Psych Chapter 16: Social Cognition – Flashcards
Unlock all answers in this set
Unlock answersquestion
define: social psychology
answer
The subfield of psychology that focuses on how people think about other people and interact in relationships and groups
question
define: social cognition
answer
The area of social psychology that focuses on how people perceive their social worlds and how they attend to, store, remember, and use information about other people and the social world
question
define: impression formation
answer
The process of developing initial views of others
question
define: impression management
answer
A person's efforts to control how others will view him or her
question
define: attitude
answer
An overall evaluation about some aspect of the world
question
define: cognitive dissonance
answer
The uncomfortable state that arises because of a discrepancy between an attitude and behavior or between two attitudes
question
define: self-perception theory
answer
The theory that people come to understand themselves by making inferences from their behavior and the events surrounding their behavior
question
define: persuasion
answer
Attempts to change peoples' attitudes
question
define: mere exposure effect
answer
The change--generally favorable--in attitude that can result from simply becoming familiar with something
question
define: social cognitive neuroscience
answer
The subfield of psychology that attempts to understand social cognition not only by specifying the cognitive mechanisms that underlie it, but also by discovering how those mechanisms are rooted in the brain
question
define: stereotype
answer
A belief (or set of beliefs) about people in a particular category
question
define: prejudice
answer
An attitude (generally negative) toward members of a group
question
define: ingroup
answer
An individual's own group
question
define: outgroup
answer
A group other than an individual's own
question
define: recategorization
answer
A means of reducing prejudice by shifting the categories of "us" and "them" so that the two groups are no longer distinct entities
question
define: attribution
answer
An explanation for the cause of an event or behavior
question
define: internal attribution
answer
An explanation of someone's behavior that focuses on the person's preferences, beliefs, goals, or other characteristics; also called "dispositional attribution"
question
define: external attribution
answer
An explanation of someone's behavior that focuses on the situation; also called "situational attribution"
question
define: self-serving bias
answer
A person's inclination to attribute his or her own failures to external causes and own successes to internal causes, but to attribute other people's failures to internal causes and their successes to external causes
question
define: belief in a just world
answer
An attributional bias that assumes that people get what they deserve
question
How long does it generally take us to form accurate first impressions?
answer
Less than 5 minutes
question
define: halo effect
answer
If you think someone has a positive/important trait, you are likely to infer that he/she has other positive/important traits
question
define: primacy effect
answer
The information about a person that you notice early on is likely to bias subsequent information about the person
question
define: rebound effect
answer
When you regulate yourself considerably to produce an impression, you think more about the behavior you are trying to suppress once you've suppressed it
question
What are the ABCs of attitude?
answer
Affective, behavioral, cognitive
question
What is the affective quality of an attitude?
answer
Your feelings about the object or issue in question
question
What is the behavioral quality of an attitude?
answer
Your predisposition to act in a particular way toward the object or issue in question (refers to the inclination, not the actual behavior)
question
What is the cognitive quality of an attitude?
answer
What you believe or know about the object or issue in question
question
How are attitudes shaped?
answer
Individual experience, personality, and temperament
question
What kind of attitude is more likely to affect behavior?
answer
Strong, stable, relevant to behavior, important, or easily accessed from memory
question
define: social desirability bias
answer
The tendency of peoples' responses to reflect their desire to be seen by others in a positive light
question
define: implicit association test (IAT)
answer
A test that measures the strength of association between an evaluation and a concept, category, or group of people
question
In the study conducted by Festiger and Carlsmith, why did those who were paid $1 seem to enjoy the study more than those who were paid $20?
answer
Those who were paid $1 couldn't justify that they enjoyed the task for the amount they were paid, so to reduce the dissonance between what they did and what they received, they subconsciously convinced themselves that they enjoyed the task; those who were paid $20 seemed adequately compensated
question
How do people tend to reduce dissonance?
answer
Change how they understand their immoral act, minimize responsibility for it, disregard negative consequences, blame and dehumanize victims
question
What are the two routes to persuasion in the elaboration likelihood model of attitude change?
answer
Central and peripheral
question
How are we persuaded through the central route to persuasion?
answer
The content of an argument
question
How are we persuaded through the peripheral route to persuasion?
answer
The attractiveness and expertise of the source of an argument
question
What are four obstacles to persuasion?
answer
Strong attitude, reactance, forewarning, and selective avoidance
question
Do we need to be conscious of dissonance in order to try to reduce it?
answer
No; patients with amnesia were asked to choose between two similar stimuli which one they liked more (which requires finding reasons not to like one), and they were later presented with the same stimuli after having forgotten them, which led to them having stronger feelings about the two
question
Which region of the brain plays a key role in holding positive attitudes?
answer
Left frontal lobe
question
Which region of the brain plays a key role in holding negative attitudes?
answer
Right frontal lobe
question
Which region of the brain plays a key role in encoding aversive stimuli?
answer
Amygdala
question
What do people tend to do when there is a conflict between a stereotype and the actual behavior of someone from the stereotypical group?
answer
Rather than change it, people create a new subtype within the stereotype
question
Does prejudice arise from the presence of negative feelings or the absence of positive feelings?
answer
It comes from both
question
define: social categorization
answer
The automatic process of dividing the world into categories of "us" and "them," both consciously and unconsciously
question
define: social identity theory
answer
The tendency of people to view the "ingroup" favorably and the "outgroup" unfavorably
question
define: illusory correlation
answer
The tendency to overestimate the strength of a relationship between two things (i.e. white people overestimating amt. of crime committed by blacks)
question
define: illusion of outgroup homogeneity
answer
The inclination to view an outgroup as being more homogeneous than the ingroup
question
define: ingroup differentiation
answer
The inclination to view members of an ingroup as more heterogeneous than those of another group
question
define: discrimination
answer
The effect of prejudiced behavior
question
define: realistic conflict theory
answer
The theory that prejudice arises from the competition for scarce resources; as groups compete for these resources, they form increasingly negative views of other groups
question
define: social categorization theory
answer
The theory that the psychological forces leading to ingroup favoritism are so powerful that creating even an arbitrary "us" and "them" can lead to unconscious favoritism and discriminatory behavior
question
define: social learning theory
answer
Stereotypes can be spread and passed through generations as a learned prejudice
question
define: contact hypothesis
answer
Increased contact between different groups will decrease prejudice between them
question
How does increased contact help reduce prejudice?
answer
Groups become aware of similarities, groups' views can change if enough inconsistent information is presented, and the illusion of homogeneity is shattered
question
define: jigsaw classroom
answer
A cooperative learning technique; groups of 5-6 children from different backgrounds are given a research project; each group member researches a particular aspect, and then forms a new group with members of other jigsaw groups that are researching the same aspect of the assigment
question
define: theory of causal attribution
answer
The theory that people decide whether to attribute a given behavior to a person's enduring traits or to the situation based on whether the behavior shows consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness
question
define: attributional bias
answer
A cognitive shortcut for determining attribution that generally occurs outside of conscious awareness
question
define: correspondence bias
answer
The strong tendency to interpret other people's behavior as due to internal (dispositional) causes rather than external (situational) ones; also known as the "fundamental attribution error"
question
Identify the dimension of attribution: "Would other people react similarly in the situation?"
answer
Consensus
question
Identify the dimension of attribution: "Has the person responded in the same way in similar situations?"
answer
Consistency
question
Identify the dimension of attribution: "Has the person responded differently in situations that are not similar?"
answer
Distinctiveness
question
When can behavior be attributed to internal causes?
answer
Consensus and distinctiveness are low and consistency is high
question
When can behavior be attributed to external causes?
answer
Consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency are all high
