Social Psych Chapter 5

social cognition

began in the 1970s focuses on thoughts an people about social relationships

cognitive miser

describes people’s reluctance to do extra thinking

stroop test

a standard measure of effortful control over responses requiring participants to identify the color of a word

stroop effect

in the stroop test, the finding that people have difficulty overriding the automatic tendency to read the word rather than name the ink color

five elements that distinguish automatic from deliberate processes

awareness, intention, control, effort, efficiency

knowledge structures

automatic thinking involves little effort because it relies on these, organized packets of information that are stored in memory

schema

knowledge structures that represent substantial information about a concept, its attributes, and its relationship to other concept

scripts

knowledge structures that define situations and guide behavior

priming

activating an idea in someone’s mind so that related ideas are more accessible

framing

how information is presented to others

gain-framed appeal

focuses on how doing something will make you healthier

loss-framed appeal

how not doing something will subtract from your health

counter regulation (what the hecj effect)

my diet is already ruined so what the heck, I might as well eat more

attributions

inferences people make about events in their lives

self-serving bias

the tendency to take credit for success but deny blame for failure

actor/observer bias

the tendency for actors to make external attributions and observers to make internal attributions

fundamental attribution error (correspondence bias)

people tend to overemphasize someone’s personality traits while ignoring situational factors when explaining their behavior

simulation heuristic

the tendency to judge the frequency or likelihood of an event by the case with which you imagine it or mentally simulate it (more easily imagined events are judged to be more likely than tother events

anchoring and adjustment

the tendency to judge the frequency or likelihood of an event by using a starting point (anchor) and making adjustments up or down

confirmation bias

the tendency to notice information that confirms one’s beliefs

illusory correlation

when people overestimate the link between variables that are related only slightly or not at all

one-shot illusory correlations

an illusory correlation that occurs after exposure to only one unusual behavior performed by only one member of an unfamiliar group

base rate fallacy

the tendency to ignore or underuse base rate information instead to be influenced by the distinctive feature of the case being judged

hot hand

the frequency for gamblers who get lucky to think they have “hot” hand and their luck will continue

gambler’s fallacy

the belief that a particular chance event is affected by previous events and that chance events will “even out” in the short run

false consensus effect

people tend to overestimate the number of people who share their opinions, attitudes, values, and beliefs

false uniqueness effect

people tend to underestimate the number of people who share their most prized characteristics and abilities

theory of perseverance

proposes that once the mind draws a conclusion it tends to stick with that conclusion unless there is overwhelming evidence to change it

statistical regression (Regression to the mean)

introduced by Sir Francis Galton, which refers to the statistical tendency for extreme scores or extreme behavior to return toward the average

illusion of control

the belief that people can control totally change situations

counterfactual thinking

involves imagining alternatives to past or present factual events or circumstances

first instinct fallacy

the false belief that it is better not to change one’s first answer on a test even if one starts to think a different answer is correct

upward counterfactuals

involve alternatives that are better than what actually happened

downward counterfactuals

are alternatives that are worse than actuality

regret

involves feeling sorry for misfortunes, limitations, losses, transgressions, shortcomings, or mistakes

debiasing

reducing errors and biases getting people to use deliberate processes rather than automatic processing

meta-cognition

reflecting on one’s own thought processes (thinking about thinking)