Social Cognition Flashcards
(26 cards)
Attribution
process of assigning cause to our own and others behaviour
Primacy effect
earlier information has more influence
Recency effect
Later information has more impact (when distracted or not fully engaged )
Personal construct
we have personal ways of characterising people that are resistant to change
Stereotypes
Widely shared assumptions about personalities/behaviour based on group membership. Schema about a social group
Categories
- Categorise in order to apply schmeatic knowledge
- Prototypes
- Exemplars
- Accentuation principle
Salience
Stimulus outstanding in relation to others
Priming
Activation of accessible categories/schemas
Implicit personality theory
- personal way of characterising people and explaining their behaviour
- general expectations that we build after learning something about central traits (e.g. a happy person is a friendly person)
Physical appearance
first imformation gathered, very influential
attractive vs unattractive
Social judgeability
Perception whether or not it is socially acceptable to judge a specific target has an influence
-if acceptable : judgements are more polarised
Schema
- Templates for the interpretation of stimuli and planning of action
- Cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept/ type of stimulus including its attributes and the relations among these attributes-that fills in the gaps (built upon experiences and knowledge )
- Stereotype
- Person schema
- role schema (about role occupant)
- Content-free schema
Script
event schema
Categories
- Categorise in order to apply schmeatic knowledge
- Prototypes
- fuzzy sets (features organised around a prototype
Affect-infusion model
= describes effects of mood on social cognition (social judgements reflect current moods)
= better recall current-mood-congruent information
- 4 ways of processing information
1) Direct access: schemas/judgements stored in memory
2) Motivated processing: judgement based on specific motivation to achieve a goal
3) Heuristic processing: reliance on short-cuts
4) Substantive processing: carefully construct judgement from variety of informational sources
Heuristic
= cognitive shortcuts that provide adequately accurate inferences most of the time. Help navigating overwhelming amount of social information in our environment.
Representativeness heuristic
= instances are assigned to categories or stereotypes based on overall similarity/resemblance
- Disregards base-rate information
Social inference
= how we sample and combine information to form impressions and make judgements
- First stage: gathering data and sampling info
o Rely too much on schemas (clinical judgement)
- Overly influenced by extreme examples/ small samples
- Top-down deductive: automatically rely on schemas/stereotypes
- Bottom-up inductive: rely on specific instances
Covariation judgements
= how strongly are two things related?
- Fall short of normative information because influenced by prior assumptions
- Illusory correlation: cognitive exaggeration of degree of co-occurrence of two events/stimuli thus expected co-occurrence where none exists
1) Associative meaning: items seen as belonging together because they ought to based on prior expectations
2) Paired distinctiveness: items thought to go together because they share an unusual feature
Naive Psychologist theory
= describes people as using rational, scientific-like cause-effect analysis to understand their world
People have a pervasive need for causal explanation (own behaviour motivated so look for cause in others)
Look for stable & enduring properties of people/ world around us to construct theories in order to predict and control
Distinguish between two factors
o Internal (dispositional) attribution: assigning cause to personal factors
o External (situational) attributions: assigning cause to environmental factors
Theory of correspondent inference
= “people like to make correspondent inferences (dispositional attributions) because it makes behaviour predictable and thus gives us sense control over the world”
When do we conclude whether someone’s behaviour corresponds to his/her dispositions?
5 sources of information that make correspondent inference likely
1) Act freely chosen (no external threats)
2) Act produced non-common effect (unexpected choice)
Outcome bias- false belief that outcome was intended by actor
3) Act is low in social desirability (counter normative)
4) Act hedonically relevant (behaviour impacts actor)
5) Behaviour seems to directly benefit/harm us thus high in personalism
Correspondence bias
= people have an inflated tendency to see behaviour as reflecting (corresponding to) stable underlying personality attributes
Three possible explanations
o Focus of attention: behaviour attracts more attention than background
o Differential forgetting: tend to forget situational causes
o Linguistic facilitation: easier to describe disposition than situation
Fundamental attribution error
= attributing another’s behaviour more to internal then external causes
Over-/underestimate behaviour and see what we want to see
Operate on auto pilot and make have expectations
Actor-observer effect
= tendency to attribute own behaviour externally and other’s internally
More dispositional attributions for socially desirable behaviour
Explanation: point of view (can’t see myself doing it) and informational differences (know more about my own background)
