Social Psych Ch 3&4 Test

Question 1

Social Cognition

Answer 1

How people think about themselves and the social world – specifically, how they select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgements and decisions.
It compromises automatic and controlled thinking processes.

Question 2

Automatic Thinking

Answer 2

Thinking that is generally unconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless.
Helps us understand new situations by relating them to our prior experiences

Question 3

Schema

Answer 3

Mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social world.
- Influence the information we notice, think about, and remember.

Question 4

The function of schemas?

Answer 4

Helps us organize, and make sense of our world and to fill in the gaps in our knowledge.
Helps us have continuity and to relate new experiences to our past schemas.
Helps us know what to do in ambiguous or confusing situations.
- Harold Kelly’s classic study (1950)

Question 5

Schemas can be accessible for which 3 reasons?

Answer 5

1. They can be chronically accessible due to past experience.
2. They can be temporarily accessible because they are related to a current goal.
3. They can be temporarily accessible as a result of priming, whereby a recent experience increases the likelihood that a particular schema will be accessed.

Question 6

Accessibility

Answer 6

the extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people’s minds and are therefore likely to be used when making judgments about the social world.

Question 7

Can we make schemas true?

Answer 7

People can inadvertently make their schemas come true by the way they treat others, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It is an expectation or belief that can influence your behaviors, thus causing the belief to come true.
- Rosenthal & Jacobson’s (1968) classic experiment

Question 8

Embodied Cognition

Answer 8

Another form of automatic thinking is embodied cognition, whereby bodily sensations activate mental structures such as schemas.

Question 9

Judgemental heuristics

Answer 9

in order to make judgements and decisions quickly and efficiently.
Although they do not always lead to accurate conclusions, heuristics are, for the most part, quite useful.

Question 10

Availability Heuristic

Answer 10

is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person’s mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method, or decision.
For example, plane crashes can make people afraid of flying. However, the likelihood of dying in a car accident is far higher than dying as a passenger on an airplane.

Question 11

Representative Heursitic

Answer 11

a mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case
An example of a representativeness heuristic is thinking that because someone is wearing a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase, that they must be a lawyer, because they look like the stereotype of a lawyer.

Question 12

Base rate information

Answer 12

Information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population.
- When faced with base rate information and contradictory representativeness information, people will rely more on the representativeness heuristic.

Question 13

Analytic thinking style

Answer 13

They focus on the properties of objects/people without considering the surrounding context.

Question 14

Holistic thinking style

Answer 14

They focus on the whole picture, i.e., the person/object and the surrounding context.

Question 15

Controlled Thinking

Answer 15

Thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful.
- Provides checks and balances for automatic thinking.

Question 16

Counterfactual Thinking

Answer 16

• Mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been.
  - Usually conscious and effortful, but not always voluntary and intentional.
  People are more likely to engage in counterfactual thinking when they can easily imagine having avoided a negative event.
  - The easier to imagine a tragedy having been avoided, the more distressed people feel.

Question 17

How can counterfactual thinking be useful?

Answer 17

• Focuses people’s attention on ways that they can cope better in the future.
  - Motivates them to take steps to prevent similar outcomes from occurring in the future.

Question 18

Overconfidence Barrier

Answer 18

the barrier that results when people have too much confidence in the accuracy of their judgements.

Question 19

Social Perception

Answer 19

the study of how we form impressions of other people and make inferences about them.
Eg. First day of classes - professor’s impression (friendliness, competence…)
An important source of information about other people is their nonverbal communication.

Question 20

Non-verbal Communication

Answer 20

How people communicate, intentionally or unintentionally, without words.

Question 21

Non-verbal Cues

Answer 21

Include facial expression, tones of voice, gestures, body position and movement, and the use of touch, and eye gaze.

Question 22

Mirror Neurons

Answer 22

these neurons respond when we perform an action when we see someone else perform the same action.

Question 23

Encode

Answer 23

to express or emit nonverbal communication, such as smiling or patting someone on the back.

Question 24

Decode

Answer 24

to interpret the meaning of the nonverbal communication others express.
Eg. Deciding that a pat on the back is an expression of condescension and not kindness.

Question 25

Affect Blends

Answer 25

This is where one part of a person’s face registers one emotion while another part registers a different emotion.

Question 26

Display Rules

Answer 26

are culturally determined rules about which nonverbal behaviours are appropriate to display.
Display rules also differ depending on gender, age, and other rules.
Eg., It may be more acceptable for men to display anger than it is for women. Women – fear and sadness

Question 27

Individualistic Cultures

Answer 27

The more individualistic (cultures where individuals are important), a culture, the more likely that the expression of emotions is encouraged.

