Term
| Cognitive Psychology vs. Social Psychology |
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Definition
| Both include topics such as perception, memory, language, reasoning, problem-solving, judgment, and decision-making; the development of social cognition, individual differences in social intelligence, and social-cognitive neuroscience. One way to think about social cognition is that it is cognitive psychology applied to the world of social objects -- meaning people, their behaviors, and the situations in which we encounter them. |
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Term
| Social Cog vs. Non-Social Cog |
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Definition
Quantitatively:
In social cognition, the stimulus is typically very ambiguous, supporting many different possible representations.
In social cognition, there are often conflicting cues that have to be resolved somehow.
In social cognition, context often affects the meaning assigned to a stimulus.
Social cognition is more affected by the perceiver's emotional and motivational states.
Social cognition may be mediated by different brain modules than nonsocial cognition (it is not clear whether this would count as a quantitative or qualitative distinction).
Qualitatively:
Social cognition blurs the distinction between subject (e.g., the perceiver) and object (e.g., the object of perception), because the self is both knower and the object of knowledge.
In social cognition, the object of cognition is itself a sentient being who is trying to control how he or she is represented in the mind of the perceiver; thus, the perceiver has to "read between the lines" to determine what the object of perception is really like. The result is an indefinite series in which a Perceiver (P) is trying to perceive another person (O), O knows that P is trying to perceive O, and P knows that O knows that P is trying to perceive O. The series occurs precisely because O is conscious of P. |
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Term
| Cognitive Perspective Social Interaction |
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Definition
| The cognitive perspective on social interaction begins with the simple proposition that an individual's behavior in some situation depends on the meaning that situation has for him or her. Therefore, in order to understand an individual's social behavior, we must understand the social situation from that individual's point of view. |
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Term
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Definition
Human beings act toward things on the basis of the meaning that the things have to them. It is not the things themselves that elicit action, but rather the meanings behind those things (interpretations, beliefs, etc). These meanings are not intrinsic in the things themselves. They are derived from social interaction.
Symbolic interactionism comes from Blumer’s idea that what determines the nature of interactions within the social world is how those interactions are symbolized in the mind of the interactors. |
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Definition
On the importance of "the definition of the situation" (which is defined for and by the individual).
"if men define situations as real, then they are real in their consequences." |
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Term
| Four Modes by which a person affects the environment |
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Definition
Evocation- Their presence illicits a response from the environment.
Selection- The person can choose the situation they are in.
Behavioral Manipulation- The person overtly does something about the situation.
Cognitive Transformation- A person can change the environment by adjusting their mental perception of the situation. |
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Term
| Bandura's Doctrine of Reciprocal Determinism |
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Definition
| A revision of Lewin's Grand Truism. It takes into account that the environment can influence the person as well. More important, Bandura pointed out that behavior can alter both the environment in which it occurs and the person who engages in it. In reciprocal determinism, all three elements in Lewin's Grand Truism serve as both causes and effects of the others -- a situation he calls "triadic reciprocality". |
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Term
| General Social Interaction Cycle |
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Definition
Cognitive perspective on social interaction and reciprocal causality come together.
Two people are arbitrarily assigned the roles of Actor and Target, respectively; but it soon becomes apparent that the Target is also an actor, and that the Actor is the target of the Target's actions. |
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Term
| The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy |
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Definition
A false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true.
Comes into play with Interpersonal Expectancy Effects. |
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Term
| Interpersonal Expectancy Effects |
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Definition
Concerns the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. The basic message is that social reality is not independent of the person experiencing it. Rather, social reality is cognitively constructed, in the mind of the perceiver; and it is this cognitive construction that determines the perceiver's behavior.
There are two forms:
Perceptual Confirmation, in which a perceiver interprets the target's ambiguous behavior as confirming his or her prior expectations.
Behavioral Confirmation, in which a third party -- an unbiased, objective observer -- interprets the target's behavior as conforming to the perceiver's expectations.
