Chapter 4: Social Cognition

Question 1

Primacy effect

Answer 1

A type of order effect whereby the information presented first in a body of evidence has a disproportionate influence on judgment
Occur often when the information is ambiguous.
What come first influences how the later information is interpreted.

Question 2

Asch 1946 study

Answer 2

Aim: primacy effect

Procedures: Participants were asked to evaluate a hypothetical individual described by the following terms: intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, and envious.
Participants rated the individual favorably, no doubt because of the influence of the two very positive terms that began the list. A second group read the same trait adjectives in the opposite order and formed a much less
favorable impression because the first two descriptive terms (stubborn and envious) were negative.

Question 3

Recency effect

Answer 3

A type of order effect whereby the information presented last in a body of evidence has a disproportionate influence on judgment.

Question 4

Framing effects

Answer 4

The influence on judgment resulting from the way information is presented, including the words used to describe the information or the order in which it is presented.

Question 5

Spin framing

Answer 5

A form of framing that varies the content, not just the order, of what is presented

Question 6

Positive versus negative framing

Answer 6

Positive framing is focusing on the good like meat is describe as 75% lean
Negative framing focuses on the negative/bad like meat being described as 25% fat.
The both mean the same thing just the framing is different

Question 7

McNeil et al. 1982 Study

Answer 7

Aim: Positive versus negative framing

Procedures: More than 400 physicians were asked whether they
would recommend surgery or radiation for patients diagnosed with a certain type of cancer. Some were
told that of 100 previous patients who had the surgery, 90 lived through the postoperative period, 68 were still alive after a year, and 34 were still alive after five years. Eighty-two percent of these physicians recommended surgery. Others were given the same information, but it was framed in different language: 10 died during surgery or the postoperative period, 32 had died by the end of the first year, and 66 had died by the end of five years. Only 56 percent of the physicians given the
information in this form recommended surgery.

Implication: Negative information tends to attract more attention and have a greater psychological impact than positive information.

Question 8

Construal level theory

Answer 8

A theory about the relationship between temporal distance (and other kinds of distance) and abstract or concrete thinking: Psychologically distant actions and events are thought about in abstract terms; actions and events that are close at hand are thought about in concrete terms.

Question 9

Confirmation bias

Answer 9

The tendency to test a proposition by searching for evidence in support of it.

Question 10

Crocker 1982 Study

Answer 10

Aim: examine confirmation bias

Procedures: One group of participants was asked to determine whether working out the day before an important tennis match makes a player more likely to win. Another group was asked to determine whether working out the day before a match makes a player more likely to lose. Both groups could examine
any of four types of information before concluding: the number of players in a sample who worked out the previous day and won their match, the number of players who worked out and lost, the number of players who didn’t work out
the previous day and won, and the number of players who didn’t work out and lost.

Findings: However, participants tended not to seek out all the necessary information. Instead, participants exhibited confirmation bias: they were especially interested in examining the information that could potentially con firm the
proposition they were investigating.

Question 11

Snyder & Swann 1978

Answer 11

Aim: confirmation bias

Procedures: Researchers asked one group of participants to interview someone and determine whether the target person was an extrovert; another group was asked to determine whether the target person was an introvert. Participants selected their interview questions from a list provided.

Question 12

Overconfidence bias

Answer 12

The tendency for individuals to have greater confidence in their judgments and decisions than their actual accuracy merits.

Question 13

Bottom-up processing

Answer 13

“Data-driven” mental processing, in which an individual forms conclusions based on stimuli encountered in the environment.

Question 14

Top-down processing

Answer 14

“Theory-driven” mental processing, in which an individual filters and interprets new information in light of preexisting knowledge and expectations

Question 15

Schemas

Answer 15

Organized coherent packages in which related information is stored together

Question 16

How do schemas affect our judgments?

Answer 16

They direct our attention, structure our memories, and influence our interpretations. But schemas can sometimes leads us to mischaracterize the world.

Question 17

How does schema direct our attention?

Answer 17

Attention is selective since we can’t focus on everything.
The knowledge we bring to a given situation enables us to direct our attention to what’s most important while largely ignoring everything else.

Question 18

Simons & Chabris 1999 study

Answer 18

Aim: Schemas and expectations guide our attention

Procedure: Participants watched a video of two teams of
three people, each passing a basketball back and forth. Members of one team wore white shirts, and
members of the other team wore black shirts. The researchers asked each participant to count the number of passes made between the members of one of the teams. Forty- five seconds into the action, a person wearing a gorilla costume strolled into the middle of the scene. Although a large gorilla might seem hard to miss, only half the participants noticed it!

Findings: The participants’ schemas about what is likely to happen in a game of catch directed their attention so intently to some parts of the video that they failed to see a dramatic stimulus they weren’t expecting.

Question 19

How does schema influence memory?

Answer 19

We are most likely to remember stimuli that have captured our attention.
Information that fits a preexisting schema often enjoys an advantage in recall

Question 20

Cohen 1981 Study

Answer 20

Aim: Schemas influencing memory

Procedure: Students watched a video of a husband and wife having
dinner together. Half of the students were told that the wife was a librarian and the other half that she was a waitress. The students later took a quiz that assessed their memory of what they had witnessed. The researchers asked them, for example, whether the woman was drinking wine (librarian stereotype) or beer (waitress stereotype) and whether she had received a history book (librarian) or romance novel (waitress) as a gift .

Findings: Students who thought the woman was a librarian recalled librarian-consistent information more accurately than librarian-inconsistent information, whereas those who thought she was a waitress did precisely the opposite.

