Chapter 4: Social Cognition: inking About People and Situations

Covariation Principle

 the idea that behavior should be attributed to potential causes that occur along with the observed behavior.

Consensus

A type of covariation information: whether most people would behave the same way or differently in a given situation.

Distinctiveness

A type of covariation information: whether a behavior is unique to a particular situation or occurs in many or all situations

Discounting Principle

the idea that people will assign reduced weight to a particular cause of behavior if other plausible causes might have produced the same behavior.

Counterfactual Thinking

 thoughts of what might have, could have, or should have happened "if only" something had occurred differently.

Emotional Amplification

 An increase in an emotional reaction to an event that is proportional to how easy it is to imagine the event not happening

Self-Serving Attributional Bias

the tendency to attribute failure and other bad events to external circumstances and to attribute success and other good events to oneself.

Fundamental Attribution Error

the failure to recognize the importance of situational influences on behavior, along with the corresponding tendency to overemphasize the importance of dispositions on behavior.

Actor-Observer Difference

A difference in attribution based on who is making the causal assessment: the actor (who is relatively inclined to make situational attributions) or the observer (who is relatively inclined to make dispositional attributions).

Framing Effect

Influence on judgment resulting from the way information is presented, including the words used to describe the information or the order in which it is presented.

Primacy Effect

 A type of order effect whereby the information presented first in a body of evidence has a disproportionate influence on judgment

Recency Effect

A type of order effect whereby the information presented last in a body of evidence has a disproportionate influence on judgment.

Construal Level Theory

A theory about the relationship between temporal distance (and other kinds of distance) and abstract or concrete thinking: Psychologically distant actions and events are thought about in abstract terms; actions and events that are close at hand are thought about in concrete terms.

Confirmation Bias

 the tendency to test a proposition by searching for evidence in support of it.

Bottom-Up Processing

 "Data-driven" mental processing, in which an individual forms conclusions based on stimuli encountered in the environment.

Top-Down Processing

"Theory-driven" mental processing, in which an individual filters and interprets new information in light of preexisting knowledge and expectations

Priming

the presentation of information designed to activate a concept and hence make it accessible. A prime is the stimulus presented to activate the concept in question

Subliminal

 Below the threshold of conscious awareness

Heuristics

Intuitive mental operations, performed quickly and automatically, that provide efficient answers to common problems of judgment.

Representative Heuristic

the process whereby judgments of likelihood are based on assessments of similarity between individuals and group prototypes or between cause and effect.

Availability Heuristic

the process whereby judgments of frequency or probability are based on how readily pertinent instances come to mind.

Fluency

 the feeling of ease (or difficulty) associated with processing information

Base-Rate Information

Information about the relative frequency of events or members of different categories in a population.

Illusory Correlation

the belief that two variables are correlated when in fact they are not

Regression Effect

 a statistical tendency, when two variables are imperfectly correlated, for extreme values of one of them to be associated with less extreme values of the other

Regression Fallacy

the failure to recognize the influence of the regression effect and to instead offer a causal theory for what is really a simple statistical regularity