Chapter 3: Social Cognition

These flashcards cover key concepts in social cognition, including theories, effects, heuristics, and cognitive processes studied in the lecture.

Social Cognition

The study of how people process social information, including thoughts about oneself and others.

Weapons Identification Task

A research method that assesses the association between race and weapon recognition.

Stereotypes

Oversimplified and widely held ideas about a particular group of people, often leading to biased behaviors.

Automatic Thinking

Nonconscious, unintentional, and uncontrollable thought processes, often occurring rapidly.

Controlled Thinking

Conscious, intentional, and effortful thought processes that require deliberation.

Schemas

Mental structures that help organize knowledge about the social world and guide behavior.

Priming

A technique in psychology used to stimulate thoughts or feelings related to certain concepts.

Perseverance Effect

The phenomenon where people's beliefs about themselves persist even in the face of contradictory evidence.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

When expectations about a person cause that person to act in ways that confirm the expectations.

Judgment Heuristics

Mental shortcuts that simplify decision making and judgments about people.

Availability Heuristic

Judging the likelihood of an event based on how easily an example can be recalled.

Representative Heuristic

Classifying something based on how closely it resembles a typical case or scenario.

Anchoring and Adjustment

A cognitive bias where individuals rely too heavily on the first piece of information encountered when making decisions.

Thought Suppression

The process of deliberately trying to avoid thinking about something.

Counterfactual Thinking

The mental process of considering what might have happened if circumstances were different.