Social Psychology Chapter 4
Match each term to the correct definition. 1) the feeling of ease (or difficulty) associated with processing information 2) process whereby judgments of frequency or probability are based on how readily pertinent instances come to mind 3) process whereby judgments of likelihood are based on assessments of similarity between individuals and group prototypes, or between cause and effect 4) quick and automatic intuitive mental operation that provides efficient answers to common problems of judgment
1) Fluency 2) Availability of Heuristic 3) representativeness heuristic 4) Heuristic
Match each fact about the activation and application of schemas to the scenario that best illustrates it. Note: It may seem that more than one fact applies to a scenario, but only one matches to each. 1) Joe rides the subway every day where he is continually exposed to announcements warning riders to be suspicious of unusual activities due to the threat of terrorism. Soon Joe believes he sees potential terrorist activity in a wide variety of everyday situations. 2) A tourist on the sidewalk asks Rick if she can ask him a question. Thinking she is a panhandler, Rick says, "Sorry, I don't have any change," and rushes past her. 3) Using a proven tactic to reduce the instances of employees drinking coffee in the break room without contributing 25 cents to the coffee fund, the office manager puts a picture of herself over the sign that reads "Coffee 25¢ per cup."
1) If a person uses a particular schema frequently, it can become chronically accessible and therefore likely to be used still more often in the future. 2) Sometimes people apply a schema because of a preexisting expectation about what they will encounter. 3) Subliminal stimuli (those below the level of consciousness) can prime a schema sufficiently to influence subsequent information processing.
Match each term relating to social cognition to the correct definition. 1) the disproportionate influence of information presented last in a body of evidence 2) the disproportionate influence of information presented first in a body of evidence 3) the collective name for the phenomena of presenting information first and last in a body of evidence, exerting disproportionate influence on judgment 4) the influence on judgment resulting from the way information is presented
1) Recency Effect 2) Primacy Effect 3) Order Effect 4) Framing Effect
Match each fact about the activation and application of schemas to the scenario that best illustrates it. Note: It may seem that more than one fact applies to a scenario, but only one matches to each. 1) The advertising agency paints all of the interior office walls either green or blue, because research suggests that green and blue environments foster creativity in people. 2) Annabel sees a movie in which a character depicted as being wealthy drives a Lexus RX. Coming out of the theater, she sees a man driving by in a Lexus RX and thinks to herself that the man must be wealthy 3) Michelle prizes stylishness in an assistant, so when she interviews assistant candidates, she focuses a lot of attention on how they are dressed.
1) Schemas can become activated from seeing a specific color as well as from exposure to many other stimuli that are not words. 2) If a schema has been brought to mind recently, it tends to be more accessible and hence ready for use. 3) The role of the evaluator often influences which traits or schemas are activated.
Match each concept about information to the appropriate example. 1) Jon likes a guy in his class but thinks he's out of his league and avoids talking to him. When Jon finally decides to ask him out, Jon says, "You wouldn't want to hang out later, would you?" The guy replies that he has other plans. 2) A woman soliciting donations on campus spots Max in a group and approaches him since she thinks he looks the most naïve. 3) Many of the teammates think the basketball team's star takes too many low percentage shots and doesn't pass the ball enough, but none of them say this out loud. 4) Martin reads a rumor on Facebook that one of his classmates "stole" another classmate's boyfriend.
1) Self-fulfilling prophecy 2) Snap judgments 3) Pluralistic ignorance 4) Secondhand information
Match each type of framing to the appropriate example. 1) Hallie signs up for a 5K run to support her school's athletic teams. However, the evening before the run, she wonders why she signed up, as she would rather sleep in the next day. 2) Beryl wants to be the last candidate to make a closing statement at the debate since she believes the audience will best remember the last speaker's remarks. 3) When he is asked what he does for a living, Rocco used to say he is a "garbage man," but now he says he "works for the Department of Sanitation." 4) The box states that condoms are 98 percent effective at preventing pregnancy when used consistently and correctly—instead of saying they are ineffective 1 time in 50.
1) Temporal Framing 2) Recency Effect 3) Spin Framing 4) Positive & negative framing
In a study on overconfidence, researchers asked subject matter experts and undergraduate students to indicate the probability of certain events related to South African Apartheid. Place the labels next to the appropriate lines of the graph.
1) a perfect correspondence between prediction accuracy and confidence 2) the experts' prediction accuracy and confidence 3) the undergraduates' prediction accuracy and confidence
This bar graph exemplifies confirmation bias. Place the labels in the appropriate locations on the graph.
1) confirmation bias exhibited for the expectation that practice leads to winning 2) confirmation bias exhibited for the expectation that practice leads to losing 3) blank 4) blank
Which of the following statements relating to the availability heuristic are accurate and which are not?
Accurate Statements: It can lead to a biased assessment of risk. Schwarz and others showed that it occurs because of how easily relevant instances can be brought to mind and not simply the number of instances that are retrieved. Fluency, the subjective feeling of ease or difficulty associated with processing information, is closely related to the availability heuristic. Inaccurate Statements: It explains why people underestimate their own contributions to joint projects.
