Chapter 2

Question 1

What are the differences between thoughts and cognition?

Answer 1

Thought is the internal language/symbols we use (often conscious) while cognition refers to mental processing that is relatively automatic, which we are largely unaware of.

Question 2

What is Social Cognition?

Answer 2

It is the cognitive processes and structures that influence and are influenced by social behaviour. It was very popular in the 1980s and expanded on social psychological research ever since.

Question 3

What is the history of social cognition?

Answer 3

Wilhelm Wundt started examining cognition through autobiographical methods. Later, the popularity American behaviourism made cognition appear unscientific. But the 1960s made a fresh interest on cognition due to lack of explanation for language (cognitive revolution). The computer revolution led to an idea of a human “computer model” for cognition (encoding, storage and retrieval) although not entirely accurate with emotions/limited cognitive capacity. Later, Kurt Lewin used gestalt psychology to explain cognition in social psychology - introducing the four guises. Now, there is more focus on social neuroscience.

Question 4

What is gestalt psychology?

Answer 4

Perspective in which the whole influences constituent parts, rather than vice versa.

Question 5

What are the four guises of Lewin for social cognition?

Answer 5

1. Cognitive consistency
2. Naive scientist
3. Cognitive miser
4. Motivated tactician

Question 6

What is cognitive consistency?

Answer 6

A model of social cognition in which people try to reduce inconsistency among their
cognitions, because they find inconsistency unpleasant.

Question 7

What is a naive scientist?

Answer 7

Model of social cognition that characterises people as using rational, scientific-like, cause–
effect analyses to understand their world.

Question 8

What is a cognitive miser?

Answer 8

A model of social cognition that characterises people as using the least complex and demanding cognitions that generally produce adaptive behaviours.

Question 9

What is a motivated tactician?

Answer 9

A model of social cognition that characterises people as having multiple cognitive strategies available, which they choose from based on personal goals, motives and needs.

Question 10

What is social neuroscience?

Answer 10

Exploration of brain activity associated with social cognition and social psychological processes and phenomena.

Question 11

What is Asch’s configural model?

Answer 11

Asch’s gestalt-based model of impression formation, in which central traits play a disproportionate role in configuring the final impression over peripheral traits. Asch did an experiment for warm/cold and competence, which proved these results.

Question 12

What are central traits?

Answer 12

Traits that have a disproportionate influence on the configuration of final impressions, in Asch’s configural model of impression formation.

Question 13

What are peripheral traits?

Answer 13

Traits that have an insignificant influence on the configuration of final impressions, in Asch’s
configural model of impression formation.

Question 14

What may be biases in forming impressions?

Answer 14

1. Primacy and recency
2. Positivity and negativity - we assume positivity in people, but negativity sticks in our mind.
3. Personal constructs and implicit personality theories
4. Physical appearance
5. Stereotypes
6. Social judgeability

Question 15

What is primacy?

Answer 15

An order of presentation effect in which earlier presented information has a disproportionate influence on social cognition.

Question 16

What is recency?

Answer 16

An order of presentation effect in which later-presented information has a disproportionate influence on social cognition. Happens when distracted or when you have little motivation to attend to someone.

Question 17

What are personal constructs?

Answer 17

Idiosyncratic and personal ways of characterising other people.

Question 18

What are implicit personality theories?

Answer 18

Idiosyncratic and personal ways of characterising other people and explaining their behaviour. We have ideas about characteristics that fit together so that when we know one thing about a person we assume others.

Question 19

What are stereotypes?

Answer 19

Widely shared and simplified evaluative image of a social group and its members.

Question 20

What is social judgeability?

Answer 20

Perception of whether it is socially acceptable to judge a specific target.

Question 21

What is a schema?

Answer 21

Cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among those attributes.

Question 22

What is a script?

Answer 22

A schema about an event.

Question 23

What are the types of schemas?

Answer 23

1. Person schemas
2. Role schemas
3. Scripts
4. Content-free schemas - not a specific category but a limited number of rules of processing information
5. Self-schemas

Question 24

What are roles?

Answer 24

Patterns of behaviour that distinguish between different activities within the group, and that interrelate to one another for the greater good of the group.

Question 25

What are prototypes?

Answer 25

Cognitive representation of the typical/ideal defining features of a category that are kind of fuzzy (not a definitive list).

Question 26

What is a family resemblance?

Answer 26

Defining property of category membership.

Question 27

What is an exemplar?

Answer 27

Specific instances of a member of a category.

Question 28

What are associative networks?