In research on self-verification, Swann and his colleagues have shown how a target, when given an opportunity to correct the perceiver's erroneous misconceptions, can do so. In what Swann calls a "battle of wills", self-verification will often win over expectancy confirmation. |
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Term
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Definition
| Humans are behaving organisms, and what out to be studied is their behavior, and the different condition under which it occurs. He said that mental states don’t have any causal function. To him, the doctrine of mentalism isn’t true. Mental states have no causal efficacy; rather, behaving organisms react to environmental stimuli. |
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Definition
| States that important causal factors in behavior are external to the person. They don’t reside in the individual’s head. They are in the environment outside. There is no cognitive mediation between environmental stimulus and the person’s response to it. |
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Definition
| Behavior is a function of the factors of internal factors and factors in the external environment (B = f(P, E)). What the person does is a function of what is going on inside the person and what is going on in the environment outside the person. |
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Term
| Bower's Doctrine of Interactionism |
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Definition
"Situations are as much a function of the situation as the person's behavior is a function of the situation"
This took into account Gestalt Psychology (that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts") |
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Term
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Definition
Nativism - some knowledge, perhaps all knowledge, is innate; we just come into the world with some a priori knowledge.
Empiricism - knowledge comes from the senses. That there exists an intimate relationship between experience and learning.
Psychology and Cognition has its roots in empiricism. |
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Term
| Dominant Views of Perception |
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Definition
1. The ecological view associated with Gibson holds that all the information needed for perception is provided by the stimulus, and that our perceptual systems evolved so as to extract the information needed to see the world the way it really is, without any involvement of learning or "higher" cognitive processes.
This is called direct perception or direct realism. In the ecological view, perception is not mediated by thought processes; we perceive the world as it really is.
2. The constructivist view associated with Helmholtz and Bruner, is that the stimulus is typically ambiguous, so that the perceiver must (in Bruner's phrase) "go beyond the information given" by the stimulus, filling in the gaps by making inferences based on knowledge, expectations, and beliefs stored in memory.
The basic idea is that you cannot just extract information. |
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Term
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Definition
Sensation is only concerned with detection of present objects in the direct environment. Perception is more about constructing a mental representation of the stimulus.
In nonsocial perception, this boils down to the perception of things like distance and motion. In social perception, this entails the perception of things like another person's beliefs, feelings, and desires. Perception, viewed as a cognitive activity, ends with the identification and classification of the object. |
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Term
| Asch's Impression Formation Paradigm |
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Definition
There were two different theories to address:
1. Impression is the sum of independent characteristics; you just add it up like a checklist.
2. Impression is a unified perception; like Gestalt which represents relations among characteristics so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
He made two list of trait ensembles. The only difference between the two lists was that one contained the trait "warm" and the other "cold". Participants were asked to form a overall impression of a person with those traits and he found that each group had overall different impressions.
He argued that some personality traits are central to impression formation, altering the entire impression of the person. |
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Term
| Central vs. Peripheral Traits |
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Definition
Asch defines central traits as traits that alter the meaning of the other traits by providing a context. These words include warm/cold and intelligent/unintelligent.
Peripheral traits are those that don't make a difference. |
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Term
| Why are some traits central to impression formation and not others? |
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Definition
Wishner concluded that central traits were more highly correlated with other traits, so that they provided more information about the person than peripheral traits. (Knowing that a person is warm or cold, intelligent or unintelligent, simply tells you more about that person than knowing that he or she is polite or blunt.)
(Later, Rosenberg and Sedlak refined this conclusion: warm-cold and intelligent-unintelligent are central because they load highly on the two major dimensions of trait space, social and intellectual good-bad.)
A more recent proposal, which has not been tested (hint, hint) is that traits will be central to impression formation that load highly on any of the "Big Five" personality traits: neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. |
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Term
| "Big Five" personality traits |
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Definition
Goldberg argued that there were five dimensions of personality = neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience.
It is suggested that those five dimensions emerge strongly when judges make ratings of people they know well, also emerge when judges make ratings of perfect strangers.
