Social Cognition

Organized beliefs we have about stimuli in our social world are known as what?

• Automatic processes

• Deliberate processes

• Self concepts

• Schemas

What topic do people spend the greatest amount of time thinking about?

• Weather

• Money

• People

• Food

Which of the following is not one of the elements that distinguish automatic from deliberate processes?

• Relevance

• Efficiency

• Effort

• Awareness

You and your classmate work on a project, and it succeeds!  In describing your relative contributions to the project, you assume that your contribution is greater than your classmate’s, but they assume their contribution is greater than yours.  Which of the following does this illustrate?

• Self-serving bias

• Actor/observer bias

• False consensus effect

• Fundamental attribution error

Which of the following is not a way to reduce the fundamental attribution error?

• Think of how you would react if you were in their shoes

• Being empathetic/

  sympathetic

• People are cognitive misers

The strategy of judging the likelihood of things by how well they match what we expect constitutes which heuristic?

• Vividness

• Representativeness

• Matching

• Availability

People’s greater fear of flying than of driving can probably best be explained by which heuristic?

• Representativeness

• Simulation

• Anchoring and adjustment

• Availability

Masako asked two friends to estimate the number of people living in Tokyo.  The correct answer, according to the 2000 census, was just over 12 million.  She asked the first friend whether it was more or less than 8 million.  She asked the second friend whether it was more or less than 16 million.  The first friend guessed 9 million people, whereas the second friend guessed 15 million people.  The difference in estimates can best be explained using which heuristic?

• Simulation

• Representativeness

• Availability

• Anchoring and adjustment

What system is mainly responsible for the cognitive errors that people make?

• Automatic system

• Secondary system

• Deliberate system

• Primary system

People make fewer cognitive errors when they are making decisions about which of the following?

• Very serious matters (survival)

• Trivial matters (What brand of toothpaste to buy)

• Important matters (what major to select in college)

• None of the above; cognitive errors are the same for the three types of matters.