Chapter 1 - Social Cognition Flashcards

Flashcards on Social Cognition

Social cognition

How we think about ourselves and the social world; how we select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make decisions and judgements.

Two Types of Social Cognition

Two basic types of social cognition: automatic vs. controlled, also known as System 1 and System 2 thinking.

When Automatic Processing Occurs

Information overload, limited cognitive resources, depleted processing capacity, extensive experience with a task or type of information.

How Automatic Processing Works

Stretching our capacity to process information by providing shortcuts (quick, simple rules) to deal with large amounts of information and actually working and being accurate most of the time.

Neural bases of automatic processing

Amygdala, hypothalamus, hippocampus—limbic system, paleomammalian or “old mammalian“ brain.

Neural bases of controlled processing

Frontal lobe/ prefrontal cortex (at the front of the brain, up to 10% of its volume, neomammalian brain, neocortex).

Automaticity

Efficient, effortless, unintentional, uncontrollable, saves cognitive resources behavior or thinking.

Schemas

Mental frameworks centering around a specific theme that help us organize related to it social information.

Impact of Schemas on social cognition processes

Attention, encoding, retrieval.

Impact of Schemas on social cognition processes

Attention, encoding, retrieval.

Teachers' positive expectations

Teachers' positive expectations about students result in extra attention, more challenging tasks, better feedback, more opportunities to respond, etc..

Automatic goal pursuit

Pursuing goals that have been primed.

Heuristics

Mental shortcuts, simple rules of making complex decisions or drawing inferences in a rapid, efficient, and seemingly effortless manner.

Representativeness heuristic

Strategy based on the extent to which current stimuli or events resemble other stimuli or categories; similar to stereotypes!

Availability heuristic

Strategy based on how easily specific kinds of information can be brought to mind.

Anchoring & adjustment heuristic

Strategy involving the tendency to use a number, value or personal experience as a starting point, to which we then make adjustments, Even when the adjustments are often insufficient.

Analytic thinking style

Focusing on properties of objects, less consideration of the surrounding context, more common in Western cultures.

Holistic thinking style

Focusing on the overall context, ways in which objects relate to one another, common in East Asian cultures.

Bias

Mistake, error in cognitive processing and/or social perception.

Fundamental attribution bias

Underestimating the situational impact, overestimating the extent to which one’s behavior reflects their traits, attitudes, etc. (= dispositions; dispositional attribution).

Self-serving bias

Taking credit for positive events, outcomes, blaming outside factors for negative results.

Negativity bias

Greater sensitivity to negative than to positive information.

Optimistic bias

Expectation for things to turn out well overall; Belief that one is more likely than others to experience positive events, and less likely to experience negative ones.

Change blindness

Perceptual phenomenon, inability to spot a visual stimulus that is introduced or changed, especially when we do not expect the change to happen.

Thought suppression

Efforts to prevent certain thoughtsfrom entering our consciousness.

Hot cognition

Mental processes that are influenced by our desires, motivations, and feelings.

Mood Congruence

Current mood affects our first impressions of people, reactions to new stimuli

Controlled social cognition

High-effort thinking: conscious, intentional, voluntary, effortful, costly in terms of resources, most people can only think in such a way about one thing at a time.

Counterfactual thinking

Mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been (often when we experience negative events or “close calls“).