Which of the following are benefits that can be gained from the study of social cognition and which are not?
Benefits: It can help us learn from past mistakes in our social judgments. It can help us understand how people think about the social world. It can show us how to interpret social judgment errors that help us better understand the strategies people use to make judgments. Not Benefits: It can teach us how to never make mistakes in our social judgments. It can show us how to study illusions to help reveal general principles of perception.
Perceiving and understanding the world involves the concurrent functioning of two types of processes. While ____ processes consist of taking in relevant stimuli from the outside world, ____ processes, including schemas, filter and interpret those stimuli in light of preexisting knowledge and expectations. The meaning of stimuli is actively____ not passively recorded.
Bottom-up, top-down, construed
When studying individuals' confidence in their own knowledge, abilities, or predictions, researchers have consistently observed that people are more ____ than they are ____. This is known as _____.
Confident, accurate, overconfident bias
Ethologist Konrad Lorenz proposed that the ____ of the young in mammalian species triggers a hardwired reaction that encourages ____. The ____ nature of our response to infantile features makes it more likely that we will overgeneralize and come to see even adults with such features as trustworthy and ____.
Cuteness, caregiving, automatic, friendly
A recently divorced woman is asked to describe her ex-husband by listing three of his characteristics. Her daughter is then asked to describe her father using the same three characteristics. Both women agree on the three characteristics and use the primacy effect to describe him—but the ex-wife uses it to show him in a negative light, while the daughter uses it to show him in a positive light. Given this scenario and your understanding of the primacy effect, identify each description as belonging to either the ex-wife or the daughter.
Daughter a good father, cheap, lazy a good father, lazy, cheap Ex-Wife lazy, cheap, a good father cheap, lazy, a good father
According to construal level theory, the temporal perspective from which people view events has important and predictable implications for how they construe them. Identify each term as applying to either distant events or events close at hand.
Events Close at Hand: Thinking in concrete terms Distant Events: Idealized thoughts Thinking in abstract terms
Which of the following are examples of confirmation bias or motivated confirmation bias and which are not?
Examples of Either Bias: Researching the idea that people are more successful at jobs that they like than at those they don't, an investigator asks successful people how much they like their jobs and less successful people how much they dislike their jobs. A conspiracy theorist who believes that there is a secret society exerting a strong influence over world events searches the Internet for hidden messages supporting his belief. A researcher investigating the proposition that hockey referees call fewer penalties against the home team seeks out data that tend to support the notion, while discounting evidence that tends to refute it. To investigate the validity of the statement "You don't find atheists in a foxhole" (meaning atheists would not serve in the military), a researcher interviews veterans she found through church groups but makes no effort to find veterans who are not religious. Not Examples of Either Bias: Marilyn believes all museums are haunted, so she refuses to go to the museum.
Which of the following statements are examples of positive spin framing and which are not?
Examples of Positive Spin Framing: On her résumé, instead of including the fact that she has a 2.74 GPA, Alexis lists that she has a 3.68 GPA in her major. The chance of winning a raffle is 1 in 10,000. Of 100 patients who underwent a specific surgery, 90 survived. An advertiser labels ground beef as 80 percent lean. Not Examples of Positive Spin Framing: Harmony tells her parents she was absent from school only 10 percent of the time. However, she actually missed over 30 percent of her classes. On the first day of class, the professor tells her students that one-third of the students last semester failed her course. A job interviewer describes a candidate to her boss as unpleasant, female, and intelligent.
Which of the following scenarios are examples of how construal level theory explains behavior and which are not?
Examples: January 1: Jean resolves to work out five times a week to stay fit. January 15: It seems like too much effort, so Jean cuts back. February 1: Jean's gym bag is gathering dust in her closet. When Jedd's ex invited him to her party, he was excited about seeing her friends whom he likes. When the day of the party arrives, Jedd realizes he also dreads having to see the friends he doesn't like. Last month over sushi, Daniel agreed to help a friend paint his house. Today, he is wondering what he was thinking when he said he'd help. Not Examples: Raina entered a contest in the hope of winning a scholarship to attend music school. She practiced every day until the contest. When Juan's final semester of college started in January, he felt excited about graduation in May. On graduation day, Juan remains excited about being finished with school.
Match each example to the type of secondhand information distortion it best describes.
Ideological Distortion: Raul's father warns him to not be friends with any fans of the New England Patriots because (he says) they are all dishonest. Leslie's grandmother tells her that everyone who owns a Prius is a "dangerous radical" and a "hippie." Tamara always says everyone should travel and meet new people. She tells all her friends about her exciting RV vacation, but she leaves out the part about the flat tire she got and how she paid more than she expected. Distortion in the Service of Entertainment: A newspaper runs the headline "Toddlers Killing Their Parents" even though the story is about a contagious disease being passed accidentally from child to parent. A newscaster on an all-weather station uses the words "disaster" and "extreme danger" to describe an approaching rainstorm.
