Exam 3: Social Cognition: How We Think About the Social World

Fidan wrecked his dad's car. When his dad got home from work, Fidan met him at the door with a cold beer and his favorite magazine. The smell from his dad's favorite meal was wafting through the house, and his dad's favorite CD was playing. Fidan is trying to use ________ to get his father to think of him as a good, responsible son before he tells him about the car.

The study by Shariff and Norenzayan (2007) presented in your text showed that under some conditions, participants would be more likely to leave more money for a stranger. What is the larger contribution to understanding social cognition that this study makes?

The fact that students "instantly" know the difference between a classroom and a party is an example of a(n)

Your roommate is a case study in faulty and biased social thinking. You've just read Chapter 3, and you notice his inappropriate use of schemas and judgmental heuristics. How might you combat these troublesome tendencies?

Zuzanna had a hard time remembering the names of streets when she traveled because they were in a different language. In addition, the buildings did not look like what she was used to, so she got lost several times. These problems emphasize the role of schemas in

If accurate judgments are our goal, we should use base rate information instead of the representativeness heuristic when

When people use information about the relative frequency of members of different categories in the population to make judgments (e.g., percentage of students who are psychology majors), they are using

Assume that the winning lottery ticket was purchased at the convenience store just around the corner from your house. According to research on counterfactual thinking, you would probably feel worse than if the winning ticket had been purchased all the way across the state, because

According to the authors of your text, what is the primary reason that people often rely on a variety of mental shortcuts? We're

If the research on priming and metaphors is correct, what should your organization do if it wants to raise money for its service project?

Based on the study by Shariff and Norenzayan (2007) presented in your text, if you pass by several churches, then a block or so later a homeless person asks you for change, how are you likely to behave?

What effect does use of automatic versus controlled thinking have on the quality of our reasoning? Overall, how good are people as social thinkers?

We are most likely to rely on schemas when the situation we confront is

Alice goes to see a rerun of Jaws (a movie about a vicious shark) a few days before she takes off to Florida on spring break. On break, she finds that she is now too nervous to spend much time actually in the water, since she is convinced that anything she sees in the water is a shark. Her heightened sensitivity is due to

Consider the results from a study by Miyamoto and colleagues in which participants viewed either photos of U.S. city scenes or Japanese city scenes, then were asked to detect differences between two similar pictures. Based on their findings, if an American was touring in Tokyo, Japan, which of the following aspects of a picture would she be most likely to pick up on?

Recent research suggests that participants who are cognitively distracted are more likely to fall prey to the self-fulfilling prophecy than are participants who are not distracted. This suggests that self-fulfilling prophecies are

Counterfactual reasoning is like controlled thinking in that it is ________, but it can be like automatic thinking in that it may be ________.

How are self-fulfilling prophecies and schemas related?

Self-fulfilling prophecies can best be described as

Define each of the following mental shortcuts and explain why each may be inaccurate: (1) the availability heuristic; (2) the representativeness heuristic.