Chapter 2: Social Cognition and Social Thinking

Vocabulary flashcards covering core definitions, historical figures, social thinker models, schema types, and heuristics from the social cognition lecture.

Social cognition

Cognitive processes and structures that influence - and are influenced by - social behaviour.

Kurt Lewin

A psychologist who treated behaviour as a function of perceived reality and argued that behaviour depends on how the person perceives the environment.

Cognitive consistency

An image of the social thinker where people seek coherence among their various cognitions.

Naive scientist

An image of the social thinker where people try to explain causes of behaviour rationally.

Cognitive miser

An image of the social thinker where people use mental shortcuts to save mental effort.

Motivated tactician

An image of the social thinker where people switch between different cognitive strategies depending on their goals.

Central traits

Traits that organise the overall impression and influence how other traits are interpreted.

Primacy effects

A bias in first impressions where early information dominates the final judgement.

Recency effects

A bias that occurs when later information becomes particularly salient and influences judgement.

Personal constructs

Idiosyncratic dimensions people develop for judging others.

Implicit personality theories

General principles or assumptions people hold about which types of characteristics go together.

Cognitive algebra

Mental models, such as summation, averaging, and weighted averaging, used to combine positive and negative information into an overall evaluation.

Schema

A knowledge structure that organises attributes and the relations among attributes about a concept or stimulus type.

Person schemas

Organised knowledge structures about particular individuals.

Role schemas

Organised knowledge structures about role occupants, such as doctors or lecturers.

Scripts

Schemas for events and specific sequences of action, such as a restaurant visit.

Self-schemas

Structured knowledge regarding one's own self-concept.

Prototype

A representation of a category that captures its typical or defining features.

Exemplars

Specific remembered examples used to represent a social category.

Bookkeeping

A process of schema change characterized by slow change in the face of accumulating evidence.

Conversion

A sudden and massive change in a schema due to a critical mass of evidence.

Subtyping

A process where schemas morph into a subcategory to accommodate incoming data.

Salience

The property of information that makes it stand out against its background.

Vividness

The property of information being striking and memorable.

Accessibility

The ease with which specific information or categories come to mind.

Social inference

The cognitive process of going beyond the information directly given to make judgements.

Heuristics

Quick mental shortcuts used to make judgements efficiently.

Representativeness heuristic

A shortcut where the likelihood of a stimulus belonging to a category is estimated by its superficial resemblance to a typical member.

Availability heuristic

A mental shortcut where the frequency or probability of an event is judged by how easily instances come to mind.