Exam 5: Social Cognition

Yesi and her boyfriend have just broken up, and Yesi has been deeply upset about the breakup for several days. She is trying to take her mind off of her ex-boyfriend, though, and to focus her attention on other things instead. However, if this attempted thought suppression results in ironic processing, then Yesi will most likely end up ____.

Suppose that Dorothy and Tim are out to lunch together, and both are on restricted-calorie diets. Which of the following would be the best example of counterregulation?

The so-called "self-serving bias" refers to the tendency for people to ____.

Priming people with money can ____.

A gain-framed appeal focuses on framing something in ____ terms.

Social psychologists use the term ____ to refer to a process by which a given stimulus activates mental pathways, thereby enhancing their accessibility.

People tend to want to explore most issues thoroughly before making decisions.

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 ____.

Counterregulation occurs when people indulge in a behavior they are trying to regulate after an initial regulation failure.

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

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

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

There are a number of heuristics, errors, and biases upon which people routinely rely that suggest that they are not naturally skilled at making estimates of statistical probabilities. Identify and discuss at least three of these.

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?

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 ____.

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 ____.

Otilia is furious when she gets back an exam that she thought she should have aced. Instead, she receives a low C, and attributes it to a water main repair involving heavy construction equipment going on less than 10 yards from the open classroom windows. Otilia's explanation relies on ____ factors.

The term ________________ was coined to refer to people's general unwillingness to do much extra conscious thinking (i.e., people's mental "laziness").

Once a dieter has slipped up and indulged at the Dairy Queen, he or she is likely to engage in ________________.

The term "cognitive miser" was coined to refer to ____.