Answer 28

Model of memory in which nodes or ideas are connected by associative links along which cognitive activation can spread. Activating one concept makes others (via links) more accessible

Question 29

What is the difference between a prototype and a schema?

Answer 29

Prototypes are relatively nebulous, unorganised fuzzy representations of a category; schemas are highly organised specifications of features and their interrelationships

Question 30

What are some facets of stereotyping?

Answer 30

People do it easily, they are slow to change, often respond to wider societal changes, acquired at an early age, increase with social tension/conflict and may not be inaccurate/wrong but serve to make sense of certain groups

Question 31

What is the Accentuation Principle?

Answer 31

Categorisation accentuates perceived similarities within and differences between groups on dimensions that people believe are correlated with the categorisation. The effect is amplified where the categorisation and/or dimension has subjective importance, relevance or value.

Question 32

What is Social Identity Theory?

Answer 32

Theory of group membership and intergroup relations based on self-categorisation, social comparison and the construction of a shared self-definition in terms of ingroup-defining properties.

Question 33

What is Self-Categorisation Theory?

Answer 33

Turner and associates' theory of how the process of categorising oneself as a group member produces social identity and group and intergroup behaviours.

Question 34

What type of categories do people make?

Answer 34

Basic-level categories that are neither too inclusive or too exclusive

Question 35

What may be some individual differences that lead to different schema usage?

Answer 35

1. Attributional complexity (the complexity of their explanations of others) 2. Uncertainty orientation (interest in gaining information vs. being uninformed but certain) 3. Need for cognition (how much they like to think deeply about things) 4. Need for cognitive closure (How quickly one needs to tidy cognitive loose ends) 5. Cognitive complexity (How complex their cognitive processes and representations are)

Question 36

What is accessibility?

Answer 36

Ease of recall of categories or schemas that we already have in mind.

Question 37

What are some features of schemas?

Answer 37

They become more abstract and richer/complex as more instances are encountered, they become more organised, compact, resilient and generally more accurate, they are relatively resistant to change unless really innaccurate

Question 38

How may schemas change?

Answer 38

1. Bookkeeping - slow change in the face of accumulating evidence 2. Conversion - sudden and massive change once a critical mass of disconfirming evidence has accumulated 3. Subtyping - schemas morph into a subcategory to accommodate disconfirming evidence.

Question 39

What influences social encoding?

Answer 39

Cognitive processes occur in a situation/context, and depending on that situation/context certain information may be salient, vivid or more accessible

Question 40

What is salience?

Answer 40

Property of a stimulus that makes it stand out in relation to other stimuli and attract attention.

Question 41

How might someone be salient?

Answer 41

If they are novel in the immediate context, they are behaving in ways that do not fit prior expectations of them and if they are important to your goals, dominate your visual field or if you have to pay attention to them.

Question 42

What is vivideness?

Answer 42

An intrinsic property of a stimulus on its own that makes it stand out and attract attention.

Question 43

How might something be vivid?

Answer 43

If they are emotionally attention-grabbing, concrete and image-provoking and if they are close to you in time/place

Question 44

What is priming?

Answer 44

Activation of accessible categories or schemas in memory that influence how we process new information.

Question 45

What is Behavioural Decision Theory?

Answer 45

Set of normative models (ideal processes) for making accurate social inferences

Question 46

What are heuristics?

Answer 46

Cognitive short-cuts that provide adequately accurate inferences for most of us most of the time.

Question 47

What is a representativeness heuristic?

Answer 47

A cognitive short-cut in which instances are assigned to categories or types based on overall similarity or resemblance to the category

Question 48

What is an availability heuristic?

Answer 48

A cognitive short-cut in which the frequency or likelihood of an event is based on how quickly instances or associations come to mind

Question 49

What is the anchoring and adjustment heuristic?

Answer 49

A cognitive short-cut in which inferences are tied to initial standards or schemas.

Question 50

What may be the criticisms of social cognition?

Answer 50

That is way more of the cognitive psychology than social psychology and may be reductionist - social neuroscience may falter in the same way but worse

Question 51

How do we form first impressions of people?

Answer 51

1. We observe visible features 2. We interpret non-verbal language 3. We search for an explanation of what people do/say

Question 52

What is the order of cognition when meeting someone for the first time?

Answer 52

1. Schemas and Social Categorisation - fast and automatic, make knowledge salient and influence what we think/feel/do 2. Heuristics - Decision rules that apply when we are not thinking systematically

Question 53

What is social categorisation?

Answer 53

The tendency to categorise objects/people into discrete groups based on shared characteristics among them