Exam 5: Social Cognition

Across many different contexts and settings, people prefer to attribute their successes to ability and effort but tend to attribute their failures to bad luck or task difficulty. This is known as ____.

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 the ____ effect.

Even though stomach cancer kills more people than plane crashes do, most people tend to assume that plane crashes cause more deaths. This misconception seems to arise from ____, since plane crash fatalities tend to be widely publicized and are therefore relatively easy for people to recall.

People apply the ____ exclusively to their own desirable behaviors.

In Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996), participants who were in the "rude" priming condition were more likely to ____.

Suppose that Mr. Yipol gives 100 students a reading exam. He then selects the 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, though, the students actually perform worse 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 ____.

People who receive extremely low scores on IQ tests almost always perform better the second time around. This pattern can be attributed to ____________________.

Research demonstrates that, in counterfactual thinking, people engage in far more ____ than ____.

The false consensus effect refers to the tendency for people to ____.

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 "non-matching" 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 ____.

Polina is three years old. She is just beginning to understand concepts such as "dog," "cat," "chair," and "sofa," and to understand how these concepts differ from one another. In other words, she is just beginning to develop ____________________.

Schemas and scripts are both examples of ____.

Suppose that 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 ____.

Suppose that 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? When people engage in the gambler's fallacy, they ____.

The opposite of a cognitive miser would be someone who ____.

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 ____.

As discussed in the textbook, research participants who read a story about a character named "Donald"-a character who engages in skydiving, demolition derby driving, and other similar activities-tend to think that Donald is especially reckless when they have been ____.

The belief that one should not change an answer on a test, even if additional consideration has led one to believe another answer might be the correct one, is called the ____.

Mr. X thinks that Barack Obama became president of the U.S. 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.

Research shows that people tend to engage in fewer cognitive errors and biases in everyday thinking ____.