The IPT model that traits will be central to impression formation if they load highly on any of the "Big Five" personality traits has not yet been tested. |
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Term
| Implicit Personality Theory |
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Definition
The notion of central traits entails this.
It is the idea that every one of us carries around a theory of what people are like in general.
(Bruner and Tagiuri) They had the insight that there are preconceptions about what goes with what in personality.
Naive judgement about people's personalities. |
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Term
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Definition
Cronbach, offered a more thorough characterization of the implicit personality theory.
He described it as the view that people have of other people in general. The description of the generalized other includes some idea about what the important dimensions of personality are, estimates of the mean value (ie., how friendly people are in general) estimates of variance (dispersion about the mean value), estimates of covariants (relations of traits with each other… i.e., friendly goes with agreeable).
He went on to say that there are individual differences in people’s implicit theories of personality, and the differences in implicit personality theories account for differences in social behavior. Cronbach argued that there are also cultural differences in implicit personality theories. Among all the other things that we acquire as a socialization from our culture, we get an idea about what people are like in general, and the ideas vary systematically from one culture to the next. |
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Term
| Affective Theory of Meaning |
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Definition
The idea that the meaning of any word in any language could be quantified in terms of the position of that word on three dimensions (evaluation, potency, and activity).
evaluation (whether a person is good/bad), potency (whether a person is strong/week), and activity (whether a person is active/passive).
Developed by Osgood, who provide this, one of the earliest models of IPT. (aka Osgood's tridimensional model of implicit personality theory) |
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Term
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Definition
Opposite of Osgood's Affective Theory of Meaning. It was proposed by Rosenberg.
From her research, she found that evaluation and potency were highly correlated and were used often, and activity was seldom used in judgments. So, she developed her own model. Her model has two dimensions, simply evaluation (good/bad) and potency (strong/weak). Also, under her model, intellectual and social qualities are positively correlated.
This model held truer in experiments than did Osgood's. |
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Term
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Definition
Anderson's view of personality impression that "the whole is exactly the sum of its parts". Basically that global judgments are given by the weighted average of an individual's trait ensemble.
Anderson tested his models by asking subjects to rate a person based on an ensemble of traits. Initially the adding model was favored (4 high traits > 2 high traits) but the averaging model won (2 high traits > 2 high traits + 2 moderate).
BUT some traits are more important than others, and the individual differences vary across people so, we need to factor in a neutral initial bias (the bias that people have about other people) into the equation.
The averaging model works. We have a mathematical algorithm that predicts how likeable people are. Therefore, you have an impression of a person that is simply the average of their parts, and not greater than the whole of their parts. |
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Term
| Eckman's work on Facial Perception |
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Definition
| His work suggests that we have an evolved perceptual apparatus that enables us to perceive basic emotions like joy, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust from the expressions on people's faces/the stimulus information provided by the movements of the facial musculature. |
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Term
| "Duchenne smile" vs. "Pan-American smile" |
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Definition
Ties in with Eckman's work on facial perception.
The Duchenne Smile is genuine and involuntary. The Pan-American Smile is polite and voluntary, and is characterized by a completely different set of muscle movements. |
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Term
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Definition
| Work on facial attractiveness suggests that particular features of the facial stimulus -- namely its averageness and its symmetry -- give rise to perceptions of facial beauty. Again, evolutionary psychologists argue that our perceptual apparatus has evolved to extract these features, as cues to reproductive fitness. |
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Term
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Definition
| "Babyfacedness" appears to be a universal stimulus that stimulates caretaking and inhibits aggression -- not just in humans but in rabbits, dogs, and birds as well. An experimental literature shows that we do perceive "babyfaced" and "mature-faced" individuals as differing in personality. And, again, the idea is that babyfacedness is a universal stimulus precisely because the mechanisms for perceiving those features developed over evolutionary time. |
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Term
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Definition
| The idea is that you perceive something by paying attention to it, and that perceiving something encodes a representation of it in memory. |
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Term
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Definition
These are features that draw our attention to objects and events.
