Flashcards in Week 3 Deck (99):
1
What is a thought?
The internal language and symbols we use.
2
Is a thought often conscious?
Yes.
3
What does cognition often refer to?
Mental process that occurs automatically.
4
What is social cognition?
Social cognition refers to cognitive processes and structures that affect and are affected by social context.
5
What is it assumed about social cognition?
It is assumed that people have a limited capacity to process information and are cognitive misers who take all sorts of cognitive shortcuts; or they are motivated tacticians who choose, on the basis of their goals, motives and needs, among an array of cognitive strategies.
6
What is the difference between social cognition and social thinking?
Our awareness.
7
What are social cognition and social thinking?
Both mental activities.
8
How long was the term cognition taboo?
Half a century.
9
When was there a fresh interest in cognition?
By the 1960s.
10
Has social psychology always been strongly cognitive?
Yes.
11
What lead to an enormous amount of research on attitude change?
World war 2.
12
What did the enormous amount of research after world war 2 produce theories on?
Strive cognitive consistency.
13
What is cognitive consistency?
A model of social cognition in which people try to reduce inconsistency among their cognitions because they find inconsistency unpleasant.
14
What is the naive scienticist model?
The naïve scienticist is a model of social cognition that characterizes people as using rational, scientific-like cause-effect analyses to understand their world.
15
Why did the naive scienticist model fail?
The late seventies this model failed because it became clear that even in ideal circumstances people are not scientists at all.
16
What is social neuroscience?
The is exploration of brain activity associated with social cognition and social psychological processes and phenomena.
17
Do individuals spend a lot of time thinking about other people?
Yes.
18
Who do individuals form impressions of?
o People they meet
o People that are described to them
19
Do people communicate their impression of other people?
Yes.
20
What do people use their impressions of other people to do?
People use impressions to determine how they will think, feel and act.
21
What is the overall impression that we form of other people dominated by?
Stereotypes, unfavourable information, first impressions and idiosyncratic personal constructs.
22
What does research on forming impressions suggest?
Research suggests that in forming impressions of other people we weight components and then average them in complex way; or certain components may influence the interpretation and meaning of all other components and dominate the resulting impression.
23
Who constructed the configural model?
Solomon Asch.
24
What is the configural model?
Model of impression formation, in which central traits play a disproportionate role in configuring the final impression.
25
What are central traits according to the configural model?
Traits that have a disporportionate influence on the configuration of final impressions.
26
What traits have more information in the configural model?
Central traits.
27
What are peripheral traits?
Traits have an insigficant influence of the configuration of final impressions, in Asch’s configural model of impression formation.
28
In forming first impressions, what do we latch onto?
Central traits which have a disproportionate influence over the final impression.
29
According to Ash's configural model, do central traits have a disprortionate influence over the final impression?
Yes.
30
Who found a primacy effect for forming impressions?
Solomon Asch.
31
What is a primacy affect for forming impressions?
the traits presented first disproportionately influenced the final impression, so that the person was evaluated more favourably when positive information was presented first than when negative information was presented first.
32
What is the recency affect for forming impressions?
A recency effect is an order of presentation effect in which later presented information has a disproportionate influence on social cognition.
33
What is positive and negative for forming impressions?
Research indicates that, in the absence of information to the contrary, people tend to assume the best of others and form a positive impression. Any negative information tends to attract our attention.
34
Who suggested that individuals can develop their own idiosyncractic ways of characterising people?
George Kelly
35
What are the two idiosyncratic ways people develop to characterise people?
personal construct and implicit personality theorys.
36
What are personal constructs for forming impressions?
idiosyncractic and personal ways of constructing other people.
37
What are implicit personality theories for forming impressions?
idiosyncratic and personal ways of chracterising other people and explaining their behaviour.
38
Does physical appearance count when forming impressions?
Yes.
39
Are stereotypes of people strongly influenced by stereotypes?
Yes.
40
What are stereotypes?
Widely shared and simplified evaluative image of a social group and its members.
41
What is social judgeability?
Social judgeability is pereception of whether it is socially acceptable to judge a specific target.
42
What does cognitive algebra focus on?
Cognitive algebra focuses on how people come up with the overall positive or negative impression.
43
What is impression formation?
Impression formation = the integration of sequential pieces of information about a person into a complete image.
44
What is cognitive approach?
Cognitive algebra = approach to the study of the impression formation that focuses on how people combine attributes that have valence into a positive or negative impression.
45
What is summation?
Summation is a method of forming positive or negative impressions by summing the valence of all the constituent person attributes.
46
What is averaging?
A method of forming positive or negative impressions by averaging the valence of all constituent attributes.
47
What is weighted averaging?
Method of forming positive or negative impressions by first weighting and then averaging the valence of all the constituent person attributes.
48
What are schemas?
