Week 3

Question 1

Define social cognition

Answer 1

• the encoding, storage and retrieval of information in the brain which relates to members of the same species.

Question 2

What can affect social cognition and or construal of new info?

Answer 2

• the way we are presented information (order, framing) can affect the judgements we make.
• pre-existing knowledge that we may have
• reason and intuition which underlie social cognition .

Question 3

What would occur if we have little or misleading information in social cognition?

Answer 3

• doesn’t stop us from making inferences about people or situations.

Question 4

Define bias

Answer 4

• a tendency to put disproportionally more weight in Favour of an idea, its systematic.

Question 5

Define snap judgement

Answer 5

• people tend to make very complex inferences about motives and personality based on very small amounts of info

Question 6

Describe the results and method for the study by Willis and Todorov

Answer 6

• showed pps faces and had them rate them on several factors
• given varying amounts of time
• control group was given as much time as they needed to from a judgement
• similar correlations between each trait and exposure time

Question 7

Define pluralistic ignorance

Answer 7

• misrception of a group norm that results from observing people who are acting differently to their self in order to fit in with a group norm

Question 8

How to avoid pluralistic ignorance?

Answer 8

• reach out to another person
• connect with your peers, form support group
• set time aside to discuss the fundamentals

Question 9

Describe aspects of self-fulfilling prophecy

Answer 9

• people may think that other people have an expectation of them, and this may cause the other person to behave consistent with the original expectation, making it come true

Question 10

Describe the study by Rosenthal and Jacobson

Answer 10

• before the school year, gave teachers dossiers on students randomly labeled some students as intellectual bloomers
• those students who were labeled intellectual bloomers had made more progress than those who were originally equal

Question 11

Describe what are the aspects of order effects

Answer 11

• primacy effect: Info presented first has an overly strong influence on later judgements.
• recency effect: Info presented last has an overly strong influence on later judgements

Question 12

Describe what is meant by framing effects

Answer 12

• the influence on judgement resulting from the way that info is presented.

Question 13

What is spin framing?

Answer 13

• changing the way something is phrased so that it looks more favorable or unfavorable.

Question 14

Describe the method and results of the Asch study looking at primacy effect

Answer 14

• pps asked to evaluate an individual described as a bunch of different adjectives in a set order.
• individuals rated favorably/unfavorably if adjectives presented in that order - eg if positive to negative adjectives, favorably and vise versa.

Question 15

Describe the method and results of the study by McNeil et al.

Answer 15

• 400 doctors asked wether they would recommend surgery or radiation
• info presented in positive/negative frame
• 56 percent doctors recommended surgery (in the positive frame)

Question 16

Define Temporal framing

Answer 16

• how actions and events are framed within a particular time perspective

Question 17

Define construal level framing

Answer 17

• distant actions are thought about in abstract terms
• actions that are close at hand are thought about in concrete terms

Question 18

Construal level theory

Answer 18

• distant actions = thought about abstractly
• close actions thought about concretely.

Question 19

Describe what is meant by confirmation bias

Answer 19

• the tendency to test a proposition by searching for evidence that would support it.

Question 20

What can confirmation bias lead to?

Answer 20

• false beliefs because supporting evidence can be found for anything

Question 21

Why does confirmation bias work (4)

Answer 21

• not seeking objective facts.
• interpreting info to support existing belief
• only remember details that uphold our belief
• ignore info that challenges our belief

Question 22

How does confirmation bias affect info?

Answer 22

• how its:
• gathered
• interpreted
• recalled

Question 23

Describe the differences between the top down and bottom up processing

Answer 23

• top down: theory driven, basing judgements on pre-existing expectations and knowledge.
• bottom up: data driven, put together info to see what you get, basing judgements on the stimuli that are encountered.

Question 24

What influence can schemas have? (5)

Answer 24

• attention: schemas direct us to what’s important, ignore the rest.
• memory: more likely to remember stimuli that has caught our attention
• construal: schemas influence our interpretation of info
• encoding
• retrieval

Question 25

Define intuition vs reason

Answer 25

- quick automatic based on associations, performs many operations simultaneously. - reason: slower, controlled processing, based on rules and deductions, performing one operation at a time.

Question 26

Define what is meant by Heuristics

Answer 26

- a verity of mental operations that are commonly used to make quick and efficient jusdgments and decisions. - needed for survival and decision making - but can lead to error and bias

Question 27

What is meant by the availability heuristic?

Answer 27

- biased assessment of risk. - if something comes to mind easily, people think its common.

Question 28

Describe what is meant by the representativeness heuristics

Answer 28

- tendency to compare things to prototypes of their category

Question 29

Describe what is meant by the representativeness heuristic

Answer 29

- tendency to ignore base rate information: info about the relative frequency of events or members of different groups.