Social Cognition and Person Perception (PSY 312)

Vocabulary flashcards generated from PSY 312 lecture notes covering topics on social cognition, schemas, heuristics, cognitive biases, attribution models, and principles of relational justice.

Social cognition

The manner in which we receive, interpret, analyze, remember, and use information about the social world.

Schemas

Mental frameworks containing information relevant to specific situations or events, which, once formed, help us interpret these situations and what is happening in them.

Person schemas

Mental frameworks suggesting that certain traits and behaviours go together and individuals having them represent a certain type.

Role schemas

Mental frameworks containing information about how persons playing specific roles generally act.

Event schemas (Scripts)

Mental frameworks of and expectations in specific situations and events.

Heuristics

Rules or principles that allow us to make social judgments more quickly and with reduced efforts.

Representativeness heuristic

A strategy to make social judgments based on the extent to which a current person's or event's characteristics resemble the characteristics of a stored schema of a similar event or person.

Availability heuristic

A strategy to make social judgments based on specific kinds of information that can easily be brought into mind.

False consensus effect

The tendency to assume that others behave or think as we do to a greater extent than is actually true.

Priming

A process where some events or stimuli increase the availability of specific types of information in memory or consciousness.

Rational thinking

Thinking in situations involving analytical thought, such as solving mathematical problems.

Intuitive thinking

Thinking in situations involving social judgments.

Planning fallacy

The tendency to make optimistic predictions concerning how long a task will take.

Automatic vigilance

A strong tendency to pay attention to undesirable or negative information, such as readily noticing a frown rather than twenty smiles.

Counterfactual thinking

The tendency to evaluate events by thinking about alternatives to them, or 'what might have been or should have been'.

Magical thinking

The belief that things that resemble one another share fundamental properties, relying on assumptions that do not hold up to rational inquiry.

Law of Contagion

A principle of magical thinking stating that when two objects touch, they pass properties to one another.

Law of Similarity

A principle of magical thinking stating that things that resemble one another share fundamental properties.

Attribution

The process of identifying the causes of others' behaviour and their stable traits and dispositions.

Correspondent Inference Theory

Jones and Davis's theory proposing that behaviour indicates stable traits when it is freely chosen, non-common in its effects, and low in social desirability, whereas forced, common, or highly socially desirable behaviour reflects situational effects.

Theory of Causal Attribution

Kelley's theory that attributes others' behaviors to internal causes (traits, motives, intentions) or external causes (aspects of the social or physical world) based on consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness.

Consensus

The extent to which an individual's response is similar to one shown by others.

Consistency

The extent to which an individual responds to a given situation in the same way as on different occasions.

Distinctiveness

The extent to which an individual responds in the same way as to different situations.

Discounting principle

The tendency to attach less importance to one potential cause of a behaviour when other potential causes are also present.

Augmenting principle

The tendency to attach greater importance to one potential cause of a behaviour if it occurs despite the presence of other inhibitory factors.

Fundamental attribution error

The tendency to overestimate the impact of dispositional causes on others' behaviour.

Actor-observer effect

The tendency to attribute our own behaviour mainly to situational causes, but others' behaviour to internal (dispositional) causes.

Self-serving bias

The tendency to attribute our own positive outcomes to internal causes (own traits or characteristics) but negative outcomes to external causes (chance, task difficulty).

Contribution Rule and Equity

A rule stating that a relationship is considered fair when all individuals involved receive outcomes proportional to their respective contributions.

Need Rule and Norm of Social Responsibility

A rule stating that outcomes should be distributed in accordance with the relative amount of individual need.

Equality Rule

A rule stating that outcomes should be distributed equally among the participants in a relationship, irrespective of individual contributions or needs.