Chapter 7 - Perceiving and understanding the social world Flashcards Preview

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Flashcards in Chapter 7 - Perceiving and understanding the social world Deck (31)
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1
Q

Social cognition

A

The processing of social knowledge – perceiving, thinking, judging and explaining objects, events, relationships and issues in the social world.

2
Q

Attitudes

A

A combination of our beliefs (cognitions) and feelings, and thought to be an influence on our behaviour.

3
Q

Attributions

A

The explanations we arrive at to account for the causes of our own behaviour (and its outcomes) and other people’s behaviour (and its outcomes).

4
Q

Experimental social psychology

A

A perspective that frames its questions about social phenomena so that they can be studied using experimental methods.

5
Q

Schema

A

A mental structure containing knowledge relating to a particular kind of object.

6
Q

Schematic processing

A

An efficient, but sometimes constraining, way of processing information based on pre-existing schemas.

7
Q

Person schema

A

A mental structure that contains knowledge about types of people at the level of personality traits.

8
Q

Role schema

A

A mental structure that contains knowledge about social roles and social groups.

9
Q

Event schema/script

A

A mental structure that contains knowledge about social situations and activities.

10
Q

Stereotype

A

A mental representation of a person as more like a ‘typical’ member of a social category than the person actually is. Seen as an inevitable consequence of the basic cognitive process of overgeneralization.

11
Q

Cognitive miser model

A

A view of the social perceiver as someone who uses as little processing capacity as possible and thus is limited to seeing things in terms of assumptions and expectations.

12
Q

Motivated tactician

A

A model of the social perceiver as having multiple cognitive strategies to choose from, based on goals, motives and needs.

13
Q

Automaticity

A

The idea of schematic processing as an automatic process, happening without any awareness or conscious control on our part.

14
Q

Internal/dispositional causes

A

Factors that motivate behaviour and that are located ‘within’ the actor (e.g. personality, mood, ability).

15
Q

External/situational causes

A

Factors that motivate behaviour and that are located in the actor’s environment.

16
Q

Locus of causality

A

The location of the cause of behaviour (internal or external), or the location of the cause of outcomes of behaviour like success or failure.

17
Q

Covariation model

A

This model proposes that we make sense of current behaviour by considering information, from past and present, relating to its consistency, distinctiveness and consensus.

18
Q

Vignette

A

A short description
of a person, event or behaviour, used in an experimental setting, which permits control over the amount and nature of information provided to participants.

19
Q

Fundamental attribution error

A

The tendency, when explaining the behaviour of other people, to favour internal rather than external attributions.

20
Q

Actor/observer effect

A

The tendency to favour external attributions for our own behaviour, while favouring internal explanations for others’ behaviour.

21
Q

Perceptual salience

A

One aspect of the perceptual field is particularly significant for the perceiver, and thus attracts more attention than other aspects.

22
Q

Self-serving bias

A

An information processing bias which serves the perceiver’s interests in some way, for example the tendency to attribute one’s success to internal causes and failure to external causes.

23
Q

Content analysis

A

A procedure used to represent qualitative data (i.e. language and its meaning) in quantitative (numerical) form.

24
Q

Cognitive bias

A

An information processing bias that is thought to be caused by the way the cognitive system works.

25
Q

Motivational bias

A

An information processing bias that is thought to be caused by the perceiver’s goals or needs.

26
Q

Availability heuristic

A

Refers to the practice of making judgements on the basis of examples or instances that are accessible to the cognitive system/ decision-maker. Examples may come to mind more easily if they are more memorable or easier to construct.

27
Q

Representativeness heuristic

A

Refers to a tendency to make categorisations according to whether an item is representative of the category to which it might belong.

28
Q

Calibration

A

The extent to which a person knows about the accuracy of their own judgements.

29
Q

Optimistic bias

A

Occurs when people are more optimistic than objective statistics warrant.

30
Q

Demand characteristics

A

Features of a psychological method that lead people to respond in particular, constrained ways.

31
Q

Social representations

A

Shared cognitive and linguistic structures that we use to make sense of the social world.