Social Psych - Ch. 3

How people think about themselves and the social world, or more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgements and decisions.

Thinking that is unconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless.

Mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social world around themes or subjects that influence the information people notice, think about, and remember.

The extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people's minds and are therefore likely to be used when making judgments about the social world.

The process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, or concept.

The case whereby people have an expectation about what another person is like, which influences how they act toward that person, which causes that person to behave consistently with people's original expectations, making the expectations come true.

Mental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently.

A mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind.

A mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case.

Information about the frequency of members of different categories in the populations.

A type of thinking in which people focus on the properties of objects without considering their surrounding context; this type of thinking is common in Western cultures.

A type of thinking in which people focus on overall context particularly the ways in which objects relate to each other; this type of thinking is common in East Asian cultures.

Thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful.

Mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been.

The attempt to avoid thinking about something we would prefer to forget.

The fact that people usually have too much confidence in the accuracy of their judgments.