2- Social Cognition

Social cognition

cognition that relates to social activities and that helps us understand and predict the behavior of ourselves and others

Learning

A fundamental part of social cognition involves ____, the relatively permanent change in knowledge that is acquired through experience

Behaviorist

The study of learning is closely associated with the _____ school of psychology

John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner

psychologists of behaviorism

Conditioning

For behaviorists, the fundamental aspect of learning is the process of ____,the ability to connect stimuli (things or events in the environment) with responses (behaviors or other actions)

Operant conditioning

also known as instrumental conditioning

Classical conditioning

also known as respondent conditioning

Operant learning

the principle that experiences that are followed by positive emotions (reinforcements or rewards) are likely to be repeated, whereas experiences that are followed by negative emotions (punishments) are less likely to be repeated.

Operant learning

probably the most important form of human learning

Associational learning

occurswhen an object or event comes to be associated with a natural response, such as an automatic behavior or a positive or negative emotion

Observational learning

people learn by observing the behavior of others

Schemas

The outcome of learning is knowledge, and this knowledge is stored in the form of ____, which are knowledge representations that include information about a person, group, or situation.

Prefrontal cortex

In the brain, our schemas reside primarily in the ____, the part of the brain that lies in front of the motor areas of the cortex and that helps us remember the characteristics and actions of other people, plan complex social behaviors, and coordinate our behaviors with those of others

Prefrontal cortex

social part of the brain

Prefrontal cortex

newest part of the brain, evolutionarily speaking, and has enlarged as the social relationships among humans have become more frequent, important, and complex.

Accomodation

When existing schemas change on the basis of new information

Assimilation

a process in which our existing knowledge influences new conflicting information to better fit with our existing knowledge, thus reducing the likelihood of schema change.

Confirmation bias

the tendency for people to seek out and favor information that confirms their expectations and beliefs

Reconstructive memory bias

remember things that match our current beliefs better than those that don’t and reshape those memories to better align with our current beliefs

Self-fulfilling prophecy

process that occurs when our expectations about others lead us to behave toward those others in ways that make our expectations come true.

Pygmalion effect

describes how positive expectations lead to better performance

Golem effect

negative expectations lead to worse performance

Cognitive dissonance

the mental discomfort people feel when they hold two contradictory beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors, or when their actions contradict their beliefs

Automatic cognition

refers tothinking that occurs out of our awareness, quickly, and without taking much effort

Controlled cognition

When we deliberately size up and think about something, for instance, another person

Priming

a technique in which information is temporarily brought into memory through exposure to situational events, which can then influence judgments entirely out of awareness.

salience

We are more likely to judge people on the basis of characteristics of ___, which attract our attention when we see someone with them.

Representativeness heuristic

which occurswhen we base our judgments on information that seems to represent, or match, what we expect will happen, while ignoring more informative base-rate information

Cognitive accessibility

refers to the extent to which a schema is activated in memory and thus likely to be used in information processing

Availability heuristic

The tendency to make judgments of the frequency of an event, or the likelihood that an event will occur, on the basis of the ease with which the event can be retrieved from memory

Processing fluency

refers tothe ease with which we can process information in our environments.

False consensus bias

the tendency to overestimate the extent to which other people hold similar views to our own

Projection bias

is the tendency to assume that others share our cognitive and affective states

Conterfactual thinking

The tendency to think about events according to what might have been

Anchoring and adjustment

the accessibility of the initial information frequently prevents this adjustment from occurring—leading us to weight initial information too heavily and thereby insufficiently move our judgment away from it.

Overconfidence bias

a tendency to be overconfident in our own skills, abilities, and judgments

Optimistic bias

a tendency to believe that positive outcomes are more likely to happen than negative ones, particularly in relation to ourselves versus others.

Depressive realism

social judgments about the future are less positively skewed and often more accurate than those who do not have depression

Planning fallacy

tendency to overestimate the amount that we can accomplish over a particular time frame

Bias blind spot

tendency to believe that our own judgments are less susceptible to the influence of bias than those of others

Affect heuristic

describesa tendency to rely on automatically occurring affective responses to stimuli to guide our judgments of them

Mood dependent memory

describesa tendency to better remember information when our current mood matches the mood we were in when we encoded that information

Mood congruence effects

when we are more able to retrieve memories that match our current mood

Misattribution of arousal

occurs when people incorrectly label the source of the arousal that they are experiencing.

Framing effects

when people’s judgments about different options are affected by whether they are framed as resulting in gains or losses

Self-regulation

The process of setting goals and using our cognitive and affective capacities to reach those goals

Optimistic explanatory style

a way of explaining current outcomes affecting the self in a way that leads to an expectation of positive future outcomes,

Self-efficacy

the belief in our ability to carry out actions that produce desired outcomes.

Affective forecasting

describesour attempts to predict how future events will make us feel.