Social Psychology Terms Quiz

Social Psychology Terms

• Schemas: Sets of thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes used to understand individuals, situations, or events. They provide a framework for interpreting limited information.
• Top-down processing: Theory-driven approach, starting with a general theory and then examining specific details.
• Bottom-up processing: Data-driven approach, starting with specific details and building towards a general theory.
• Person schemas: Knowledge structures concerning role occupants.
• Scripts: Schemas about events (e.g., a festival).
• Self-schemas: Schemas about oneself often complex and varied.
• Content-free schemas: Rules for processing information.
• Categories/Prototypes: General representations of attributes; prototypes are typical/ideal features (of a category, not always representative).
• Family resemblance: Defining property of category membership: features overlap, no single defining attribute.
• Exemplars: Specific instances of a category member, highlighting concrete examples.
• Stereotypes: Schemas about social groups; often used for outgroups and associated with prejudice and conflict. Stereotypes simplify images of group members. Often based on physical differences. Adaptive cognitive shortcut for quick judgments, but prone to change. Affected by social, political or economic changes; usually crystallized after age 10.

Accentuate

• Accentuation principle: Similarities emphasized within categories and differences between categories are highlighted. Categories show more errors in differences than between categories.

Basic level categories

• Middle range categories: Useful and readily processed due to their cognitive priority.

Optimal distinctiveness theory

• Balance between conflicting needs to perceive similarities and differences amongst people.

Categorizing people

• Ways to categorize people (e.g., distinctive cues, standing out from the group).
• The categories are in schemas (easily retrieved from memory).

Schema Acquisition and Change

• Schemas are acquired through experience and can be modified. Schemas are initially general and become more complex over time.
• Acquiring schemas: Instances that fit the category increase schema generality and abstraction.
• Changing schemas: Schemas change slowly, requiring supportive evidence. Significant change occurs only with inaccurate evidence (bookkeeping, conversion, or sub-typing).
• Social encoding: Process of representing external social stimuli in minds; influenced by salience and perceived accessibility.

4 key stages of social encoding

• Pre-attentive analysis: Automatic, non-conscious scanning of the environment.
• Focal attention: Stimuli are consciously identified and categorized.
• Comprehension: Stimuli are given a meaning.
• Elaborative reasoning: Linking stimuli to other knowledge (allows complex inferences).
• Salience: Stimuli that stand out from the background, or are especially meaningful in the current context.

Salient people

• Important in a specific context; they attract attention and are influential in a group. They are more responsible for their actions and less influenced by the situation.

Priming

• Activating accessible categories or schemas in memory, influencing the processing of new information.
• Person memory: Remembering people based on schemas.

Associative network

• Specific ideas or memories (nodes) linked together in a network, activated by cognitive rehearsals.

Types of memory

• Long-term memory: Vast store of information brought to mind.
• Short-term memory: Working memory, focus of attention, limited.

Person Memory Structure

• Concrete appearance (observable traits) to more abstract categories (e.g., personality).
• Positive/desirable to negative/undesirable attributes. Stored like pictures in memory.
• Accurate at remembering faces.

Organizing Person's Memory

• Categorizing people by person vs. by group.
• First encounters with strangers leads to categorizing them based on salient characteristics (pigeon-hole).
• Social inference: Processing information to form impressions.

Categories (Brewer)

• Schemas related to categorized information
• Attributes or traits.

Heuristic/Peripheral route

• Simple, top-down decisions based on schemas or cognitive shortcuts.
• systematic/central route: More deliberate and thoughtful decision-making process, examining the reasons behind decisions.

Illusory Correlation

• Exaggerated perception of a relationship between two stimuli or events where no connection exists. Often caused by distinctive events being viewed as more common, e.g., negative stereotype of minority groups.

Cognitive Heuristics

• Simplification methods used to solve complex problems.
• Representative heuristic assesses similarity.
• Availability heuristic focuses on readily-available information (perceptions).
• Anchoring and adjustment focuses on early perceptions which act as a baseline.

People as naïve psychologists

• Individuals construct causal theories of human behavior (similar to scientific methods).
• Understanding individuals, their motives, and the causes of their actions.

Attribution theory

• Internal vs External attributions (causes of behavior) and self vs other differences
• Covariation model: Attributing cause of a behavior to factors that closely correlate with that behavior.
• Dimensions of performance (e.g., locus, stability, controllability).
• Self-perception theory (making self-attributions to understand oneself).
• Defining emotions (psychological arousal and cognitions).
• Attribution bias (assessing cause of behaviors based on others' actions).
• Attributional style (tendency to make the same type of attribution).
• Internal (personal) vs External (situational) attributions
• Attributional Conflict

Correspondent Inference

• Inferring a correspondence between a person's behavior and their personality traits.
• Correspondence bias: Fundamental Attribution error; tendency to attribute behavior to internal factors, overlooking situational influences
• Actor-observer effect: Attribute others' behavior to internal factors but our own behavior to external situational factors.
• Asymmetry of information: Better understanding of oneself than of another person regarding situational context.
• False consensus: Overestimating the degree to which others share our views or behavior.
• Self-serving bias: Attributing our successes to internal factors and failures to external factors.
• Self-enhancing bias: Attributing positive behaviors to personality, not coercion.

Self-protecting bias

• Explaining negative behaviors as external and situational to protect our image.

Intergroup attributions and prejudice

• Attributing behaviors to group membership rather than individual factors.
• Ultimate attribution error: Negative out-group behavior attributed internally and positively to groups.

Social representations

• Common sense interpretations of social reality; creating shared understanding.

Rumors and conspiracy theories

• Unverified accounts intended to create explanation or sense.
• Conspiracy theories attribute widely-spread events to secret organized groups.

Test your knowledge of key terms and concepts in social psychology through this engaging quiz. Learn about schemas, processing types, and other foundational ideas that shape our understanding of social interactions. Challenge yourself to recall important definitions and examples.