Exam 5: Social Cognition

The self-serving bias refers to people's tendency to think that others are more similar to them than they really are when it comes to their faults and weaknesses.

Fritz Heider analyzed what he called "common sense psychology"-the ways in which people explain everyday events. He suggested that most people explain everyday events in terms of either ____ factors.

Current theory and research suggests that the power and size of the human cerebral cortex may have evolved largely in order to ____.

How does the fundamental attribution error (FAE) differ from the actor-observer effect (AOE)?

You flip a coin ten times in a row. Every single time it comes up heads. On the eleventh flip, is it more likely to be heads, tails, or are heads and tails equally likely ? If you are a hot hand player, you will answer ____.

Wing Tung is reading his textbook for history class. At the end of each paragraph, he stops and asks himself what the paragraph was about. Once he feels like he knows that, he goes on. Wing Tung is using ____ to improve his thinking.

The belief that people can control totally chance situations is the ____.

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

One explanation for the false consensus effect is that people use their own attitudes and behaviors as "anchors" for predicting others' attitudes and behaviors.

Research indicates that ____ and ____ are two main motivations underlying the self-serving bias.

Recent research suggests that the basic distinction people make in attribution processes is between _____________________ and _____________________ behavior.

When people make external, unstable attributions for others' successes or failures, these attributions tend to concern questions of ____.

Jacob is taking his economics final exam. He answers question #31 with "D" but isn't sure about it. After answering all the other questions, he goes back to 31 and starts to believe that perhaps "C" was the right answer. He decides to stick with "D," most likely because of ____.

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

Sometimes people blow on dice when playing a board game to make sure they get the numbers they need to advance in the game. When people believe they can affect the dice by blowing on them they are experiencing the ____.

Your friend Roger has recently been promoted at work to senior vice president. If you made an internal, unstable attribution for Roger's promotion, what might you be thinking?

The illusion of control tends to produce ____.

"If only I had decided to take a different route home, I wouldn't have hit that stupid tree and ended up getting this huge ticket! Argh!" This thought is an example of ____.

Given the research on cognitive errors and biases, it can be concluded that ____.

Research on ____ is concerned with the causal explanations people give for their own and others' behaviors, and for events in general.