Ch 7 Social Cognition and attitudes

Affective forecasting

Predicting how one will feel in the future after some event or decision.

Attitude

A psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor.

Automatic

A behavior or process has one or more of the following features: unintentional, uncontrollable, occurring outside of conscious awareness, and cognitively efficient.

Availability heuristic

A heuristic in which the frequency or likelihood of an event is evaluated based on how easily instances of it come to mind.

Chameleon effect

The tendency for individuals to nonconsciously mimic the postures, mannerisms, facial expressions, and other behaviors of one’s interaction partners.

Directional goals

The motivation to reach a particular outcome or judgment.

Durability bias

A bias in affective forecasting in which one overestimates for how long one will feel an emotion (positive or negative) after some event.

Evaluative priming task

An implicit attitude task that assesses the extent to which an attitude object is associated with a positive or negative valence by measuring the time it takes a person to label an adjective as good or bad after being presented with an attitude object.

Explicit attitude

An attitude that is consciously held and can be reported on by the person holding the attitude.

Hot cognition

The mental processes that are influenced by desires and feelings.

Impact bias

A bias in affective forecasting in which one overestimates the strength or intensity of emotion one will experience after some event.

Implicit Association Test

An implicit attitude task that assesses a person’s automatic associations between concepts by measuring the response times in pairing the concepts.

Implicit attitude

An attitude that a person cannot verbally or overtly state.

Implicit measures of attitudes

Measures of attitudes in which researchers infer the participant’s attitude rather than having the participant explicitly report it.

Mood-congruent memory

The tendency to be better able to recall memories that have a mood similar to our current mood.

Motivated skepticism

A form of bias that can result from having a directional goal in which one is skeptical of evidence despite its strength because it goes against what one wants to believe.

Need for closure

The desire to come to a decision that will resolve ambiguity and conclude an issue.

Planning fallacy

A cognitive bias in which one underestimates how long it will take to complete a task.

Schema

A mental model or representation that organizes the important information about a thing, person, or event (also known as a script).

Social cognition

The study of how people think about the social world.

Stereotypes

Our general beliefs about the traits or behaviors shared by a group of people