Social Psychology - Social Cognition

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering key concepts, definitions, and theories in Unit 2 Social Psychology (Social Cognition).

Social cognition

How we judge others in social situations by interpreting, analysing, remembering, and using social information.

Cognitive bias

A systematic error or bias in thinking that occurs when using mental shortcuts to simplify complex information.

Person perception

The mental processes used to form impressions, opinions, and judgements of other people.

Schema

Information about a person, group, or situation based on past experience or pre-existing knowledge, used as a mental shortcut to form expectations and make predictions about future events.

Physical cues (Physical appearance)

The physical characteristics of people, such as attractiveness, that influence our initial impressions and judgements of them.

Halo effect

A cognitive bias where one quality of a person makes us think that other aspects of them are also good, or where one negative impression makes us think other aspects are bad.

Physical cues (Body language)

Non-verbal communication using physical posture, movement, eye contact, gestures, and facial expressions rather than words to express a message.

Saliency detection

The process where personal characteristics that initially attract our attention—such as bright, novel, or negative features—are more noticeable and become the main focus of our judgements about others.

Social categorisation

A mental shortcut, usually unconscious, used to classify people into groups based on their shared social characteristics.

Attribution biases

Inferences and explanations that we make about the underlying causes of our own behaviour and other people's behaviour.

Personal (internal) attribution

Explaining the cause of behaviour as being due to internal factors belonging to the individual, such as personality, ability, mood, motivation, or effort.

Situational (external) attribution

Explaining the cause of behaviour as being due to factors external to the individual, such as the environment, luck, task setting, or another person.

Fundamental attribution error

The tendency to attribute other people's behaviour to personal (internal) factors while underestimating or ignoring situational (external) factors.

Actor-observer bias

The tendency to attribute our own behaviour to situational (external) factors whilst attributing the behaviour of others to personal (internal) factors.

Self-serving bias

The tendency to attribute our successes to internal factors and our failures to external factors in order to protect self-esteem.

Attitude

A person's long-lasting and consistent evaluation of other people, objects, events, or issues.

Tri-component model of attitudes

A model proposing that attitudes consist of three interrelated components: Affective (feelings), Behavioural (actions), and Cognitive (beliefs and thoughts).

Affective component

The emotional component of an attitude, involving how a person feels about people, objects, places, events, or ideas.

Behavioural component

The action component of an attitude, involving what a person does or does not do as an expression of their attitude.

Cognitive component

The mental component of an attitude, involving the beliefs, thoughts, or knowledge that a person holds about an object, person, group, event, or issue.

Cognitive dissonance

A state of psychological discomfort experienced when a person's actions or behaviours are inconsistent with their thoughts or beliefs.

Stereotype

A collection of fixed ideas or beliefs about members of a certain group in which their individual differences are ignored.

Stereotyping

The process of creating fixed over-generalised beliefs about a group and matching individual people to those beliefs.

Stigma

A negative label put on someone based on a distinguishing characteristic, such as mental illness, disability, gender, sexuality, race, religion, or culture.