《社会认知心理学》阅读材料
Social Cognition
Instructor：Li Tonggui
Glossary of Social Cognition
Accessibility
The ease and speed with which information stored in memory is found and retrieved.
Accountability
Requirement for research participants to justify a generated judgment to others; used
to foster systematic (as opposed to heuristic) information processing.
Acquiescence bias:
Tendency to provide more yes than no responses in interviews and survey research.
Activation
Transfer of information from inactive long-term memory to active working
memory.
Applicability
Whether a concept can potentially be used to give meaning to a specific stimulus.
Whether or not the concept is actually used also depends on the concept’s accessibility.
Assimilation effect
Judgments of a stimulus are biased towards the position of a context stimulus on
the judgment scale.
Attention
Processes that enable individuals to selectively attend to the (social) environment.
Attribution theory
Deals with the processes that are involved when individuals try to explain behavior
or events.
Attribution
Individuals’ inferences about the cause of behaviors or events.
Automatic processes
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《社会认知心理学》阅读材料
Social Cognition
Instructor：Li Tonggui
Cognitive processes that are initiated and run without controlled processes,
requiring no or very few attentional resources.
Availability
Judgmental heuristic for judging the frequency or probability of events on the basis
of the ease with which relevant memories come to mind.
Base rate
Frequency of a characteristic in a relevant population or sample.
Bottom-up processing
Information processing that is driven by new stimulus input rather than by abstract
knowledge structures in memory; see also top-down processing.
Category
Elementary knowledge structure. Class of functionally similar objects sharing one
or more features.
Cognitive miser
Metaphor for the assumption that individuals try to avoid elaborative and extensive
information processing, and often rely on simplifying short cuts and heuristics.
Concept-driven processing
See top-down processing
Conjunction fallacy
Overestimating the likelihood of a joint occurrence of several characteristics on the
basis of similarity.
Consistency theories
Hold that individuals experience an aversive state when they perceive that they
hold inconsistent beliefs about the social world. Because individuals try to avoid or
eliminate this aversive state, they process information in a biased fashion so that
perceived inconsistencies are reduced.
Constructive memory
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《社会认知心理学》阅读材料
Social Cognition
Instructor：Li Tonggui
Self-generated, imagined, or inferred information is erroneously remembered as if
it had been actually experienced.
Context dependency
The notion that social judgments (and the underlying processes) are highly
dependent on the situational context in which they are formed. For example, a person
may be judged more positively in one situation than in another simply because different
standards of comparisons are accessible and applied.
Contrast effect
Judgments of a stimulus are biased in the direction opposite to the position of a
context stimulus on the judgment scale.
Controlled processes
Cognitive processes that are consciously initiated by the individual, usually
requiring substantial cognitive resources.
Data-driven processing
See bottom-up processing
Encoding
Comprises various processes that are involved when an external stimulus is
transformed into an internal representation so that it can be retained by the cognitive
system. This requires that the external stimulus is given some meaning by relating the
new stimulus to prior knowledge.
Episodic memory
Memory of experienced events that are tied to particular times and places.
Illusory correlations
Observers believe they have seen a correlation in a series of stimulus events,
although the actually presented correlation has been absent or clearly lower.
Implicit association test (IAT)
Computerized procedure for measuring association tendencies related to attitudes
and prejudice, based on the sorting speed for attitude objects and relevant attributes.
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《社会认知心理学》阅读材料
Social Cognition
Instructor：Li Tonggui
Incidental affect
Affective state that is perceived as independent of the judgmental target.
Integral affect
Affective state that is perceived as a result of the judgmental target.
Judgmental heuristic
Rules of thumb that allow quick and economic judgments even under high
uncertainty.
Linguistic inter-group bias
The tendency to describe positive in-group behavior and negative out-group
behavior in more abstract linguistic terms than negative in-group and positive out-group
behavior.
Metacognition
Cognitive processes that involve knowledge about knowledge or processes; for
example, knowing that we do not know the answer to a specific question.
Mood as information
The notion that affective states may themselves serve as relevant information in
making a judgment.
Mood-congruent recall
The tendency to recall information that is congruent with one’s affective states, for
example, recalling positive events in happy moods and negative events in sad moods.
Mood management
The notion that individuals are motivated to maintain positive affective states and
to eliminate negative affective states and consequently engage in cognitive processes
that allow them to attain these goals; for example, to intentionally think of positive
events when in a sad mood.
Network models
Conceptualizations of human memory that assume a system of nodes and
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《社会认知心理学》阅读材料
Social Cognition
Instructor：Li Tonggui
connections.
Positive testing
Selective information search for those events or behaviors that are stated in the
hypothesis under focus.
Priming effect
The finding that a schema is more accessible and hence more likely to be activated
when it has recently been presented or used in the past.
Representativeness
Representativeness heuristic for judging category membership on the basis of
various aspects of similarity.
Retrieval
Processes that are involved when individuals retrieve information from long-term
memory into working memory.
Salience
The distinctiveness of a stimulus relative to the context reflected in its ability to
attract attention (for example, a male in a group of females; a group of people of whom
one is in the spotlight).
Schema
Knowledge structure linked to adaptive function. Once a schema is activated by
specific events, specific reactions are triggered.
Script
Temporally organized behavioral routine.
Self-fulfilling prophecy
An expectancy-based illusion in social hypothesis testing. Subject persons treat
object persons in such a fashion that object persons eventually verify their original
(often unjustified) expectations.
Self-reference effect
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《社会认知心理学》阅读材料
Social Cognition
Instructor：Li Tonggui
Memory advantage for stimuli that have been encoded or judged in relation to the self.
Shared-information effect
In-group decision making, information shared by different group members is
more likely to be considered, and is given more weight, than unshared information that
is exclusively available to individual members.
State-dependency
Describes the general finding that memory performance is enhanced if individuals
are in the same psychological state (e.g., the same mood) at both the time of encoding
and the time of retrieval.
Stereotype
Category-like knowledge structure associated with a social group, judgment of
persons on the basis of characteristics of their social group.
Subliminal
On a subconscious level; out of awareness
Top-down processing
Information processing that is driven by general, superordinate knowledge
structures in memory (e.g., schema, stereotype) that influences the perception of new
stimuli; see also bottom-up processing
Truncated search process
When searching in memory for applicable information (e.g., for encoding, or for
computing a judgment), individuals are unlikely to search for all potentially relevant
information but instead truncate the search processes. Due to this truncation,
information that has a higher accessibility is more influential.
Working memory
The part of our memory system that is currently activated; it has little processing
capacity. In order to enter into long-term memory, information has to pass through
working memory. Conversely, information from long-term memory needs to enter
working memory in order to affect ongoing processes, judgments, and behaviors.
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