Exam 5: Social Cognition

Suppose you meet an old man named Al. You have no idea how old he is. To try to guess his age you start with your grandfather's age (80), and then add on a few years since Al seems to be a little older. That is, you make use of ____.

Donovan is a research scientist at a prestigious university. Due to the representativeness heuristic, people assume he wears glasses, is lanky and pale due to lack of exercise, and is socially awkward.

Research on conformity and attribution reveals that people are ____.

Joe takes on his sister's view that all people from "up north" are snobs. Later, Joe learns that his sister's opinion was based on the fact that her boyfriend from "up north" recently dumped her. Yet, Joe persists in his belief that people from "up north" are snobby. This best illustrates ____.

A well-known test used in psychological research plays on the distinction between automatic and controlled processing. The test requires people to look at the written names of several colors (green, red, blue, etc.)-names which are, in all cases, written in "nonmatching" colors of ink (e.g., the word "green" might be written in red ink, while the word "red" might be written in yellow ink)-and to identify, as quickly as possible, the color in which each word is written. This test is known as the ____.

Feeling sorry for misfortunes, limitations, losses, transgressions, shortcomings, or mistakes is called ____.

Mr. X thinks that Barack Obama became president of the United States because-even though he is not that brilliant or talented-he made a real effort to campaign well in 2008. But Mr. Y thinks that Barack Obama only became president because he was "in the right place at the right time," and had good luck. Social psychologists would say that Mr. X is making ____ attributions for Obama's success, while Mr. Y is making ____ attributions.

Recall the "Castro study" conducted by Jones and Harris. In this study, participants were asked to read an essay that was supposedly written by a student. The essay was either pro-Castro or anti-Castro. Also, participants were told either (a)that the essay writer got to choose which side to take (pro- or anti-), or (b)that the essay writer was ASSIGNED to one side or the other. The researchers found that ____.

The so-called " Sports Illustrated jinx"-the tendency for athletes to experience a dip in performance directly after appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated -can be best explained by ____.

Suppose Mr. Yipol gives 100 students a reading exam. He then selects five students with the highest scores for a special reading program. At the end of the reading program, he administers the same reading exam again. To Mr. Yipol's astonishment, the students actually perform poorly this time. While it might well be the case that the reading program actually negatively impacted the students' reading ability, Mr. Yipol would be wise to consider that the decrease could be due to ____.

When people want to suppress a thought, the automatic mind works to ____.

Even though Vlad never actually exercises, you have always assumed that he is an athlete because he hangs around at the gym (like other athletes), drinks bottled water nonstop, and wears sweat suits everywhere. Your (false)assumption that Vlad is an athlete is most clearly an example of the ____.

Research on the anchoring and adjustment heuristic indicates that people ____.

Describe counterfactual thinking and provide two examples.

Suppose a coin is flipped 20 times. The first 19 flips are all heads. Is the last flip more likely to be heads, more likely to be tails, or equally likely to be heads or tails? According to gambler's fallacy, players ____.

In his research, Malle concluded that there is ____.

Within the field of social cognition, scripts can be thought of as ____.

In informal surveys, people always overestimate the number of lesbians who have AIDS. Lesbians actually have extremely low rates of AIDS, but people tend to associate lesbians with gay men (who have relatively high rates). Thus, people tend to think that they see a lesbian-AIDS relationship when in fact there is no such relationship. This is a good example of the ____.

Quite understandably, students are often more upset about missing an exam question when they had previously circled the correct answer-and then changed it to an incorrect answer-as opposed to when they had chosen an incorrect answer all along. This is most directly related to the ____.

The older students get, the more variance there is in their reading test scores. This pattern can be attributed to statistical regression.