Social beliefs and judgements Flashcards
(44 cards)
priming
Activating particular associations in memory
- our memory system is a web of associations
Example of priming in everyday life
Watching a scary movie alone at home, can prime our thinking, by activating our emotions and without realizing, it causes us to interpret furnace noises as a possible intruder
Categorical thinking
Categorical shows the process of how we perceive a person in terms of cues that indicate their social group.
–> the way we categorise within our social world has implications for stereotyping, the production of prejudice + discriminatory behaviour.
Cruel or kind ? experiment
Mayron Rothbath + Pamela Birrell had university students adress the facial expressions of a man. Those who were told he was GESTAPO leader judged his expression as CRUEL meanwhile those which were told he saved thousand of jewish lives said his facial expressions were warm + kind
Belief perseverance
Persistence of one’s initial conceptions, as when the BASIS for one’s belief is discredited but an EXPLANATION of way the belief might be true survives
Misinformation effect
incorporating ‘misinformation’ into one’s memory of event, after witnessing an event and receiving misleading information about it
(wrong information about an event)
reconstructing our past attitudes
- not totally unaware of how we used to feel, just that when memories are hazy, current feelings guide our recall
before didn’t care about American new president but since attitude changed now yes
Reconstructing out past behaviour
Memory construction enables us to revise our own histories
Hindsight bias involves around memory revision
Our memories reconstruct other sorts of past behaviour as well!!
sometimes our present view is improved - sometimes say our past was more unlike the present than it actually was
Intuitive judgement
Controlled processing
Automatic processing
Controlled processing
mental activities that require conscious, deliberate and reflective thinking
Automatic processing
mental activities happening with little OR no conscious awareness
Social schema theory
schema is a construct social psychologist use to illustrate HOW we store information about the world
4 main types of schema
- self schemas - information we hold about ourselves in terms of our traits, values
- person schemas - personality traits so we can categorize people when we first meet them
- role schemas - information about behavior + norms
- event schemas - information about appropriate behavior for events (going to football match)
Limits of intuitions
intuitive thinking can make us ‘smarter’ or process information faster
think unconscious may not be as smart as previously believed
Social encoding
The process of getting social information into memory.
- It comprises initially attending to and perceiving social information, understanding it and making connections with information already in memory
Processing of social world involves
- Pre-attentive analysis - unconscious + automatic taking in of information
- Focusing of attention - identifying + categorizing information
- comprehension - giving meaning to information
- elaborative reasoning - linking information together
Overconfidence phenomenon
The tendency to be more confident than correct - to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs
More confident than expected
Medial temporal lobe
where high confidence - real events are processed
Frontoparietal regions
where high confidence - fake events are processed
Confirmation Bias
The tendency to search for information that confirms, rather than disconfirms, one’s preconceptions (preconceived idea)
Reducing overconfidence Bias
- Prompt feedback - receiving daily feedback
- to reduce ‘planning fallacy’ overconfidence - break down task into subcomponents
- Disconfirming information - get people to think one good reason why their judgement might be wrong
Heuristics (mental shortcuts)
A thinking strategy + problem solving method that enables QUICK + EASY judgments and search procedures (shortcut)
Representativeness Heuristic
Tendency to presume, sometimes despite contrary odds, that someone or something belongs to a particular group if resembling a typical member
Base rate
Factual information about a person
