1/30/15 – Lecture Notes and Chapter 4- Social Cognition: interpreting/ perceiving/ think about the social world and arrive at judgmentso Interpret the past, understand the present, and predict the future Social cognition judgment can only be as good as the available information- Snap judgments: consistent judgments we make but are usually incorrect- Pluralistic Ignorance: first-hand information of how we’re perceiving another person’s behavior, but being wrong about the reasons behind themo Misperception of a group norm that results from observing people who are acting at variance with their private beliefs out of a concern for the social consequences – actions that reinforcethe erroneous group norm- Second-hand Information: someone telling you about something else while inserting their own opinion about the topico Ideological Distortions: a desire to foster certain beliefs or behaviors in others, leads them to accentuate some elements ofa story and suppress otherso Overemphasis on bad news: over victimizes the idea that we areall in trouble more than we ever actually are Social cognition highly depends on how the information is presented- Order Effects: the order in which information is presentedo Primacy Effect: the disproportionate influence on judgment by information presented first in a body of evidenceo Recency Effect: the disproportionate influence on judgment by information presented last in a body of evidenceo Framing Effect: the influence on judgment resulting from the way information is presented, such as the order of presentation or how it is wordedo Construal Level Theory: outlines the relationship between psychological distance and the concreteness versus abstraction of thought Psychologically distant actions and events are thought about in abstract terms … actions and events that are close at hand are thought about in concrete terms We do not passively take in information but rather we seek out the information- Confirmation Bias: the tendency to test a proposition by searching for evidence that would support it Our preexisting knowledge, expectations, and mental habits can influence the construal of new information and thus substantially influence judgment- Bottom-Up Processes: “data-driven” mental processing, in which an individual forms conclusions based on the stimuli encountered through experience- Top-Down Processes: “theory-driven” mental processing, in which an individual filters and interprets new information in light of preexisting knowledge and expectation- Encoding: filing information away in memory based on what informationis attended to and the initial interpretation of the information- Retrieval: the extraction of information from memory- Prime: a stimulus used to momentarily activate a concept and hence make it accessible- Subliminal: a memory or sensory input below the threshold of consciousawareness Two mental systems – intuition and reason – underlie social cognition, and their complex interplay determines the judgments we make- Heuristics: intuitive mental operations that allow us to make a variety of judgments quickly and efficientlyo Availability Heuristics: the process whereby judgments of frequency or probability are based on how readily pertinent instances come to mind Fluency: the feeling of ease associated with processing informationo Representativeness Heuristic: the process by whereby judgments of likelihood are based on assessments of similarity between individuals and group prototypes or between cause and effect Base-Rate Information: information about the relative frequency of events or of members of different categories in the population Planning Fallacy: the tendency for people to be unrealistically optimistic about how quickly they can complete a project Illusory Correlation: the belief that two variables are correlated when in fact they are