Vividness is inherent in the stimulus itself whereas salience is determined by the relation of the object to its context. Salience exaggerates attention, perceived prominence, evaluations, and coherence but not the sheer amount of memory. People may be emotionally aroused or entertained by vividness. |
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Term
| Situational Accessibility (including conscious and unconscious priming) vs. Chronic Accessibility |
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Definition
Situational Accessibility is based on the idea that priming of certain information makes you react differently in certain situations.
There's two parts to it:
unconscious - that priming occurs unconsciously and you unconsciously react the way that you’ve been primed
conscious - priming occurs consciously causing the perceiver to become more able to overcome or resist primed information
Chronic Accessibility is based on the idea that information that has been primed often or recently primed develops “chronicity” (i.e. permanence in memory) |
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Term
| assimilating a stimulus to an accessible category vs. contrast |
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Definition
Assimilating a stimulus to an accessible category is pretty much what it sounds like. You take stimulus and align it with preconceived notions (perhaps from priming).
Whereas contrast is that sometimes if you prime with a trait opposite to a judgment that you previously had, that you will believe that judgement. |
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Term
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Definition
| It emphasizes perceivers interacting with their environments and embedded in their own characteristic niche. Perception is adapted for perceivers; "perceiving is for doing," in this view, so perception will typically be accurate if perceivers are given sufficient information and context. |
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Term
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Definition
| A particular stimulus affords or offers particular behaviors to a perceiver, and the perceiver is reciprocally attuned or sensitive to particular stimulus properties. |
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Term
| Dissonance vs. Balance Theory |
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Definition
| Problem of maintaining consistency among attitudes. |
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Term
| Functional dimensions on which attitudes differ and serve |
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Definition
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Term
| Heuristic and Systematic Processing |
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Definition
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Term
| Central and Peripheral routes to persuasion and attitude change, and the factors that affect the likelihood that the receiver will elaborate on the persuader's communication. |
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Definition
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Term
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Definition
Memory with truth value.
Represented as sentence-like propositions (or a network of propositions), of which there are two forms:
semantic- (implicit personality theory) mental encylopedia/dictionary; book knowledge.
episodic- (autobiographical memory, person memory, etc.) memory that took place within a unique time and space. |
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Term
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Definition
Memory on how to do things.
Represented as "If-Then" productions (or systems of productions), of which there are two forms:
motoric - (eye contact, handgrip, display rules, interpersonal distance)
cognitive - (impression formation, self-regulation) |
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Term
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Definition
| --that is, memory for factual knowledge concerning the characteristics and behaviors of other people. So that makes it declarative memory. Memory for a person's general characteristics is semantic in nature. Memory for a person's specific behaviors and experiences is episodic in nature. |
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Term
| Memorization vs. Impression-Formation |
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Definition
Hamilton studied person memory.
He found that studying with an intention of forming an impression lead to a better memory than simply trying to memorize the characteristics about a person.
It turns out that, if you are trying to form an impression that organizational activity serves to unify various events in memory and create connections that weren’t there before. This has some important social consequences. If you try to form an impression of a person, then you will remember specific behaviors better. |
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Term
| Generic Associative-Network Models of Memory |
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Definition
Individual people are represented as nodes in the network; these nodes are linked to other nodes describing their traits and behaviors by associative links.
In such a system, each "person" is represented by a different node. When two nodes refer to the same person a new associative link is established (as opposed to importation or overlapping of nodes). |
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Term
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Definition
Schema (plural schemata) refers to the background knowledge, expectations, and beliefs that serve as the cognitive framework for perception, memory, and thought.
The general findings of this line of research are:
Schema-relevant information is remembered better than schema-irrelevant information;
Schema-incongruent information is remembered better than schema-congruent information. |
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Term
| Why is schema-incongruent remembered better than other schemas? |
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Definition
Another explanation is in terms of an associative network model of memory:
The extra processing devoted to schema-incongruent information at the time of encoding results in more associative links among schema-incongruent items, and between schema-incongruent items and schema-congruent items.
