PSYC2017 SOCIAL COGNITION

Social cognition

How people make sense of the social world, themselves, and situations.

Naive scientist model

The view that people gather evidence to test hypotheses about the social world.

Cognitive miser model

The tendency for people to use cognitive shortcuts and heuristics to save mental energy.

Intentionality in automaticity

Whether an act of will is necessary to set a process in motion.

Priming effect

The unintended influence of prior experience on subsequent judgment, thought, or behaviour.

Self-regulation

The human capacity to bring behaviour, thoughts, and emotions into line with desired outcomes.

Hyper-accessibility effect

The tendency for suppressing unwanted thoughts to make them occur more frequently.

Ironic Process Theory

Mental control achieved through an intentional operating process and an ironic monitoring process.

Strength model of self-regulation

The view that self-regulation relies on a limited energy resource resembling a muscle.

Ego depletion

A state of diminished self-regulatory capacity caused by prior acts of self-control.

Motivated tactician

A model of the social thinker who strategically selects cognitive strategies based on goals.

Directional goal

The motivation to reach a particular outcome or form a preferred judgment.

Accuracy goal

The motivation to form an objective, well-reasoned, and correct judgment.

Closure goal

The desire to arrive at a clear conclusion as quickly as possible.

Positive test strategy

Seeking out evidence that confirms an original hypothesis while ignoring contradictions.

Affect

A person's current emotional state and temporary moods.

Mood-congruent memory

Recalling stored memories that match one's current emotional state.

Mood-dependent memory

Enhanced memory retrieval when mood matches the mood present during encoding.

Feelings-as-information model

Using one's current affective state as a direct source of information for judgments.

Impact of happy moods on processing

Positive moods tend to increase reliance on heuristics and judgmental errors.

Difference between emotions (feelings) and mood

moods do not usually have an immediate or salient cause

How does affect influence memory?

mood-congruent and mood-dependent

Mood and the Correspondence Bias (Forgas, 1998)

being in a happy mood meant engaging more while a lessened mood meant more distraction and less retrievable information

Pennebaker work on suppression

suppression is an inhibitory practice that takes effort

Self-regulation

the human capacity to control responses for goal-directed action

mental control is dependent on...

cognitive capacity

hot cognition

processes that are driven by motives/goals

amount of effort

accuracy and closure goals depending on how much effort is placed into an action

allocation of effort

we put more effort into refuting what we want to refute and don't scrutinise what we want to believe

priming effect

the unintended influence of prior experience on judgment, thought, or behaviour

priming technique

the presentation of a stimulus that activates a concept in memory

what are the two main reasons for escalating probes when using supraliminal primes?

not wanting to look foolish and demand characteristics

supraliminal primes affect

people depending on the characteristics of the individual and those depending on social beliefs

why is the rebound effect considered ironiic?

it increases in the probability of what you don't want to do

the main way for affect to bias our evaluation according to the Feelings as Information theory is through

faulty attribution

non-rational scientist model

pure cognition is very 'expensive', scientific inquiry is shaped by bounded rationality, intuition, social paradigms, and institutional rule