social cognition and biases Flashcards
(21 cards)
What is social cognition?
How we process, store, and apply social information to understand and influence behaviour.
What is attribution?
The process of assigning a cause to one’s own or others’ behaviour.
What are schemas in social cognition?
Mental frameworks that help us organize information and guide perception.
What are prototypes?
Mental representations of the most typical features of a category.
What are the three principles of Heider’s naïve scientist model (1958)?
Coherence, motive searching, and desire for environmental control.
What did Heider & Simmel (1944) demonstrate?
People assign human motives to simple shapes, showing our tendency for causal attributions.
What are the three dimensions of Weiner’s Attributional Theory (1979)?
Locus (internal/external), Stability (stable/unstable), and Controllability.
What did Parker et al. (2018) find in their RCT on university athletes?
Attributional retraining improved academic control and performance.
What does Correspondent Inference Theory (Jones & Davis, 1965) explain?
How we infer traits from intentional behaviour, especially when it has clear consequences.
What are the three components of Kelley’s Covariation Model (1967)?
Consistency, Distinctiveness, and Consensus.
How do depressed individuals explain failure, according to Abramson et al. (1989)?
They use internal, stable, and global attributions.
What is the therapeutic implication of Ebeck et al. (1979)’s findings?
Attributional retraining in therapy helps challenge pessimistic thinking.
What is the False Consensus Effect (Ross et al., 1977)?
Overestimating how many people share our attitudes or behaviours.
What did Ross et al. (1977) find in the quizmaster study?
Observers rated the quizmaster as more intelligent, showing fundamental attribution error.
What is the Actor-Observer Bias (Jones & Nisbett, 1972)?
Tendency to explain others’ actions with internal causes, but our own with external ones.
What is the Self-Serving Bias (Olson & Ross, 1988)?
Success is attributed internally; failure is blamed on external factors.
How did Kingdon (1976) show self-serving bias in politicians?
They took credit for success but blamed external factors for failures.
What are heuristics (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974)?
Mental shortcuts used to reduce effort in decision-making.
What is the Availability Heuristic?
Judging likelihood based on how easily examples come to mind.
What is the Representative Heuristic?
Judging based on how much something resembles a prototype.
What is the Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic?
Judging based on an initial reference point, even if it’s arbitrary.
