Deck 4: Social Cognition: Making Sense of Others

Question 1

What is the conceptual definition of social cognition?

Answer 1

the process by which people think and make sense about other people, themselves, and social situations

Question 2

What is the operational definition of social cognition?

Answer 2

apply cognitive psychology's methods and theories to social psychology
- examines cognitive structure and process, applied to perceptions of people

Question 3

What does the term "cognitive miser" refer to?

Answer 3

people conserve mental resources and use cognitive shortcuts when trying to make sense of other people

Question 4

What does the term "motivated tacticians" refer to?

Question 5

What is the person positivity bias?

Question 6

When people are accurate in their judgments of people in certain contexts but not others, they are said to have what kind of accuracy?

Question 7

What is the difference between normative and descriptive models of decision-making?

Question 8

What are the three stages of inference making?

Question 9

People tend to focus too heavily on outliers, or extreme instances of outcomes, when making predictions for the future. In doing so, they are ignoring what?

Question 10

What is the conjunction error?

Question 11

Because members of minority groups often stand out more, some people overestimate their frequency of criminal behavior. Which bias does this represent?

Question 12

Jill fears she is more likely to die in a plane crash than in an automobile accident, even though she is statistically much more likely to die from the latter. Her irrational fear is most likely due to which heuristic?

Question 13

People generally get more upset if they miss a train by one or two minutes, than if they were to have missed that same train by twenty minutes. This reflects which heuristic?

Question 14

Schemas, categories, concepts, and expectations are all examples of what?

Question 15

Unlike multiple choice, an open-ended memory question is testing what kind of memory?

Question 16

When people expect excellence from other people, they can induce that excellence through their own behavior. This result is referred to as what?

Question 17

When recollecting a thought, the original perceptual experience and physical state re-emerge and simulate the original experience. What concept does this reflect?

Question 18

What is the name for an initial stimulus that activates concepts and affects subsequent interpretation?

Question 19

Whenever Paula meets someone new, the first and foremost quality she looks for is how intelligent he/she is. To Paula, the trait of intelligence can be described as what?

Question 20

A study that instructs participants to "not think of a white bear" is an example of what kind of experiment?