Because they do not get extra processing at the time of encoding, few associative links are established between schema-congruent items, or between schema-irrelevant items.
Therefore, the increased number of associative links makes it more likely that the retrieval process will access schema-congruent information.
In a test of the associative-network model, it was found that:
Prior retrieval of schema-congruent items primed subsequent retrieval of schema-incongruent items, but not of schema-congruent items.
Prior retrieval of schema-incongruent items primed subsequent retrieval of both schema-congruent and schema-incongruent items. |
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Term
| Associative Network Model and priming |
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Definition
Prior retrieval of schema-congruent items primed subsequent retrieval of schema-incongruent items, but not of schema-congruent items.
Prior retrieval of schema-incongruent items primed subsequent retrieval of both schema-congruent and schema-incongruent items. |
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Term
| How is semantic (trait) and episodic (behavioral) information represented in memory? |
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Definition
There are two theories:
Items of trait knowledge are represented independently of items of behavioral knowledge = both fan off the person node.
Only items of trait knowledge are linked directly with the person node = items of trait-related behaviors are linked with the nodes representing their respective traits, so that behavioral knowledge is organized by trait knowledge.
But when subjects recall behavioral episodes they do not cluster their recall according to the traits the behaviors represent. This lack of clustering is consistent with the independence view.
And retrieval of trait knowledge does not prime retrieval of behavioral knowledge, which is also inconsistent with the organizational view, and consistent with the independence view.
So, we conclude that, in person memory, items of trait (semantic) and behavioral (episodic) knowledge are represented independently of each other. In this view, each node in the network is a symbol that stands for some fact about the person. |
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Term
| Connectionist vs. Symbolic View |
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Definition
(Both the standard (declarativist) view and the proceduralist view assume that declarative person memory is represented by symbolic nodes in an associative network)
(Both form the theoretical background for asking about the neural representation of person memory in the brain)
Connectionist: knowledge isn't represented by discrete nodes in a network. Instead, knowledge is represented by the pattern of activation among processing elements widely distributed across the network as a whole. Because knowledge about James Bartlett is not associated with any discrete neural location, specific lesions will not disrupt retrieval of this knowledge.
Symbolic: There might be discrete neurons, or more likely discrete clusters of neurons, associated with each node in the network. The implication is that, if these neural structures were lesioned, knowledge about "James Bartlett" would be lost irretrievably. |
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Term
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Definition
Accounts of the neural substrates of memory have favored the connectionist view -- which is why connectionist models of memory are often touted as "neurally plausible".
However, a recent neuroscientific study involving single-unit recording of brain activity in conscious patients yielded evidence supporting the locationist view.
e.g. Jennifer Aniston neuron etc.
Results such s these suggest that, perhaps, there is a "Grandmother Neuron" after all -- a small neural unit that represents, in neural form, all your knowledge about our grandmother. |
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Term
| three models of category structure |
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Definition
In both the category view and the prototype view, categories are represented mentally as summary descriptions.
In the category view, the description applies to each and every category instance.
In the prototype view, the description applies only to the "average" or "typical" instance.
In the exemplar view, there is no summary at all: the category is defined by its instances, not by the features of its instances. |
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Term
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Definition
the idea is that the past is not merely an objective fact, but is rather a socially constructed reality -- but one constructed by groups, not by individuals. Members of different social groups will remember different events, and will remember the same events differently, than those of other social groups. And social groups are defined, in part, by what they choose to remember and forget, and how they choose to remember it.
Collective memories are impersonal (historical) |
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Term
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Definition
in which individuals remember events that happened to their groups as if they had happened to themselves. Think of the motto of Holocaust survivors: 'Never forget!".
Such social phenomena make clear Zerubavel's essential point: that the past is socially constructed, and that memories of the past are not merely a property of individual minds and brains. |
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