Social Cognition (Ch 7)
What is the Tri-component (or ABC) model of attitudes?
The model of attitudes proposing that our attitudes consist of Affective (feelings), Behavioural (actions), and Cognitive (beliefs) components.
What is the difference between a social group and a collective?
A social group consists of two or more individuals who interact, share a common goal, and influence one another, whereas a collective is an aggregation of people engaged in a common activity with minimal direct interaction or shared identity (e.g., an audience or crowd).
What is transduction?
The biological process where specialised sensory receptors convert raw physical energy into electrical nerve impulses.
In the Ames Room illusion, what happens to the size of a person's retinal image as they walk from the far left corner to the near right corner?
The retinal image of the person doubles in physical size on the viewer's retina; because the brain incorrectly assumes the room is rectangular and the back wall is equidistant, it misinterprets this change in retinal image size as the person physically growing.
What are the five basic biological tastes detected by receptors on the human tongue?
Sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami (savoury).
What is the Fundamental Attribution Error?
The tendency to explain other people's behaviour by overemphasising internal factors while underestimating external factors.
Name two social factors that reduced participant obedience in Stanley Milgram’s shock experiments.
Increasing physical proximity to the learner (e.g., being in the same room) and decreasing the proximity or legitimacy of the authority figure (e.g., instructions delivered via telephone or by an ordinary person).
What is the difference between selective attention and divided attention?
Selective attention involves focusing conscious awareness on a specific stimulus while actively filtering out distractions, whereas divided attention involves distributing mental focus across two or more tasks simultaneously.
What is the Carpentered World Hypothesis?
The hypothesis explaining the Müller-Lyer illusion by suggesting our experience with rectangular buildings leads us to interpret the feathertail line as an internal corner of a room extending away from us.
What are supertasters?
Individuals who inherit a significantly higher density of fungiform papillae and taste buds, making them hyper-sensitive to bitter and sweet tastes.
What is cognitive dissonance?
The psychological discomfort experienced when an individual holds two inconsistent cognitions or acts in a way that conflicts with their beliefs.
In Solomon Asch’s conformity studies, what was the effect of introducing a single dissenting peer (an ally)?
Conformity dropped dramatically (from roughly 33% to nearly 0%), showing that unanimous group consensus is necessary to maintain high conformity.
What is the Gestalt principle of closure?
The visual system's automatic tendency to mentally fill in or bridge missing gaps in an incomplete visual contour to perceive an image as a complete, unified whole.
What is prosopagnosia?
A specific neurological condition characterised by the inability to recognise familiar faces, typically caused by damage along pathways to the temporal lobe.
What is synaesthesia?
A neurodevelopmental condition where the stimulation of one sensory pathway involuntarily triggers an automatic perception in an unrelated sensory pathway.
What is the Halo Effect?
A cognitive bias where an overall positive impression of someone in one area (such as physical attractiveness) causes us to assume they possess other positive traits.
What is groupthink?
A phenomenon where an individual's desire for group harmony and conformity overrides realistic critical thinking and leads to flawed decision-making.
What is retinal disparity?
A binocular depth cue where the brain calculates distance by measuring the difference between the two slightly distinct images projected onto each eye.
Why can the Spinning Dancer illusion be perceived as rotating in both clockwise and counter-clockwise directions?
It is an ambiguous two-dimensional silhouette that completely lacks depth cues (such as shading and volume), allowing top-down processing to alternate between two equally valid 3D directional interpretations.
What is left-sided spatial neglect?
An attentional disorder typically caused by damage to the right parietal lobe, causing the patient to systematically ignore stimuli on the left side of space and their body.
What is the availability heuristic?
A mental shortcut where people judge the likelihood or frequency of an event based on how readily examples come to mind.
What is anti-conformity (or anticonformity)?
The form of social non-conformity where an individual deliberately and actively opposes the prevailing group norm simply because the group holds it.
What is the Stroop Effect, and what does it demonstrate about automatic versus controlled processes?
It is the delay in reaction time when naming the physical ink colour of an incongruent word; it demonstrates that reading printed words is an automatic, dominant top-down process that interferes with the slower, conscious controlled process of naming ink colours.
If a patient with visual agnosia cannot identify a fork placed on a table by looking at it, how can they immediately identify what the object is?
By picking it up and using their sense of touch (tactile perception), because visual agnosia damages only the visual processing pathways from the occipital lobe while leaving other sensory pathways intact.
How does having an exceptionally high density of fungiform papillae influence a supertaster’s diet and long-term health risks compared to a non-taster?
Because supertasters experience bitter compounds and fats with extreme intensity, they tend to avoid bitter cruciferous vegetables (such as broccoli, kale, and cabbage), which can reduce their intake of cancer-fighting antioxidants. Conversely, because sweet and fatty foods taste overpoweringly rich, they often consume less sugar, lower amounts of saturated fat, and drink less alcohol, reducing their risk of cardiovascular disease.