Schemas are cognitive structures that represent knowledge about people, events, roles and the self and the general processing of information.
49
What can activate a schema?
Certain cues.
50
Once invoked what do schemas do?
They bias all aspects of information processing and inference in such a way that the schema remains unassiled.
51
What type of processing are schemas?
Top down processing.
52
Are there are many types of schemas?
Yes.
53
What are person schemas?
Person schemas are individualised
54
What are role schemas?
Role schemas are knowledge structures about role occupants.
55
What are scripts?
Schemas about events are generally called scropts.
56
What are content-free schemas?
Content-free schemas do not contain rich information about a specific category but rather a limited number of rules for processing information.
57
What are self schemas?
People schemas about themselves.
58
What are categories?
Categories are fuzzy sets of features organised around a prototype.
59
How are categories structured?
Hierachically structured in terms of inclusiveness in a way that less inclusive categories are subsets of broader, more inclusive categories.
60
What does the process of categorisation accentuate?
Perceive intra-category similarities and inter-category differences on dimensions that a person believes are correlated with the categorisation.
61
Can categories have a family resemblance?
Yes.
62
What is a prototype?
A cognitive representation of the typical/ideal defining features of a category.
63
What can a prototype represent?
Prototype can represent the average/typical category member.
64
What are exemplars?
Exemplars = are specific instances of a member of a category.
65
What are streotypes?
Stereotypes are widely shared generalization about members of a social group. Stereotypes are schemas of social groups.
66
Stereotypes are schemas of what?
Social groups?
67
What is the accentuation principle?
The accentuation principle is that categorisation accentuates perceived similarities within and differences between groups on dimensions that people believe are correlated with categorisation.
68
When is the accenutuation effect amplified?
The effect is amplified where the categorisation and/or dimension has subjective importance, relevance or value.
69
In processing information, we tend to rely on?
Schemas relating to subtypes, stereotypes, current moods, easily detected features, accessible categories and self relevant information.
70
When are people less dependent on schemas when forming impressions?
However, people are less dependent on schema when the cost of making a wrong inference is increased, when the cost of being indecisive is low and when people are aware that schematic processing may be inaccurate.
71
Can we acquire schemas second hand?
Yes.
72
Can we acquire schemas second-hand?
We can acquire schemas second-hand.
73
How do schemas change over time?
Schemas become more abstract, complex, organised, compact, resilient and accurate over time.
74
Are schemas hard to change?
Yes.
75
How can schemas be modified?
Modified by schema-inconsistent information, mainly through the formation of subtypes.
76
What are ways to change schemas?
Bookkeeping, conversion and subtyping.
77
What is bookkeeping?
Gradual schema change through the accumulation of bits of schema-inconsistent information.
78
What is conversion?
Sudden schema change as a consequence of gradual accumulation of schema inconsistent information.
79
What is subtyping?
Schema change as a consequence of schema-inconsistent information, causing the formation of subcategories.
80
What is social encoding?
Social encoding = the process whereby external social stimuli are represented in the mind of the individual.
81
What is the encoding of information heavily influenced by?
The salience of stimuli and by the cognitive accessibility of existing schemas.
82
What is salience?
Property of stimulus that makes it stand out in relation to other stimuli and attract attention.
83
What is vividness?
An intrinsic property of a stimulus on its own that makes it stand out and attract attention.
84
What is accessibility?
Ease of recall of categories or schemas.
85
What is priming?
Activation of accessible categories or schemas in memory that influence how we process new information.
86
How do we mainly remember people?
traits, behaviour and apperance.
87
What are two ways to process social information?
1. Automatically:
2. Deliberately:
88
How do we process social information automatically?
rely on general schemas or stereotypes in a top-down deductive fashion.
89
How do we process social information deliberately?
rely on specific instances in a bottom up inductive fashion.
90
What is the term for social influence?
Heuristics
91
What is heuristics?
Cognitive short cuts that provide adequately accurate inferences for most of us most of the time.
92
What is regression?
Tendency for initial observations of instances from a category to be more extreme than subsequent observations.
93
What is base rate information?
Pallid, factual, statistical information about an entire class of events.
94
What is illusory correlation?
Cognitive exaggeration of the degree of co-occurrence of two stimuli or the perception of a co-occurrence where none exists.
95
What is associative meaning?
Illusory correlation which items are seen as belonging together because they ought to, on the basis of prior expectations.
96
What is paired distinctiveness?
Illusory correlation which items are seen as belonging together because they share some usual features.
97
What are representativeness hiuerestic?
A cognitive shortcut in which instances are assigned to categories or types on the basis of overall similarity or resemblance to the category.
98
What is avaiability heuristic?
A cognitive shortcut in which the frequency or likelihood of an event is based on how quickly instances or associations come to mind.
99