Social Cognition (Lecture 4&5)

The process by which people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments and decisions about themselves or others.

Unconscious, unintentional, involuntary, effortless.

Conscious, intentional, voluntary, effortful.

The tendency to use mental shortcuts to conserve cognitive resources when processing social information.

Mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social world. They influence the information people notice, think about, and remember.

A type of schema that applies to social groups, like race, gender, or fraternity, influencing how we perceive group members.

Simple rules or mental shortcuts used for making decisions quickly and efficiently, often conserving mental resources.

A mental shortcut where people classify something according to how similar it is to the typical case, ignoring base rates (statistical likelihood).

The mental shortcut of estimating the likelihood of an event based on the ease with which examples come to mind.

A shortcut in which people make estimates by starting with an initial value (anchor) and adjusting it to reach a final decision, often insufficiently.

The erroneous belief that past random events influence future random events, leading to the assumption that chance events will "even out."

The tendency to seek out or favor information that confirms existing beliefs and to ignore information that contradicts them.

The tendency to see events as having been predictable after they have occurred, often expressed as "I knew it all along."

The statistical data about how often a characteristic occurs in the population, often ignored when using heuristics.

Conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful thinking.

Unconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless thinking.

An associative technique that makes concepts, schemas, traits, or goals accessible in people’s minds, affecting behavior unconsciously.

The phenomenon whereby people’s expectations about what another person is like influences how they act toward that person, which causes that person to behave consistently with those expectations, making the expectations come true.

The tendency to imagine other outcomes in a situation than the outcome that actually occurred; thinking about what "might-have-been."

The attempt to avoid thinking about something we would prefer to forget, often leading to ironic effects where unwanted thoughts intrude into consciousness.

The tendency for people to feel more confident in their judgments than their skills, abilities, and knowledge warrant.

A phenomenon where individuals with the least ability tend to be the most overconfident.

A mental shortcut of estimating the likelihood of an event based on the ease with which examples come to mind.

A mental shortcut where people classify something according to how similar it is to the typical case, ignoring statistical likelihood.

A shortcut in which people make estimates by starting with an initial value (anchor) and adjusting it to reach a final decision, often insufficiently.

Statistical data about how often a characteristic occurs in the population, often ignored when using heuristics.

The tendency to overemphasize personal factors (internal) and underestimate situational factors (external) when explaining others' behaviors.

The value placed on independence, autonomy, and self-reliance, common in cultures like the USA, Australia, and Great Britain.

The value placed on interdependence, cooperation, and social harmony, common in cultures like Venezuela, Colombia, and Japan.

A cognitive style where people focus on the properties of objects without considering their surrounding context, typically seen in individualistic cultures.

A cognitive style where people focus on the overall context, particularly in how things relate to each other, typical in collectivist cultures.