Ch. 4 - Social Cognition Flashcards
(21 cards)
5 key aspects of social judgment
Judgments are only as accurate as quality of info they are based on
The way info is presented influences our judgments
Our schemas influence how we construe new info and make judgments
We actively seek out info and this can create a judgment bias
Reason and intuition underlie social cognition, determines judgments
Define social cognition
Refers to the processes by which information about people/social events is processed and stored
Automatic processing
Controlled processing
Unintentional, unaware, efficient, uncontrollable
Generates impressions, intuitions and feelings
Intentional, aware, elaborate, controllable
decides/deliberates whether or not to endorse ‘suggestions’ of automatic system
Pluralistic ignorance
Self fulfilling prophecy
Occurs when people act in ways contrary to their private beliefs because of concern for social consequences
Tendency for people to act in ways that bring about the very thing they expect to happen
Misleading secondhand information and bad news bias
People who transmit information often have an ideological agenda that leads them to highlight certain parts of the story and suppress others
‘Bad news bias’ can lead people to believe they are more at risk of victimization than they actually are
Primacy effect
Recency effect
Is the disproportionate influence on judgment by information presented first in a body of evidence
Often occur when information is ambiguous so what comes first influence interpretation of later information
The disproportionate influence on judgment by information presented last in a body of evidence
Usually occurs when last items come more readily to mind
Framing effect
The influence on judgment resulting from the way information is presented
Information framed in negative terms elicits a stronger response
Construal level theory
theory about relationship between temporal distance and abstract/concrete thinking → psychologically distant actions and events are thought about in abstract terms, actions and events close at hand are thought about in concrete terms
Schemas
Accessibility
Are the mental structures that organize knowledge about the social world
Aid in categorization and predictability of objects/events
Guide our social behaviour
Influence what we remember
Ease with which a schema is activated
Priming produces greater accessibility, increases likelihood that scheme will be activated in future
Bottom up processing
Top down processing
Data driven, individual forms conclusions based on stimuli encountered in environment
Theory driven, individual filters and interprets new information in light of preexisting knowledge and expectations
Influence of schemas (5)
Selection attention - only pay attention to things that are schemas prime us for
Expectation - expect things that are part of our schemas
Memory - things that are part of our schemas are more memorable to us
Construal - how we interpret information
Behaviour - certain behaviours are elicited automatically when the environment brings to mind a specific schema
What determines which schemas are activated? (3)
Recent activation - priming
Frequent activation - can be out of habit, increases accessibility
Expectations - apply schemas based on expectations on what will happen
Heuristics
Mental shortcuts that provide convenient (if not always accurate) answers to common problems
Yield answers that feel right and therefore can delay more rational thinking
Availability heuristic
Fluency
People often judge the likelihood of an event by how readily pertinent examples come to mind
Examples can be brought to mind because they are frequent or memorable → the latter can lead to misjudgment
The ease or difficulty associated with information processing (e.g. a clear image v.s. A complicated word)
Influence judgments we make (e.g. people think a recipe in a hard to read font is hard to make)
Representativeness heuristic
Base rate information
Gambler’s fallacy
Reflects an implicit assumption that a member of a given category ought to resemble the category prototype
Can be a guide to group membership, but can also blind us to other sources of info
Our knowledge of relative frequency of the members of a given category
Sense of representativeness can cause us to ignore this source of information
Also affects people’s assessment of cause and effect → assume that big effects always have big causes and little effects always have little causes (like goes with like)
Tendency to perceive a link between past and future events, when they are actually independent
Regression fallacy
People often fail to realize impact of regression effect and instead conclude that they’ve encountered some important phenomenon
Occurs because regression runs counter to representative heuristic → being on the cover of the magazine represents success so we find results that regress towards the mean surprising and we invent explanations for them
Illusory correlation
Believing that 2 variables are related when they are not
Caused by representativeness and availability heuristic
Correlations can become unusually memorable
Affect heuristic
Tendency for our moods, emotional states and desires to bias perceptions and judgments
Planning fallacy
Tendency for people to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task
Confirmation bias
Tendency to test a proposition by searching for evidence that supports it
If we look mainly for one type of evidence we are likely to find it (so we think we are right)
Leads people to ask questions that shape the answers they get
Can be motivated
Can result in self fulfilling prophecy
Overconfidence bias
Is the tendency for individuals to have greater confidence in their judgments and decisions than their actual accuracy merits
