L2 - Social Cognition & Knowledge

Question 1

What is Social Cognition?

Answer 1

• How people attend to, perceive, store and respond to social information
• Basic cog processes involved in interpreting social situations like memory, concept formation etc.

Question 2

How do we form impressions according to Anderson?

Answer 2

Cognitive algebra:
- Impressions are evaluative
- People assign values to traits e.g helpful =+5
- Integrate/average these values to form overall evaluation

Question 3

What is Asch’s configuration model?

Answer 3

• People make holistic judgements of others
• The meaning of a trait can depend on context or other traits
• Some perceptual features have more influence than others e.g central traits and first impressions

Question 4

What study did Asch perform to work out central/non-central traits?

Answer 4

• 2 Exp conditions: had a list of words that were replicated. One condition had warm, other had cold, other words were same
• Ppts with warm list were more likely to rate this person as being generous happy and humorous
• Repeated experiment with polite/blunt, found less differences between groups

Question 5

What is the Primacy effect?

Answer 5

First impressions are central and most important

Question 6

What did Kelley demonstrate through a study?

Answer 6

• Students received guest lecturer that was previously described as cold/warm depending on condition
• ‘Cold’ condition students rated lecturer as unsociable, irritable etc, and engaged less in discussion
• Students had top-down process with influences causing precognitions against teacher
• Caused self-fulfilling prophecy as teacher responds to behaviour they receive

Question 7

What are schema?

Answer 7

• Mental framework that organises and synthesis information e.g attributes and relationships between them
• They have structure e.g exemplar and prototype
• Aid interpretation of the world
• Flexible, varies with culture
• Temporary and timewise articulated e.g eating dinner before dessert
• Can lead to surprises and prone to biases

Question 8

What is social categorisation?

Answer 8

• Perception of properties/features
• Assigned to social category
• Simplify perception and structures env
• Activates schema of social group
• Influences perception, expectation and interaction

Question 9

What are stereotypes?

Answer 9

Schemas about groups that are shared by different people
- Characterises large numbers of people in a small number of properties
- Ignores within group variability
- Can be wrong, leading to prejudice and discrimination

Question 10

What are Heuristics?

Answer 10

• Cognitive shortcuts
• Rules of thumb to reduce complex problems to manageable ones

Question 11

What are the two types of heuristics?

Answer 11

• Representative: objects assigned to categories that share similar attributes
• Availability: Importance and frequency of events is guided by the ease with which it comes to mind