SP - Chapter 02: Social Cognition

Social Cognition

It is cognition that relates to social activities and that helps us understand and predict the behavior of ourselves and others

Learning

A fundamental part of social cognition involves ________.

Learning

The relatively permanent change in knowledge that is acquired through experience.

Behaviorist

The study of learning is closely associated with the _______ school of psychology.

Conditioning

For behaviorists, the fundamental aspect of learning is the process of __________.

Conditioning

The ability to connect stimuli (things or events in the environment) with responses (behaviors or other actions).

• Operant conditioning

• Classical conditioning

Two types of conditioning

Instrumental learning

Operant conditioning is also known as…

Operant Learning

When applied to human behavior, operant conditioning is frequently called _______.

Respondent Learning

Classical conditioning is also known as…

Associational Learning

When applied to human behavior, classical conditioning is frequently called _______.

Operant Learning

The principle that experiences that are followed by positive emotions (reinforcements or rewards) are likely to be repeated, whereas experiences that are followed by negative emotions (punishments) are less likely to be repeated.

Associational Learning

It occurs when an object or event comes to be associated with a natural response, such as an automatic behavior or a positive or negative emotion.

Observational Learning

People learn by observing the behavior of others.

Bobo Doll Experiment

Children imitated the young woman in the film beating up a bobo doll.

Knowledge

The outcome of learning

Schemas

Knowledge is stored in the form of _______.

Schemas

These are knowledge representations that include information about a person, group, or situation.

Prefrontal Cortex

The part of the brain that lies in front of the motor areas of the cortex and that helps us remember the characteristics and actions of other people, plan complex social behaviors, and coordinate our behaviors with those of others.

Social and newest

The prefrontal cortex is the _______ and _______ part of the brain.

Accomodation

When existing schemas change on the basis of new information.

Assimilation

A process in which our existing knowledge influences new conflicting information to better fit with our existing knowledge, thus reducing the likelihood of schema change.

Confirmation Bias

The tendency for people to seek out and favor information that confirms their expectations and beliefs.

Reconstructive Memory Bias

We often remember things that match our current beliefs better than those that don’t and reshape those memories to better align with our current beliefs.

Self-fulfilling Prophecy

A process that occurs when our expectations about others lead us to behave toward those others in ways that make our expectations come true.

Energy Savers

Schemas function like _______, to help us keep track of things when information processing gets complicated.

Automatic Cognition

It refers to thinking that occurs out of our awareness, quickly, and without taking much effort

Controlled Cognition

When we deliberately size up and think about something, for instance, another person.

Priming

A technique in which information is temporarily brought into memory through exposure to situational events, which can then influence judgments entirely out of awareness.

Salience

We are more likely to attend to characteristics that we notice.

Base Rates

The likelihood that events occur across a large population.

Representativeness Heuristic

It occurs when we base our judgments on information that seems to represent, or match, what we expect will happen, while ignoring more informative base-rate information.

Cognitive Accessibility

It refers to the extent to which a schema is activated in memory and thus likely to be used in information processing.

Availability Heuristic

The tendency to make judgments of the frequency of an event, or the likelihood that an event will occur, on the basis of the ease with which the event can be retrieved from memory.

Processing Fluency

The ease with which we can process information in our environments.

False Consensus Bias

The tendency to overestimate the extent to which other people hold similar views to our own.

Projection Bias

The tendency to assume that others share our cognitive and affective states.

Counterfactual Thinking

The tendency to think about events according to what might have been.

Anchoring and Adjustment

The accessibility of the initial information frequently prevents this adjustment from occurring–leading us to weigh initial information too heavily and thereby insufficiently move our judgment away from it.

Overconfidence Bias

A tendency to be overconfident in our own skills, abilities, and judgments.

Optimistic Bias

A tendency to believe that positive outcomes are more likely to happen than negative ones, particularly in relation to ourselves versus others.

Depressive Realism

Social judgments of people with clinical depression about the future are less positively skewed and often more accurate than those who do not have depression.

Planning Fallacy

A tendency to overestimate the amount that we can accomplish over a particular time frame.

Bias Blind Spot

The tendency to believe that our own judgments are less susceptible to the influence of bias than those of others.

Own-race Bias

People are more accurate at identifying people belonging to their own racial or ethnic group, which may be more salient to them, than they were at identifying people from other groups.

Reconstructive Memory Bias

It suggests that the memory may shift over time to fit the individual’s current beliefs about the crime.

Affective states

Social cognition is strongly influenced by our _______ states.

Affect Heuristic

A tendency to rely on automatically occurring affective responses to stimuli to guide our judgments of them.

Attribute Substitution

When somebody makes a judgment about a target attribute that is very complex to calculate, that person tends to substitute these calculations for an easier heuristic attribute, for example, the likeability of a candidate.

Mood-dependent Memory

A tendency to better remember information when our current mood matches the mood we were in when we encoded that information.

Mood Congruence Effects

These occur when we are more able to retrieve memories that match our current mood.

Misattribution of Arousal

It occurs when people incorrectly label the source of the arousal that they are experiencing.

Framing Effects

When people’s judgments about different options are affected by whether they are framed as resulting in gains or losses.

Self-regulation

The process of setting goals and using our cognitive and affective capacities to reach those goals.

Cognitive Reappraisal

Altering an emotional state by reinterpreting the meaning of the triggering situation or stimulus.

The power of positive thinking

The idea that thinking positively helps people meet their goals and keeps them healthy, happy, and able to effectively cope with the negative events that they experience.

Optimistic Explanatory Style

A way of explaining current outcomes affecting the self in a way that leads to an expectation of positive future outcomes.

Self-efficacy

The belief in our ability to carry out actions that produce desired outcomes.

Affective Forecasting

Describes our attempts to predict how future events will make us feel.