Social Cognition Vocabulary

where suppression attempts fail; a suppressed stereotype returns to have an even greater impact on one's judgments about a person from a stereotyped group

trying to prevent an activated stereotype from impacting upon one's judgments about a person from a stereotyped group

proposes that two different processes can occur independently and that one does not inevitably follow from the other (eg. Devine's proposed dissociation between automatic and controlled processes in stereotyping in Devine, 1989)

reaction-type task that assesses attention left over from performing the primary task; doesn't take away attention from the primary task (ie. not resource depleting)

a processing goal whereby perceivers believe they will have to justify their responses to a third party and be held responsible for their impressions; this typically leads to less stereotypical impressions

motivational objective in which participants believe they will later meet a target and work together with that target on a task; shown to lead to less stereotypical impressions

views impression formation as a process going from category-based evaluations at one end to individuated responses at the other, dependent on the interplay of motivational and attentional factors

information about a person's personal characteristics not normally derived from a particular category membership

where an outcome is conditional upon a certain goal being in place

goal that enables people to regulate responses, is engaged without conscious awareness (eg. overcoming a stereotype)

a positively valued behavioural end-state that encompasses the purposeful drive/motivation to engage in a behaviour/action/judgment

a view of people as being often limited in processing capacity and apt to take shortcuts where possible to make life simple

placing weight on initial standards/schemas (anchors) and as a result we may not always adjust sufficiently far from these anchors to provide accurate judgments

how quickly information comes to mind about a particular event, to deduce the likelihood/frequency of that event

info that gives an idea how frequent certain categories are in the general population

a mental shortcut whereby instances are assigned to categories on the basis of how similar they are to the category in general

the way in which we translate what we see into a digestible format to be stored in the mind

cognitive measure (of accessibility) of how quickly people classify stimuli as real words or nonsense words; quicker responses to the certain word categories indicate increased accessibility

the extent to which information is easily located and retrieved

activating one stimulus (eg. bird) facilitates the processing of another related stimulus (eg. wing, feather)

the tendency to group objects/people into discrete groups based upon shared characteristics common to them

a cognitive structure that contains our knowledge, beliefs and expectancies about some human social group

a well-used, non-optimal rule of thumb used to arrive at a judgment that is effective in many but not all cases; stereotypes are often said to function as [ ]

cognitive structure or mental representation comprising pre-digested information or knowledge about objects/people from specific categories, our expectancies about objects/groups, what defines them

a process that is intentional, under the individual's volitional control, effortful and entails conscious awareness

occurs without intention, effort or awareness and doesn't interfere with other concurrent cognitive processes

a large topic within social psychology concerned with understanding how we think about ourselves and other people and how the processes involved impact upon our judgments and behaviour in social contexts