Exam 5: Social Cognition

An attribution is a(n) ____.

Hilda is on a low carbohydrate diet, which restricts her from eating foods such as white bread, potato chips, and pretzels. The more Hilda thinks about the fact that she cannot eat such foods, however, the more desperately she begins to crave them. Social psychologists refer to this kind of pattern as a(n) __________________.

You have just spent the afternoon volunteering in the post-anesthesia recovery unit at the local hospital, helping patients with a variety of ailments. Even though you are not actually ill, as you walk home from the hospital you do so with a slight limp, and begin coughing lightly. What phenomenon is most likely to be responsible for this?

The Stroop test can be thought of as a demonstration of ____.

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

People tend to judge others by ____, and people tend to judge themselves by ____.

The text introduces revolutionary research in social cognition by Mercier and Sperber (2011), who studied ____.

People might very well overestimate the likelihood for celebrity marriages to end in divorce, since celebrity divorces tend to be highly publicized (while happy celebrity marriages do not make front page news as easily). The overestimation could be explained in terms of ____.

"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 ____.

Rosaura has a definite idea of what an apartment is like. It is a small walk-up on the fifth floor, the kitchen is better suited to take-out meals than dinner parties, and the views are limited to alleys and the windows of other apartments. As a result, when she moves to a small city and is apartment hunting, she shocks the rental agent by repeatedly commenting about how big the rooms are, how spacious and well-equipped the kitchens are, how nice the views are, and how convenient the elevators are in getting to a third floor apartment. Rosaura's apartment ____ has been violated by the apartments she is viewing.

Elenita is from a relatively sheltered background. When she goes to college, she meets a Hispanic student. This student is the only Hispanic person she has ever known. The student is very independent and outspoken on their first meeting. After that meeting, Elenita decides that Hispanics in general must be independent and outspoken. Elenita's reaction illustrates the ____.

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

Describe how one might reduce cognitive errors in processing social information.

A knowledge structure that contains information about a concept and its relationship to other concepts (e.g., a structure that contains information about judges and how judges relate to lawyers, criminals, the general public, and so forth) is known as a ____.

Which statement best illustrates a gain-framed appeal?

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 ____.

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 ________________.

Jarvis very much wants to convince his friends that it would be good to take the day off studying and go to a concert in a nearby city. He points out the importance of taking occasional breaks from studying and recharging. He also notes that he has a friend who can get them good tickets at a reduced price. By spinning his argument and focusing on positives, Jarvis is relying on ____ to make his friends more likely to agree.

What sorts of cognitive biases do people engage in that help them to feel better about themselves (i.e., what cognitive biases work to satisfy the motivation for self-enhancement)?

Montana and Sarah are playing cards. Montana has a great hand-four aces-while Sarah's hand is just average-a 2 of hearts, a 3 of spades, a 5 of spades, and a 7 of clubs. Even though the statistical probability of both hands is the same, many people (incorrectly) assume that Montana's exact hand is rarer than Sarah's exact hand. This common misconception stems most directly from the ____.