Unit 4: Module 20, Social Cognition and Attitudes

People naturally use mental "shortcuts" to simplify their social world. These shortcuts are known as:

heuristics

Which of the following is an example of the planning fallacy?

Gerard believes he can complete a term paper within a one-week time frame. He is surprised when he cannot complete the project as quickly as he anticipated.

Stereotypes

Our general beliefs about the traits or behaviors shared by group of people.

People are usually motivated in some way when making social judgments and decisions. What often occurs as a result of having directional goals?

People may be skeptical about evidence that goes against their directional goal.

What is a potential positive outcome of the planning fallacy?

People might attempt projects that otherwise might have been avoided had the amount of effort or time needed been understood.

How is it that schemas help people save time as they have new experiences or encounter new people or objects on a daily basis?

We compare new experiences to previously stored schemas and this allows us to put forth less effort to assess those new encounters.

The ________ heuristic is one in which the frequency or likelihood of an event is evaluated based on how easily examples come to mind.

availability

Which heuristic would you likely use if you were asked, "are there more words in the English language that start with the letter "k" or that have "k" as the third letter in the word?"

availability heuristic

Calvin is interested in measuring his school's willingness to do volunteer work around the community. He sends out a self-report survey that asks students to directly fill out their _________ attitudes on the topic.

explicit

Randy has joined a new social club on campus. Is it likely that Randy will:

form the impressions he makes of these club members after only one meeting

Sasha is taking her family to Disney World. She predicts that she will feel immense happiness seeing her young daughter, Emerald, meet all the princesses at the theme park. However, when her daughter Emerald meets the first princess, Sasha does not feel as happy as she thought she would. Sasha's experience is an example of what concept?

impact bias

The Implicit Association Task (IAT) used in research, which records participants' reaction times to categorizing objects, is measuring what type of attitude?

implicit attitude

Javari is teaching a psychology class and tells his students, "Kenna is 31, single, outspoken, and bright. She majored in philosophy in college. As a student, Kenna was deeply concerned with discrimination and other social issues." When Javari asked his class if it was more likely that Kenna was A) a bank teller or B) a bank teller AND a feminist, most people in his class chose option B. Javari explained that their answer was incorrect because their _____________ heuristic led them astray.

representativeness

The ________ heuristic is one in which the likelihood of an object belonging to a category is evaluated based on the extent to which the object appears similar to one's mental conceptualization of the category.

representativeness

Automatic

A behavior or process has one or more of the following features: unintentional, uncontrollable, occurring outside of conscious awareness, and cognitively efficient.

Durability bias

A bias in affective forecasting in which one overestimates for how long one will feel an emotion (positive or negative) after some event.

Impact bias

A bias in affective forecasting in which one overestimates the strength or intensity of emotion one will experience after some event.

Planning fallacy

A cognitive bias in which one underestimates how long it will take to complete a task.

Motivated skepticism

A form of bias that can result from having a directional goal in which one is skeptical of evidence despite its strength because it goes against what one wants to believe.

Availability heuristic

A heuristic in which the frequency or likelihood of an event is evaluated based on how easily instances of it come to mind.

Representativeness heuristic

A heuristic in which the likelihood of an object belonging to a category is evaluated based on the extent to which the object appears similar to one's mental representation of the category.

Schema

A mental model or representation that organizes the important information about a thing, person, or event (also known as a script).

Heuristics

A mental shortcut or rule of thumb that reduces complex mental problems to more simple rule-based decisions.

Primed

A process by which a concept or behavior is made more cognitively accessible or likely to occur through the presentation of an associated concept.

Attitude

A psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor.

Implicit attitude

An attitude that a person cannot verbally or overtly state.

Explicit attitude

An attitude that is consciously held and can be reported on by the person holding the attitude.

Implicit Association Test

An implicit attitude task that assesses a person's automatic associations between concepts by measuring the response times in pairing the concepts.

Evaluative priming​ task

An implicit attitude task that assesses the extent to which an attitude object is associated with a positive or negative valence by measuring the time it takes a person to label an adjective as good or bad after being presented with an attitude object.

Mood-congruent memory is occurring in which of the following scenarios?

John is currently sad and can more easily recall a time when he got in trouble for a late assignment.

Implicit measures of attitudes

Measures of attitudes in which researchers infer the participant's attitude rather than having the participant explicitly report it.

Which of the following is the most accurate statement about affective forecasting?

People tend to be accurate with predicting whether an event will result in positive or negative feelings but inaccurate regarding the strength or duration of these emotions.

Affective forecasting

Predicting how one will feel in the future after some event or decision.

A(n) __________ is a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a target with a degree of favor or disfavor.

attitude

Need for closure

The desire to come to a decision that will resolve ambiguity and conclude an issue.

Hot cognition

The mental processes that are influenced by desires and feelings.

Directional goals

The motivation to reach a particular outcome or judgment.

Social cognition

The study of how people think about the social world.

Chameleon effect

The tendency for individuals to nonconsciously mimic the postures, mannerisms, facial expressions, and other behaviors of one's interaction partners.

Mood-congruent memory

The tendency to be better able to recall memories that have a mood similar to our current mood.

Which of the following is a possible outcome when individuals' implicit and explicit attitudes do not match?

They are unaware they hold an actual bias, such as a bias towards an ethnic minority.

The durability bias occurs when a person overestimates how long their feelings might last. This bias is a type of:

affective forecasting

The need for ________ refers to the desire to come to a decision that will resolve and conclude an issue.

closure

The area of social psychological that focuses on how people think about others and about the social world is called social __________.

cognition

"Oh I know that I'll just be sad forever," Monique cries, after her first boyfriend broke up with her. "I'm never going to love again. My life is RUINED!" Given that she is unlikely to be sad forever, Monique is demonstrating the __________ bias.

durability