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

Winston is looking for a job, and he notices a man in the coffee shop wearing a tie and white shirt, working on his computer, while also flipping through the ads in the paper. Based on your text's discussion of how current goals can affect accessibility, how is Winston most likely to interpret the man's behavior?

Most initial impressions of a novel situation are made using

Recall Medvec and her colleagues' (1995) study of the emotions experienced by Olympic athletes who won bronze and silver medals. If silver medalists outperformed bronze medalists, why were they less happy?

When people tend to focus on the properties of objects without consideration of the context, this is described as a(n) ___________ thinking style.

The news often points out girls' relatively poor academic performance on standardized tests compared to boys' performance on those tests. Based on the research presented in this chapter, these gender differences may be due in part to

Use of the representativeness heuristic can get people into trouble when they use biased samples to decide just what the typical case is or what a reasonable starting point is. Compare how scientists and nonscientists go about generating samples to make judgments and inferences.

Researchers asked some participants to think of six times they had behaved assertively and asked other participants to think of twelve times they had behaved assertively, and then asked all participants to rate how assertive they thought they really were. Participants who tried to generate six examples of assertive behaviors rated themselves as more assertive than did participants who tried to generate twelve examples. The point that this study illustrates is that

________ are the cognitive structures we use to organize our knowledge of the social world.

Adele is from France, where rabbits are eaten regularly. She can tell you the most tender part of the rabbit, how long to cook one, and how big a rabbit you would need to feed five people. Marsha is from the United States, where rabbits are pets, and bring colored eggs to children in the spring. She hasn't a clue about how to cook one, even if she wanted to. This example best illustrates

According to research conducted by Nisbett and his colleagues (1987), how might you improve your social reasoning? Take a(n) ________ course.

Imagine it is the end of a long day and you are hot and ready to head home. If the research on the connection between physical sensations and the judgments they affect is correct which of the following about social influence is most likely to occur?

It is ________ to miss a bus by five minutes than to miss it by an hour because ________.

In a study described in the textbook, participants memorized either the word reckless or the word adventurous before reading an ambiguous passage about Donald in which he was described as engaging in a number of recreational activities (e.g., driving in a demolition derby, white-water rafting) in which he had risked injury and even death. This method was used to study the concept of

Researchers had participants memorize a number of words before reading an ambiguous passage about a character named Donald. The words participants read influenced how they interpreted Donald's somewhat ambiguous behavior. The take-home message of this study is that thoughts have to be ________ before they affect our impressions of the social world.

What is the take-home message from the research regarding the effects of generating different numbers of examples of behavior?

If both Chinese and Americans are comparing two pieces of art, the Americans are most likely to notice

Applying the lessons learned from Rosenthal and Jacobson, if you wanted your child to succeed, what would be the best nickname for him?

If you grew up in a household with a brother who was morbidly shy, you might have a different belief about a man you meet who avoids dating women than a person who grew up in a household with a brother who was gay. This difference in interpretation is due to differences in your and the other person's

To use controlled thinking, we need all of the following except

Recall that Harold Kelley (1950) told some college students that their guest lecturer was a warm person, and others that he was a cold person. The visitor then lectured for twenty minutes, and behaved in a very arrogant way during the lecture. When students evaluated the lecturer,