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

You and your friend are debating the greatness of the human mind. She claims that relying on schemas and automatic processes is ultimately detrimental, but you contend that such processes have their benefits. List and explain three benefits to relying on schemas and automatic processes, as well as three drawbacks to using these processes.

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 __________.

When there is no other information available, it is __________ reasonable to rely on the representativeness heuristic to make a quick judgment.

Julie sees an Asian couple at the New York City Zoo. According to __________, she may assume that they are foreigners touring the area, but according to __________, she should assume that, given the low tourism rate in her town, they are actually local residents.

The availability heuristic is associated with which of the following characteristics of schemas?

Why does the availability heuristic sometimes lead to incorrect inferences?

Based on what you learned in this chapter, do schemas become stronger or weaker over time? Why?

Explain some of the differences in social cognition between Eastern Asian and Western cultures.

Tom and Julius are both in line for a movie, but it sells out before either of them can get tickets. Tom is the last person in line, but Julius is directly behind the person who got the last ticket. Based on the idea of counterfactual reasoning, why will Julius be more upset than Tom?

Explain the relation between schemas and the self-fulfilling prophecy. Provide a concrete example.

When most Americans walk into a fast food restaurant chain, they know they should walk up to the counter to order, pay, and pick up their food, rather than sit down and wait to be served. This knowledge of how to act in such a situation is called __________.

People tend to have __________ emotional reactions the __________ it is to "mentally undo" an outcome.

When using the availability heuristic, people make quick judgments by __________.

When Jana was chiding herself for losing her favorite necklace and reciting a list of all the things she could have done to prevent the loss, her grandmother said, "Now, Jana. Don't cry over spilled milk." In essence, Jana's grandmother was advising her to __________.

Based on information from the authors of your text, what is one possible explanation as to why girls and boys perform about the same in math in elementary school while a gender gap appears around puberty?

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 __________.

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

Nao was raised in Japan and is walking through Times Square in New York City. Based on results from Nisbett's studies on cultural differences in thinking styles, which of the following would Nao be most likely to notice relative to people raised in the U.S.?

What is automatic thinking, and what are the two major types of automatic thinking that people use?

Isabella goes to a fortune teller, who tells her, "You are the type of person who is very outgoing and sociable, yet at times you enjoy being alone." Isabella thinks this captures her personality amazingly well, because she finds many instances in her memories of such behaviors. Isabella has just fallen prey to the __________.