Heuristics Flashcards
What is Social Cognition?
a term that describes the way people encode, process, remember and use information in social contexts in order to make sense of other’s behaviour
What are naive scientists?
naive scientists are rational and logical in making social inferences. they look for consensus, consistency and distinctiveness information and combine these sources of information in a systematic way to arrive at an internal or external attribution.
What does the fundamental attribution error show?
it shows how we are typically inclined towards making dispositional attributions when thinking about other people’s behaviour.
For our own behaviour we tend to make external, situational attribution (actor-observer bias)
what is the actor-observer bias?
people sometimes tend to rely on simpler cues for making attributions like perceptual salience.
What are Cognitive misers?
we are reluctant to expend cognitive resources and we look for any opportunity to avoid engaging in the sort of effortful thought that the attribution model (Jones and Davis) (Kelley) proposed.
What are heuristics?
time-saving mental shortcuts that reduce complex judgements to simple rules of thumb. They are quick and easy, but can result in biased information processing.
What is representativeness heuristic?
the tendency to allocate a set of attributes to someone if they match the prototype of a given category. A quick and easy way of putting people into categories.
One limitation of using a heuristic?
base rate fallacy- tendency to ignore statistical information in favour of representativeness information
what problems can representativeness heuristics cause?
gender stereotyping and discrimination (e.g. occupations viewed as more female or male dominated, making it difficult for genders to progress into ‘opposite gender’ occupations)
What is the availability heuristic?
the tendency to judge the frequency or probability of an event in terms of how easy it is to think of examples of that event- related to concept of accessibility.
What is accessibility?
the extent to which a concept is readily brought to mind without explicit awareness being a necessary component
What did Schwarz et al. (1991) illustrate in regards to assertiveness?
participants who recalled 6 examples their own assertive behaviour subsequently rated themselves as MORE assertive than people who had recalled 12 examples of their own assertive behaviour. Same for unassertive behaviour.
What is the false consensus effect?
the tendency to exaggerate how common one’s own opinions are in the general population