Fill in the blanks to complete the passage. Several patterns can emerge from the output of the intuitive and rational systems of processing information. They can agree (lead to the same judgments), they can disagree (lead to opposite judgments), or the ____ system may produce a satisfying judgment so quickly that the ____ system is never engaged.
Intuitive, Rational
Match each behavior to the corresponding thought system.
Intuitive: avoiding someone who looks scary selecting a job candidate who made a pleasant impression Rational: selecting a job candidate who has relevant work experience avoiding someone you had an altercation with in the past
Madison is an adult male. He has small eyes, a small forehead, and an angular, prominent chin. Based on psychological research, which of the following are likely to be true regarding Madison and which are not?
Likely to Be True: He would tend to have an easier time than a person with "baby-faced" features being seen as appropriate for "adult" jobs, such as banking. People making a snap judgment about him will tend to believe he is relatively strong, competent, and dominant. Not Likely to Be True: He would tend to receive more favorable treatment as a defendant in court than a person with "baby-faced" features would. People making a snap judgment about him will tend to believe he is relatively weak, naïve, and submissive.
When people deliberately search for evidence that supports their preferences or expectations and explain away evidence that contradicts them, it is called ____. People who fall prey to ____ engage in a biased and potentially misleading search for evidence, though they have no particular incentive to confirm a particular outcome.
Motivated confirmation bias, confirmation bias
Studies by Baumeister and others suggest that ____ information tends to attract more attention and have more psychological impact than ____ information does.
Negative, positive
The characteristics of a hypothetical individual are listed here. One list is intended to take advantage of the primacy effect and the other is intended to take advantage of the recency effect to make the person look good. Match each list to the appropriate effect.
Primacy Effect: smart, hardworking, balanced, delicate, inflexible Recency Effect: delicate, inflexible, balanced, smart, hardworking
People use the representativeness heuristic to categorize information by assessing how similar something is to their ideal in that category. Match each example or definition to the appropriate term relating to representativeness.
Regression Effect: Students with the worst scores on the midterm tend to do poorly on the final, but not as poorly as they did initially. statistical tendency, when two variables are imperfectly correlated, for extreme values of one variable to be associated with less extreme values of the other variable Regression Fallacy: concluding that a student who fails the midterm will also fail the final applying a causal theory to what is really a simple statistical regularity Base-Rate Information: relating to the relative frequency of events or of members of different categories If twice as many people major in business as in the physical sciences, a new student you meet would more likely be a business major.
Two prime examples of misleading ____ information are ____ distortions—which can be either relatively "innocent" or motivated—and distortions in the service of entertainment, especially the overemphasis on ____ in the mass media.
Secondhand, ideological, bad news
The field of____ is the study of how people think about the social world and arrive at ____ that help them interpret and understand the past, present, and future.
Social cognition, judgments
Identify the true and false statements about the phenomenon known as pluralistic ignorance.
True Statements: A misperception is caused because an entire group of people act differently from how they truly feel. It can occur when people are afraid to show themselves as gentle or kind because they perceive that toughness is called for in the situation. False Statements: It occurs when large numbers of people share inaccurate information, such as a false report on Twitter. When we think and behave in certain ways, we often bring about our expectations.
Identify the true and false statements about snap judgments.
True Statements: In a study by Todorov and others (2006), in which people viewed brief glimpses of faces and rated them based on personality dimensions, the two dimensions that tended to stand out from the others were trustworthiness and dominance. In research, assessments of others made by people seeing facial photos for an instant were about the same as those made by people given more time to assess the faces. False Statements: In the real world, snap judgments are rare since few people make inferences about a person or a situation if there is insufficient information on which to base a judgment. Snap judgments are sometimes made on the basis of a rich amount of information.
Schemas are important top-down tools for understanding the world that affect our judgments by directing our attention, memory, and construal. Identify the true and false statements about this aspect of schemas.
True Statements: Information that is most accessible in memory can influence how we construe new information. Schemas influence our judgment by affecting our memories and how we interpret information. Because schemas influence attention, they also influence memory. False Statements: Schemas can prevent people from noticing unexpected stimuli, but only if the stimuli are weak. Schemas are able to direct our attention easily because we are often only presented with a single piece of information at once.
Identify the true and false statements about the accuracy or validity of snap judgments.
True Statements: Knowing others' opinions of someone can be as important as having accurate information about that person. The available evidence indicates there is often some validity to even extremely brief exposure to other people's behavior. False Statements: Humans form judgments quickly, but these initial judgments do not predict more informed judgments made with more exposure. Studies indicate that our snap judgments have almost no validity once we receive more information.
Identify the true and false statements about confirmation bias.
True Statements: The tendency to seek confirming information can lead to all sorts of false beliefs, because a person can find supportive evidence for almost anything. Confirmation bias leads people to unwittingly ask questions that influence the answers. Confirmation bias is the tendency to test a proposition by searching for evidence that would support it. Confirmation bias can be avoided by thoroughly investigating all sides of a proposition. False Statements: Motivated confirmation bias occurs when researchers make specific efforts to counteract the effects of confirmation bias.