Question 28

Collectivist Cultures

Answer 28

In collectivist cultures (cultures where groups are important), the expression of strong negative emotions is discouraged because it can disrupt group harmony.

Question 29

Emblems

Answer 29

These are nonverbal gestures that have well-understood definitions within a given culture.
Usually have direct verbal translations, such as the “okay” sign.
Are not universal, each culture has devised its emblems.

Question 30

implicit personality theory

Answer 30

is a type of schema people use to group various kinds of personality traits.
E.g., Someone who is kind must also be generous.
Research shows that people tend to attribute less positive characteristics to individuals described as having low self-esteem.

Question 31

Attribution Theory

Answer 31

A description of how people explain the causes of their own and other people’s behaviour.

Question 32

Naive Psychology

Answer 32

People practice a form of untrained psychology (Naive psychology) as they use cause and effect analyses to understand their world and other people’s behaviour.
- Explaining the cause of others’ behaviour allows us to understand their motivation.
- Knowing why a person acted a certain way allows us to predict how they will act in the future.
- When we make causal attributions, we make a distinction between internal and external causes of behaviour.

Question 33

Internal Attribution

Answer 33

an inference that a person’s behaviour is due to something about him or her, such as their attitudes, character, and behaviour.

Question 34

External Attribution

Answer 34

an inference that a person’s behaviour is because of something about the situation he or she is in.
The assumption is that most people would respond the same way in that situation.

Question 35

Correspondent Inference Theory

Answer 35

How people form inferences about other people’s stable personality characteristics from observing their behaviours.

Question 36

The Covariation Model: Internal vs. External Attributions

Answer 36

is an attribution theory in which people make causal inferences to explain why other people and ourselves behave in a certain way. It is concerned with both social perception and self-perception.

We make an internal or external attribution by noting the pattern between the presence (or absence) of possible causal factors and whether or not the behaviour occurs.
According to this model, we evaluate three types of information to form an attribution:
- Consensus information
- Distinctiveness information
- Consistency information

Question 37

Consensus information

Answer 37

concerns the extent to which other people behave the same way as the actor does towards the same stimulus. ( Low: Internal; High: External)

Question 38

Distinctiveness
information

Answer 38

concerns the extent to which one particular actor behaves in the same way to different stimuli. (Low: Internal; High: External)

Question 39

Perpetual Salience

Answer 39

the information that is the focus of people’s attention.
People tend to overestimate the causal role of the information they notice i.e., people, and underestimate the influence of the situation.

Question 39

Consistency information

Answer 39

concerns the extent to which the behaviour between one actor and one stimulus is the same across time and circumstances. (Low: External; High: Internal)

Question 40

Fundamental Attribution Error

Answer 40

The tendency to overestimate the extent to which a person’s behaviour is due to internal dispositional factors (personality or characteristic traits), and to underestimate the role of external, situational factors (environmental and situational factors).

Question 41

Culture and Fundamental Attribution Error

Answer 41

Collectivist cultures - situational attributions
Individualist cultures - dispositional explanations

Question 42

When we make attributions, we go through a two-step process:

Answer 42

First, we make an internal attribution, assuming the person’s behaviour is caused by something about that person.
Second, we attempt to adjust this attribution by considering the situation the person was in. (The second step may be skipped due to lack of time or effort.) - Thus resulting in mainly internal attributions.

Question 43

The Actor/Observer Difference

Answer 43

Actor-observer bias is the tendency to attribute the behavior of others to internal causes, while attributing our own behavior to external causes.
E.g, While walking down the street you trip and fall, blaming the pavement for being too slippery, an external cause. However, if you saw a stranger trip and fall, you would blame the situation on their internal factors, inattentiveness, and clumsiness.

Question 44

Self-Serving Attributions

Answer 44

A tendency to take credit for one’s own successes (internal attributions) and,
A tendency to blame others or the situation for one’s own failures (external attributions).
Can cause a person to overestimate their contribution to a shared task.

Question 45

Defensive Attributions

Answer 45

Another way to deal with threats to self-esteem is to develop defensive attributions; explanations for behaviour that help us avoid feelings of vulnerability and mortality.

Question 46

Belief in A Just World

Answer 46

The assumption that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get.
- Bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people.
(Thalassemia - result of parents’ sin?)
- Allows us to be optimistic about the future, BUT also creates a tendency to engage in victim blaming.
E.g., A victim who is sexually assaulted gets blamed for the situation, (Getting told they deserve it due to their actions).

Question 47

Self-serving bias seems to be strongest in Western cultures.

Question 48

Bias Blindspot

Answer 48

people’s tendency to underestimate the extent to which their own decision-making processes are biased.