Social Cognition Final Exam Review

Flashcards covering key concepts from the Social Cognition final exam, including heuristics, biases, language, memory, and social perception.

Illusory Correlation

Overestimating rare co-occurrences, often due to media over-representation.

Social hypothesis testing

The process of testing beliefs about social targets by seeking information, often showing confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias

Preferentially seeking or recalling hypothesis-consistent information, potentially due to motivated reasoning to maintain self-esteem or environmental limitations.

Self-fulfilling Prophecy

The perceiver forms an expectation, acts based on it, and the target behaves consistently, confirming the initial expectation.

Prejudice, Stereotype, Discrimination

Affective (dislike), cognitive (beliefs), and behavioral (unequal treatment) aspect

First-person shooter task example of Implicit Bias

Faster 'shoot' decisions for unarmed Black targets

Shifting Standards Model

Where subjective evaluations have the potential to mask biases.

Racial disparity interpretations

Individual (black people commit more crimes) and systemic (the over policing of black neighborhoods).

Confirmation bias

maintained by cognitive, motivational, and environmental factors.

Self-produced data

Avoid repeating negative experiences; limited attention to disconfirming evidence; protect self-esteem; biased information availability.

Illusory correlations

Remembering the one time a ritual worked, forgetting failures, Men/leadership roles, and women/passive tasks.

Shifting Standards Model

Subjective scales use within-category standards (e.g., good for a woman), while objective scales use common metrics.

Zero-sum behaviors vs. Non-zero sum behaviors

Competitions where one's gain is another's loss vs. collaborative outcomes

Judgment Heuristics

Mental shortcuts that simplify complex evaluations by focusing on limited information, especially under time pressure or high cognitive load.

Availability Heuristic

Judging frequency/probability by how easily examples come to mind.

Representativeness Heuristic

Categorizing based on similarity to prototypes while ignoring base rates.

COVID-19: example of Availability Heuristic

Constant media coverage of deaths made risks feel more frequent (availability), despite statistical probabilities.

Language

A system of symbols (words) and rules (grammar) for meaningful information exchange.

Lexicon

Personal vocabulary storing word meanings; reflects social awareness.

Collective Representations

Socially shared knowledge that shapes group understanding and transcends individuals.

Grice's Maxims

Give enough information, stay on topic, be clear.

Communicability

The ease with which information spreads through networks.

Group Polarization

Discussion amplifies initial tendencies.

Wisdom of Crowds

Collective Judgment average out errors, but fail when Groupthink dominates.

ADJ (trait inference), IAV (interpretive action), DAV (descriptive action), SV (state verb) examples of linguistic abstraction

Kind; helped; handled a pencil; moved their arm.

Linguistic Intergroup Bias (LIB)

Media uses more abstract verbs for in-group positives vs. concrete verbs for out-group.

Fluency

The subjective ease or difficulty with which information is processed.

Metacognitive Biases

Illusions of fluency, mistaking the ease of reading for mastery.

Mindset

beliefs about learning (fixed vs. growth).

Perceptual fluency; conceptual fluency; retrieval fluency; processing fluency

Ease of processing sensory input; familiarity with content; the speed of accessing memories; overall cognitive ease.

Encoding

Transforming sensory input into mental representations that can be stored in memory.

Applicable vs. Accessible knowledge

Information relevant to the current situation vs. information that can be easily retrieved from memory.

Priming

Recent exposure to a stimulus influences responses to subsequent stimuli.

Judgements of learning (JOL)

Predictions about future recall

Desirable Difficulties

Challenging learning methods that improve long-term retention.

Extent of Processing

The deeper you process information, the better you encode.

Memory

Memory involves encoding, storage, and retrieving information, organized in associative networks.

Retrieval Cue

A stimulus triggering memory.

Spreading Activation

Activation of related concepts.

Semantic Priming

Exposure to a word speeds processing of related words.

Explicit vs. Implicit Attitudes

Conscious beliefs vs. automatic associations.

Implicit Association Task (IAT)

Measures automatic attitudes via associative networks.

Self-Reference Effect

Linking material to oneself enhances recall.

Social Cognition

The study of how people process, store, and apply information about others and social situations.

Construal

Personal interpretation of reality shaped by personal motives and context.

Naïve Realism

Belief that one's perceptions reflect objective reality.

Black Box

The mind is an unobservable system; behaviorist reaction; uses surveys, reaction time tasks, fMRI, and priming tasks.

Cognitive Miser; Motivated Tactician; Social Identity Perspective

Makes quick judgments using heuristics; adjusts efforts; aligns with group norms.

Basic Themes of Cognitive Processing

Limited processing capacity; top-down vs. bottom-up processing; automatic vs. controlled processing.

Attention

Focusing on specific stimuli; influenced by stimuli salience.

Affective Forecasting

Predicts emotions, but can overestimate.