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Social psychology - summary

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Summary for social and organizational psychology in English (G&B book and B&B book)

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  • March 11, 2018
  • 37
  • 2017/2018
  • Summary

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By: kimmoishere • 4 year ago

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By: nspsychology • 6 year ago

Lot of bad grammer and typo's, not easy to read.. Sorry

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Chapter 2 – S.P book – Social cognition

Social cognition: How we think about social world, out attempts to understand complex issues

Heuristics: How we employ simple rules in social cognition

- At any time, able to focus on a limited amount of information
 Any input beyond our limit puts us into state of information overload (Demands on our
cognitive system are greater than its capacity)

Heuristics: Strategy for making sense of complex information (Drawing interference in a rapid and
efficient manner)

Representativeness heuristic: Making judgements on the basis of rule: The more an individual seems
to resemble or match a given group, the more likely she/he is to belong to that group

 Sometimes wrong because decisions/judgements made on the basis of this rule tend to
ignore base rates (frequency with which given events or categories occur in the total
population)

Prototype: List of attributes commonly possessed by members of each of these occupations



Availability: “If I can recall many instances, they must be frequent?”

Ease-of-retrieval effect: Being able to bring dramatic events more easily to mind

Availability heuristic: The easier it is to bring information to mind, the greater its impact on
subsequent judgements or decisions

 Can lead to errors because overestimation of likelihood of events that are dramatic but
rare (Because easy to bring to mind)
 Amount of information we can bring to mind matters (The more information we think of,
the greater its impact on our judgement

! If judgement involves emotions and feelings, tend to rely on the “ease” rule. If judgement involves
facts, or the task is difficult, tend to rely more on “amount” rule!



Anchoring and adjustment: Where you begin makes a difference

Anchoring and adjustment (Heuristic): Tendency to deal with uncertainty in many situations by using
something we do know as a starting point and then making adjustments to it

Portion size effect: Tendency to eat more when a larger portion of food is received than a smaller
portion



Status Quo Heuristic: “What is, is good”

- Objects and options that are more easily retrieved from memory may be judged in a heuristic
fashion as “good”
- When making choices or judgements, often act as though they believe the way things are
currently is better than any other alternative

,Schemas: Mental frameworks for organizing social information

Schemas: Mental framework built up through past experiences contain the essential features of
different kinds of situations, help us to organize social information, guide our actions, and process
information relevant to particular contexts

Influence three basic processes of social cognition:

1) Attention
2) Encoding
3) Retrieval



- Especially tend to rely on schemas when experiencing cognitive load (Trying to handle a lot of
information at one time)
- Information that is consistent with our schemas is encoded  Info that is sharply inconsistent
with schema may be encoded into separate memory
- Tend to remember info that is consistent with schemas more than information that is
inconsistent



Priming: Which schema guides our thought?

Priming: Schemas can be activated by priming

Unpriming: Process by which thoughts or actions pries by a recent experience dissipate once they
find expression



- By influencing what we notice, enter into memory, and later remember, schemas can
produce distortions in understanding of social world (resistant to change)

Perseverance effect: Remaining unchanged even in the face of contradictory information



Reasoning by metaphor

Metaphor: Linguistic device that related or compares a typically abstract concept to another
unrelated concept, by suggesting a similarity between them



Automatic and controlled processing in social thought

- Social thought can occur in two distinctly different ways:
1) Controlled processing
 Logical, and highly effortful manner
2) Automatic processing
 Fast, relatively effortless
- Mostly occur together
- People possess two different neural systems for processing social information
- Activation of different regions of the brain for the different processes

Evaluative reactions: Basic kind of social judgment relating to whether we like or dislike something

,  Simple good-bad judgments (occur in a rapid and automatic way (in amygdala) or
through more effortful thought (portions of prefrontal cortex)



Benefits of automatic processing: Beyond mere efficiency

- Often dealing with problems and complex decisions, while our attention is directed
elsewhere
- Conscious thought has strict limits in terms of the amount of information it can handle
(Thinking actively about decisions, may unable to take account of all available information)



Powerful tendency to be overly optimistic

Optimistic bias: Powerful predisposition to overlook risks and expect things to turn out well

 People believe they are more likely thn others to experience positive events, and less
likely to experience negative events

Overconfidence bias: Greater confidence in our beliefs or judgments than is justified

 Often stems from errors of omission
 Planning fallacy

Counterfactual thinking: Thoughts about “what might have been”

 Seems to occur automatically in many situations
 Upward counterfactuals (Comparing current outcomes with more favourable ones  strong
feelings of dissatisfaction)
 Comparing current outcomes with less favourable ones (Positive feelings)

Magical thinking: Human beings are susceptible to it, thinking makes assumptions that don’t hold up
to rational scrutiny (Knocking on wood)

Terror management: Efforts to come to terms with the certainty of death and its unsettling
implications



The influence of affect on cognition

Affect: Current moods or emotions

Cognition: Various aspects of the ways we think, process, store, remember and use information

Mood congruence effect: Current moods strongly determine which information in a given situation is
noticed and then entered into memory (Current mood serves as filter, permitting info that is
consistent with your moods to be stored in long-term memory)

Mood-dependent memory: Reflects what specific info is retrieved from memory (Current moods
serve as retrieval cue)

- Current moods influence our interpretations of the motives behind peoples behavior



Influence of cognition on affect

, Two-factor theory of emotion: People are often not aware of their own feelings or attitudes directly
rather infer their nature from external world

Affective forecasts (Predictions of how we would feel about an event we haven’t experienced) are
often inaccurate



Affect and cognition: Social neuroscience evidence for two separate systems

- Two distinct systems involved in processing social information within human brain
 One system “reason”, operation can be disrupted by cognitive load
 Other system deals with affect or emotion (less sensitive to cognitive load)
 Systems interact in many ways during problem solving, decision making



Social and organisational psychology - chapter 3 (Social perception) – SO book

Social perception: Process through which we seek to know other people, involves understanding they
ways we gather and analyse information about people



Nonverbal communication: An unspoken language

- Situations where its inappropriate to ask, possible to pay careful attention to nonverbal cues
(Changes in facial expressions, eye contact, posture, body movements)

Nonverbal communication: Information conveyed by cues other than content of spoken language



Basic channels of nonverbal communication

- Able to learn much about others current moods and feelings from their facial expressions
- 5 different basic emotions: anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and disgust
 Facial expressions are universal in both use and recognition
- Certain facial expressions (smile, frownds) are often seen as representing the basic underlying
emotions of happiness and anger
- People are better in recognizing facial expressions in members of their own national group
than in members of another national group

Eye contact:

- We interpret a high level of gazing from another person as a sign of liking or friendliness
 Except when someone engages in staring (Interpreted as a sign of anger)

Body language:

- Large numbers of movement (Especially ones in which one part of the body does something
to another part (touching, rubbing, scratching) suggest emotional arousal
- Fidgeting interpreted as sign of lying

Emblems: Body movements that carry specific meanings in a given culture

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