Deck 1: Section 2: Introduction

Question 1

Briefly describe the role of motivation for consistency theories, early attribution theories, cognitive miser models, and the motivated tactician view.
a. Consistency theories: motivation plays central role, aversive state drives cognition to reduce inconsistency.
b. Attribution theories: motivation potential qualification for attribution process, not central, motivation simply sets process in motion.
c. Cognitive miser model: motivation plays no role, purely cognitive.
d. Motivated tactician: influences preconscious, automatic responses.

Answer 1

Not Answer

Question 2

According to Kurt Lewin, what two pairs of factors determine one's psychological field and hence behavior? Describe.
a. Pair 1: the person and the situation need both to predict behavior).
b. Pair 2: cognition and motivation joint functions of person in situation).

Answer 2

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Question 3

Describe one advantage and one disadvantage of using EEG in studies of social cognition.

Answer 3

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Question 4

In what ways was the early behaviorist approach to psychology incompatible with the study of cognition? What were some challenges to the behaviorists' approach?
a. Early behaviorists like B. F. Skinner believed that all behavior is a result of a particular, observable stimulus S) that provokes a response R), and that specifying these observable factors was the most important factor in developing a theory. As a result, unobservable mental processing - cognition - was seen by these scientists as less scientific and less important in explaining behavior. However, despite their best attempts, behaviorists could not explain all phenomena with a stimulus-response framework. In one striking example, linguists such as Noam Chomsky criticized the behaviorist approach for its inability to explain the development and acquisition of complicated language. Additionally, research on knowledge acquisition led to a new "information processing approach," which emphasized the sequential stages of mental operations. In other words, it looked at the mental steps that took place in between a stimulus and a behavioral response. This took the focus away from the exclusively-observable approach of the early behaviorists and added support for studying the non-observable processes of cognition.

Question 5

Draw your own model of an elemental approach to social cognition and a holistic approach to social cognition, then explain the models in a few sentences.

Question 6

Do people around the world have similar cognitive processes? Use specific examples.
a. Much social cognition research has been conducted with undergraduates who are "WEIRD," or Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic Heinrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010), and as a result much research has attempted to generalize from findings within that group. However, researchers such as Markus and Kitayama 1991) have been finding that subjects' cultural backgrounds can have a significant influence on the way they perceive and react to the world. For example, culture can affect the ways in which people think, with Westerners tending to approach questions of causality more analytically than Easterners Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001). Markus and Kitayama 1991) have shown that East Asians tend to be more interdependent than Westerners, who are typically more independent.