Social Cognition: How We Think about the Social World

Flashcards covering essential vocabulary and concepts related to social cognition.

Social Cognition

The study of how people think about the social world and draw inferences about others.

Heuristics

Mental shortcuts or rules of thumb that simplify decision making.

Representative Heuristic

A cognitive bias used to make judgments about a person or situation based on how similar they are to existing mental categories.

Availability Heuristic

A cognitive bias that influences the estimation of likelihood based on how easily examples come to mind.

Status Quo Heuristic

The preference for the current state of affairs, often leading to resistance to change.

Schemas

Mental frameworks that help organize and interpret social information.

Cognitive Overload

A state where the demands on the cognitive system exceed its processing capacity.

Mood Dependent Memory

The phenomenon where recall is better when a person's mood at retrieval matches their mood during encoding.

Mood Congruence Effects

The tendency to recall information that is consistent with one's mood.

Planning Fallacy

The tendency to underestimate the time needed to complete a task due to overly optimistic predictions.