Social Psych Chapter 3: Social Cognition

automatic thinking

automatic, low effort thinking (mechanical) - unconscious, involuntary, and effortless

effortful thinking

thinking that requires cognitive effort, conscious attentional control, and absorbs cognitive capacity.

social cognition

the study of how people think about themselves and the social world- how we select, interpret and use social info to make judgements

schemas

mental structures that organize our knowledge about the social world

Why do schemas exist?

1. help process and organize information

2. aid in remembering information

3. fill in gaps in our knowledge

4. help interpret and evaluate new information

accessibility

the extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people's minds and are therefore likely to be used when we are making judgments about the social world

priming

the process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, or concept

belief perseverance

tendency for schemas to persist in the face of disconfirming evidence

self-fulfilling prophecy

people's tendency to behave in ways that confirm their own expectations or other people's expectations

1. chronically accessible due to past experience

2. related to current goal

3. temporarily accessible due to recent experience

why is a schema applied?

1. have an expectation about what another person is like, which

2. influences how they act toward that person, which

3. causes that person to behave consistently with people's original expectations, making the expectations come true

how does the self-fulfilling prophecy come true?

judgemental heuristics

mental shortcuts people use to make judgements quickly and efficiently

availability heuristic

ease with which things can be brought to mind is used to make a judgment

anchoring heuristic

the process of making decisions based on certain ideas or standards held by the decision maker, such as using a number as a reference point and then basing an answer off of it, even if it's completely wrong

representative heuristic

tendency to classify something by according to how similar it is to a typical case

base rate information

information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population

conjunction fallacy

when people think that two events are more likely to occur together than either individual event

controlled thinking

thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful

ironic processing

thought suppression can often lead to high levels of unwanted thoughts due to monitoring & detecting

counterfactual reasoning

mentally undoing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been

halo effect

the tendency to draw a general positive impression about an individual on the basis of a single characteristic

fork-tailed effect

the tendency to draw a general negative impression about an individual on the basis of a single characteristic

positivity bias

the tendency to focus heavily on a person's positive attributes when forming a perception

order effect

the order of presenting the treatments affects the dependent variable

primacy effect

First information is given more weight than later info

recency effect

Information coming later on has a stronger impact than earlier info

context effect

Understanding of new information will depend on the context in which is interpreted

central traits

traits that are highly associated with other characteristics. imply more about individuals than some others

1. Break through overconfidence barriers (we are not always right)

2. Become aware of biases and error

3. Teach basic statistics and methods

4. Consider the opposite point of view

how do we improve human thinking?