Social Cognition Flashcards
What are heuristics?
Rules of thumb for quick and efficient information processing.
What is the availability heuristic?
Judging the frequency of an event based on the ease with which it is brought to mind.
What is the representativeness heuristic?
Judging the likelihood of an event based on how well it fits a prototype.
What are illusory correlations?
Perceiving a relationship between two events when none actually exists. When two outstanding events in our life co-occur, we overestimate their relationship with one another.
What is the illusion of control?
Perceiving random events as subject to our influence, even though they are not.
What is regression to the mean?
People fail to recognize that events, especially extreme ones, tend to regress to their average tendency.
What is anchoring and adjusting?
When people make an estimate, they tend to anchor on a value and fail to adjust.
What is the fundamental attribution error?
A tendency to over-infer someone’s dispositional causes and to underestimate someone’s situational causes.
What is actor observer bias?
Says the same as the fundamental attribution error, but adds that the effect reverses when we reflect on ourselves.
What are schemas and stereotypes?
Preconceived notions and expectations that can influence how we process information about ourselves and others.
What are self-fulfilling prophecies?
Believing something so strongly that you somehow make it happen.
What is counterfactual processing?
The process of imagining alternative outcomes to an event.
What are the two types of counterfactuals?
Upward and downward.
What is the upward counterfactual?
Imagining the better outcome.
What is the downward counterfactual?
Imagining a worse outcome.
