Week 12

Question 1

audience design

Answer 1

• Constructing utterances (words) to suit the audience’s knowledge.
• if audiences are seen to be knowledgeable about an object, they tend to use a brief label of the object

Question 2

common ground

Answer 2

information that is shared by people who engage in a conversation

Question 3

in group

Answer 3

group to which a person belongs

Question 4

lexicon

Answer 4

words and expressions

Question 5

linguistic intergroup bias

Answer 5

A tendency for people to characterize positive things about their ingroup using more abstract expressions, but negative things about their outgroups using more abstract expression

Question 6

outgroup

Answer 6

group to which a person does not belong

Question 7

priming

Answer 7

a stimulus presented to a person reminds him or her about other ideas associated with the stimulus

Question 8

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Answer 8

The hypothesis that the language that people use determines their thoughts

Question 9

Situation model

Answer 9

• representations about the topic of a conversation
• A mental representation of an event, object, or situation constructed at the time of comprehending a linguistic description

Question 10

Social brain hypothesis

Answer 10

The hypothesis that the human brain has evolved, so that humans can maintain larger ingroups

Question 11

Social networks

Answer 11

Networks of social relationships among individuals through which information can travel

Question 12

Syntax

Answer 12

Rules by which words are strung together to form sentences

Question 13

Automatic empathy

Answer 13

• unwittingly taking on the internal state of another person
• If your friend is sad, you will automatically realize this and adjust your body language and may even become a bit sad yourself

Question 14

Folk explanations of behavior

Answer 14

People’s natural explanations for why somebody did something, felt something, etc

Question 15

Intention

Answer 15

An agent’s mental state of committing to perform an action that the agent believes will bring about a desired outcome

Question 16

Intentionality

Answer 16

• The quality of performing a behavior intentionally—that is, with skill and awareness and executing an intention

Question 17

Joint attention

Answer 17

Two people attending to the same object and being aware that they both are attending to it

Question 18

Mimicry

Answer 18

Copying others’ behavior, usually without awareness

Question 19

Mirror neurons

Answer 19

Neurons identified in monkey brains that fire both when the monkey performs a certain action and when it perceives another agent performing that action

Question 20

Projection

Answer 20

A social perceiver’s assumption that the other person wants, knows, or feels the same as the perceiver wants, know, or feels

Question 21

Simulation

Answer 21

The process of representing the other person’s mental state

Question 22

Synchrony

Answer 22

Two people displaying the same behaviors or having the same internal states (typically because of mutual mimicry)

Question 23

Theory of mind

Answer 23

The human capacity to understand minds, a capacity that is made up of a collection of concepts and processes

Question 24

Visual perspective taking

Answer 24

Can refer to visual perspective taking or more generally to effortful mental state inference (trying to infer the other person’s thoughts, desires, emotions)