Question 21

How do schemas influence how we construe information?

Answer 21

The information that is most accessible in memory can influence how we construe new information.

Question 22

Higgins, Rhole & Jones 1977 Study

Answer 22

Aim: Schemas influencing construal

Procedures: First, participants viewed several trait words projected on a screen as part of a perception experiment. Half the participants were shown the words adventurous, self-confident, independent, and persistent among a set of ten traits. The other half was shown the words reckless, conceited, aloof, and stubborn. After, the participants moved on to the second study on reading comprehension, in which they read a short paragraph about Donald and rated him on several trait scales.

Findings: As the investigators expected, participants who had been exposed to the words adventurous, self-confident, independent, and
persistent formed more favorable impressions of Donald than those who were shown the less flattering words.

Implication: Thus, participants’ schemas about personality traits like adventurousness and recklessness influenced the inferences they made about Donald.

Question 23

Priming

Answer 23

The presentation of information designed to activate a concept and hence make it accessible. A prime is the stimulus presented to activate the concept in question.

Question 24

Subliminal stimuli

Answer 24

Below the threshold of conscious awareness stimuli can prime a schema sufficiently to influence subsequent information processing

Question 25

What are the ways schemas can be activated?

Answer 25

Recency- how recent the schema frequency of the activation of the schemas

Question 26

What is recency?

Answer 26

If a schema has been brought to mind recently, it tends to be more accessible and hence ready to use

Question 27

What is frequent activation?

Answer 27

If a person uses a particular schema frequently, it may become chronically accessible.

Question 28

What is the intuitive system?

Answer 28

Operates quickly and automatically, is based on associations, and performs many of its operations simultaneously

Question 29

What is the rational system?

Answer 29

Slower and more controlled, it is based on rule and deduction, and performs its operations one at a time.

Question 30

Heuristics

Answer 30

Mental shortcuts that provide serviceable answers to common problems of judgment

Question 31

Availability Heuristic

Answer 31

The process whereby judgments of frequency or probability are based on how readily pertinent instances come to mind

Question 32

Representativeness heuristic

Answer 32

The process whereby judgments of likelihood are based on assessments of similarity between individuals and groups prototypes or between cause and effect.

Question 33

What are the risks of the availability heuristic?

Answer 33

Risks involve assessments of the likelihood of different hazards. Since people will be worried about hazards they hear a lot about in the media and are not as worried about hazards that receive less attention, even if the latter is actually more dangerous.

Question 34

Fluency

Answer 34

The feeling of ease (or difficulty) associated with processing information

Question 35

How does fluency affect people?

Answer 35

Fluency influences the judgments people make. Influence how people process relevant information

Question 36

How can the representative heuristic be useful?

Answer 36

It can make accurate judgments about people and events depending on the extent that our prototype of the category is accurate and most members of the category resemble the prototype

Question 37

What is the problem with the representativeness heuristic?

Answer 37

If relied on exclusively, it can blind us to other potentially useful sources of information like base-rate information. It also affects people's assessments of causality. Since we think that big effects are thought to have big causes, small effects of having small causes, complicated effects to have complicated causes, and so on. But this is not always true since small causes create big effects too.

Question 38

Base-rate Information

Answer 38

Information about the relative frequency of events or members of different categories in a population

Question 39

Kahneman and Tversky 1973

Answer 39

Aim: Ignore or underutilize base-rate information when assessing whether someone belongs to a particular category Procedures: Participants were asked to consider the following description of Tom. One group of participants ranked nine academic disciplines in terms of the likelihood that Tom chose them as his field of specialization. A second group ranked the nine disciplines in terms of how similar they thought Tom was to the typical student in each discipline. A final group did not see the description of Tom; they merely estimated the percentage of all graduate students in the United States who were enrolled in each of the nine disciplines. Findings: The participants' responses were based entirely on how much the description of Tom resembled the typical student in each eld. By basing their responses exclusively on representativeness, the participants failed to consider the other useful source of information: base-rate frequency.

Question 40

What is the impact of the joint operation of availability and representative heuristics?

Answer 40

Can create an illusory correlation between two variables. A judgment of representativeness leads us to expect an association between the two entities, and this expectation, in turn, makes us more likely to remember instances in which they are paired.

Question 41

Illusory correlation

Answer 41

The belief that two variables are correlated when in fact they are not

Question 42

Regression effect

Answer 42

The statistical tendency, when two variables are imperfectly correlated, for extreme values of one of them to be associated with less extreme values of the other

Question 43

Regression fallacy

Answer 43

The failure to recognize the influence of the regression effect and to instead offer a causal theory for what is really a simple statistical regularity.

Question 44

Rosenthal and Jacobson Pygmalion in the Classroom

Answer 44

Aim: examined the effect of teachers' expectations on students' intellectual development and achievement Procedures: All students in a particular school took an IQ test. At the beginning of the school year, the researchers told the teachers that about 20 percent of their students were "late bloomers", they were expected to show substantial IQ growth over the year. Findings: The gains for young children were shockingly high--15 points for first-graders and 10 points for second-graders. These increases seemed to indicate that teachers' expectations for children created a powerful self-fulling prophecy: If the teacher believed the child was going to gain in intelligence, the teacher behaved toward the child in a way that such a gain was likely to occur

Question 45

Incremental theory of intelligence

Answer 45

The belief that intelligence is something people can improve by working at it. Malleable quality

Question 46

Entity theory of intelligence

Answer 46

The belief that intelligence is something people are born with and can't change. Fixed, predetermined thing