things together with shared characteristics.
Why do we tend to categorize?
To avoid information overload, and saves us effort/ time. Without it, each person we meet would need to be treated uniquely and that would take so much cognitive energy.
Categorization favours simplification!
What is priming?
When a stimulus triggers subsequent processing of other related stimulus which are made temporarily accessible. (i.e.) bird triggers other related stimulus such as wings and feathers.
This is known as spreading activation.
What task is used to demonstrate priming effect?
Lexical decision task.
Priming stimuli shown very quickly before letter string. Participants respond significantly to real word letter strings associated with the prime.
Indicates that spreading activation is an uncontrollable and automatic process.
What is naive realism?
The failure to see how we are subjective, and that our expectancy bias’ our interpretation of the things around us. We are basically little brats and see what we want to see/ what will support our initial impressions.
What are the three main things to affect our interpretation?
Constructed nature of perception, context and power of data.
How does our constructed nature of perception affect interpretation?
Norms, goals, stereotypes, expectations, culture, mood and needs can all affect what we think we see.
Our brains are constantly comparing incoming knowledge with what we already know.
How does context affect interpretation?
Field theory- every action has specific background and is determined by that background (i.e.) Milgram provided context as it was deemed okay to shock people.
How does the power of data affect interpretation?
Salience- casual perception is influenced by what sticks out.
Examples of this: spotlight of attention, novelty of information, negativity of information, unit formation.
