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

According to the authors of your text, when people use automatic thinking, they tend to size up new situations __________.

What are schemas and why are they often adaptive?

Several studies conducted by Nisbett and his colleagues suggest that people who grow up in East Asian cultures think more __________ than people who grow up in Western cultures.

In an experiment by Harold Kelley (1950), some college students were told that their guest lecturer was a warm person, while others were told that he was a cold person. Those students who were told that he was a warm person evaluated him more positively than those who had been told he was cold. This demonstrates that schemas can be subject to __________.

Based on the study by Nisbett and his colleagues on statistical reasoning across four disciplines, which person would you count on to solve a statistical reasoning problem accurately?

Based on information from your text about cultural differences in thinking, complete the analogy: Western is to __________ as Eastern is to __________.

How are self-fulfilling prophecies and schemas related?

When people have an expectation about what another person is like, it may influence how they act toward that person; this further results in that person's behaving consistently with the other's original expectations. This is known as __________.

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?

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

In the research presented in the text, people were asked to think about how assertive they were and provide a varying number of examples. The researchers were interested in seeing if __________ would impact how they rated their own assertiveness.

Allison is a very sweet, intelligent, amicable person. However, Joe hears from her ex-boyfriend that she is hard to get along with and very snobby. According to research on the self-fulfilling prophecy, Joe acts in a(n) __________.

In general, when people first encounter a novel situation, they tend to __________.

Several studies conducted by Nisbett and his colleagues involved showing participants two similar pictures and asking them to find the differences between them. Nisbett and colleagues found that East Asian participants were more likely to focus on __________, while Western participants focused more on __________.

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 you meet your new roommate for the first time, he is wearing glasses, listening to classical music, and reading a copy of The New York Review of Books. You think, "Well, maybe rooming with an intellectual this year will be good for me." You instantly categorized your roommate as an intellectual on the basis of your __________.

According to the authors of your text, a good metaphor for human thinking is to consider people to be __________.

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

You were supposed to make an important presentation at work but you overslept, the bus was late, and you missed the meeting. If you are able to generate many ways in which to "undo" this terrible outcome, you will experience __________ emotional reaction.

Recall the words of Dr. Robert Marion, who was the first physician to correctly diagnose a nine-year-old girl with a rare disease: "Doctors are just like everyone else. We go to the movies, watch TV, read newspapers and novels. If we happen to see a patient who has symptoms of a rare disease that was featured on the previous night's 'Movie of the Week,' we're more likely to consider that condition when making a diagnosis." In essence, Dr. Marion is describing the __________ heuristic.