Social Psychology – Social Thinking & Cognition

Vocabulary flashcards summarizing key terms and definitions from the lecture on social cognition, heuristics, biases, priming, attribution theories, and emotion perception.

Social Cognition

The process of interpreting, analyzing, remembering, and using information about the social world.

Schema

A mental template or organized knowledge structure that guides automatic processing of related information.

Heuristic

A simple mental shortcut or rule of thumb that allows quick judgments with minimal cognitive effort.

Controlled Processing

Deliberate, effortful, and conscious thinking that weighs pros and cons before acting.

Automatic Processing

Fast, effortless, and unconscious thinking that relies on well-practiced routines and heuristics.

Felicific Calculus

Bentham’s concept that people rationally calculate potential pleasure minus pain to guide decisions.

Priming

Activation of certain ideas or memories that then influence the interpretation of subsequent information.

Subliminal Prime

A stimulus presented below conscious awareness that nonetheless activates related thoughts or behaviors.

Confirmation Bias

Tendency to seek, notice, and remember information that confirms pre-existing beliefs while disregarding disconfirming evidence.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

A belief or expectation that elicits behavior making the originally false conception come true.

Belief Perseverance

Persistence of initial beliefs even after evidence supporting them has been discredited.

Representative Heuristic

Judging the likelihood that something belongs to a category based on how much it resembles the typical case.

Availability Heuristic

Estimating probability based on how easily examples come to mind.

Attitude Heuristic

Using stored good-or-bad evaluations to classify objects quickly without detailed analysis.

False Consensus Effect

Overestimating how much other people share our opinions and behaviors.

Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic

Starting with an initial value (anchor) and making insufficient adjustments away from it when forming a judgment.

Negativity Bias

Greater sensitivity to and weighting of negative information compared with positive information.

Optimistic Bias

Predisposition to expect favorable outcomes; often accompanied by unwarranted overconfidence.

Overconfidence Phenomenon

Having more confidence in the accuracy of one’s judgments than is objectively warranted.

Cognitive Conservatism

Preference for maintaining existing beliefs, allowing the world to appear stable and coherent.

Counterfactual Thinking

Mentally simulating alternatives to past events and imagining "what might have been."

Upward Counterfactual

Comparison of current outcomes to better possible outcomes, often producing regret or dissatisfaction.

Downward Counterfactual

Comparison of current outcomes to worse possible outcomes, often producing relief or satisfaction.

Social Attribution

The process of inferring the causes of people’s behavior.

Correspondent Inference Theory

Jones’s idea that observers infer stable traits from behavior, especially when actions seem chosen, uncommon, and low in social desirability.

Kelley’s Covariation Model

Attribution theory stating that people consider consistency, distinctiveness, and consensus information when explaining behavior.

Consistency (Attribution)

Whether the person behaves the same way across time and situations.

Distinctiveness (Attribution)

Whether the person behaves differently toward different targets or in different situations.

Consensus (Attribution)

Whether other people behave similarly in the same situation.

Fundamental Attribution Error

Pervasive tendency to overemphasize dispositional causes and underestimate situational influences when explaining others’ behavior.

Correspondence Bias

Synonym for the fundamental attribution error emphasizing trait inferences from behavior.

Actor-Observer Effect

Attributing others’ actions to traits but one’s own actions to situational factors.

Augmenting Principle

Tendency to assign greater weight to a cause when behavior occurs despite inhibitory factors.

Discounting Principle

Reducing the importance of a potential cause when other plausible causes are present.

Two-Factor Theory of Emotion

Schachter & Singer’s view that emotion arises from physiological arousal interpreted through cognitive labeling.

Facial-Feedback Hypothesis

Idea that changes in facial expressions can trigger corresponding changes in subjective emotional experience.

Body Posture Effect

Phenomenon where upright or slumped posture influences feelings such as pride or helplessness.

Selective Attention

Focusing on evidence that supports existing beliefs while ignoring contradictory information.

Selective Memory

Enhanced recall of events that confirm existing expectations.

Double Entendre

A phrase with two meanings, one often risqué, used to prime alternative interpretations in social cognition.

Cultural Differences in Attribution

Finding that individualistic cultures show stronger fundamental attribution error than collectivistic cultures.

Schematically Driven Memory

Tendency to better encode and recall information that fits existing schemas.

Heuristic Processing Conditions

Situations—limited time, overload, low importance, scarce information, strong emotions—that encourage shortcut use.

Self-Serving Bias

Tendency to attribute successes to internal factors and failures to external factors.

Social Learning

Acquiring behaviors or knowledge through observing others and the surrounding culture.

Schema Priming (Alien example)

Demonstration that shared cultural schemas guide perception—e.g., most people draw similarly "typical" aliens.