Exam 4: Social Cognition: Thinking About People and Situations

You think of Jan as a very introverted person. The confirmation bias predicts that you will

Luis has negative schemas about his looks and his intelligence. He believes he is unattractive and doubts his smarts. At school on Friday, Luis interacted with a few different people. Which of these interactions is Luis likely to remember the following week?

The research in which participants who were primed to think of elderly people later walked more slowly down a hallway best shows

When information ________ has the most influence on people, the primacy effect has occurred. When information ________ has the most influence on people, the recency effect has occurred.

Give two examples of variables that influence the accuracy of secondhand information. Then, for each, describe a situation in everyday life where it could occur.

The media (television news programs, newspaper articles, news websites) tend to emphasize dangerous and/or criminal events. How does this so-called bad-news bias influence people's judgments about danger and crime? In addition, discuss how the availability heuristic is relevant to these judgments.

Give two examples of how order and framing effects influence specific types of judgments.

Construal level theory predicts that we think about events distant in time or space in ________ terms, and that we think about events nearer in time or space in ________ terms.

Lola visits Trish in Weston, CT. At some point, Lola asks Trish whether there is a lot of crime in Weston. Although crime rarely occurs there, Trish recalls a recent news story about a Weston drug store robbery. On the basis of this memory, she then tells Lola that there is a lot of crime in Weston. This scenario illustrates reliance on the ________ heuristic.

Describe the planning fallacy and summarize research on why this fallacy occurs.

Many members of a street gang believe privately that their initiation process is too harsh and dangerous. However, they do not express these beliefs because they assume that everyone else thinks the initiation process is just fine. This scenario exemplifies

Lauren is an attractive woman. She has large round eyes, a large forehead, high eyebrows, and a rounded small chin. When other people first meet Lauren, what are they likely to think about her?

Describe two examples of how a person could apply the wrong schemas to situations. In your examples, clearly explain the processes that led to the use of the wrong schema.

The textbook describes an experiment conducted by Bargh and Pietromonaco (1982) in which participants were exposed to a list of words too quickly to discern them. Participants were exposed to either a list composed mainly of hostile words or a list composed mainly of nonhostile words. Consistent with the argument that ________ stimuli influence schemas, results showed that those exposed to the hostile list ________.

Imagine you are part of a marketing team designing an ad campaign for an expensive new sneaker. Define spin framing and then design an ad for the sneaker using this approach.

The phenomenon of ________ occurs when people are reluctant to express their misgivings about a perceived group norm. Unfortunately, their reluctance reinforces a false norm.

According to Tversky and Kahneman, when an initial intuitive assessment of a situation is not modified or overridden by a more deliberative analysis,

When people form judgments about everyday events, the feature-matching process usually

Which of the following instances of "common sense" may be due to the representativeness heuristic?

Imagine that you have just finished a joint project for your psychology class. According to research on heuristics, will other people take more credit for the project than you think they deserve? Why or why not? Use research to justify your answer.