Economic and Consumer Psychology Key Terms
● Social Cognition: The study of how people make sense of other people and
themselves. Focuses on how ordinary people think and feel about people.
● Phenomenology: To describe systematically how ordinary people say they
experience their world.
● Configural Model (Asch): Hypothesizes that people form a unified overall
impression of other people. The unifying forces shape individual elements to bring
them in line with the overall impression.
● Algebraic Model (Asch): Takes each individual trait, evaluates it in isolation, and
combines the evaluations into a summary evaluation. Meeting someone new,
combining their pros and cons to form an overall impression.
● Elemental Approach: Breaks scientific problems down into pieces and analyzes the
pieces in separate detail before combining them.
● Holistic Approach: Analyzes the pieces in the context of other pieces and focuses
on the entire configuration of relationships among them (Gestalt).
● Lewin's Person-Situation Field Theory: Neither person nor situation alone is
enough to predict behavior, a person contributes needs, beliefs, and perceptual
abilities, which act on the environment to constitute a psychological field. Cognition
and motivation are functions of both person and situation, jointly predict behavior,
cognition provides interpretation of the world and motivation predicts whether
behavior will occur or not.
● Information Processing: The idea that mental operations can be broken down into
sequential stages.
● Attribution Theory: Concern how other people explain their own and other people's
behavior. Describe other people's causal analysis of the social world.
● Cognitive Miser Model: The idea that people are limited in their capacity to process
information. Therefore, they take shortcuts whenever they can.
● Motivated Tactician: A fully engaged thinker with multiple cognitive strategies
available. Chooses among these strategies based on goals, motives, and needs.
● People as Activated Actors: Social environments rapidly cue perceiver's social
concepts, without awareness, and almost inevitably cue associated cognitions,
evaluations, affect, motivation, and behavior → fast, implicit, spontaneous, or
automatic.
● Mentalism: The belief in the importance of cognitive representations.
,● Full Automaticity: Unintentional, uncontrollable, efficient, autonomous, and outside
awareness, as well as goal independent, stimulus driven, and fast.
● Subliminal Priming: When a concept is activated by the environment, but at
exposure times below conscious awareness.
● Postconscious Automaticity: Conscious perception of the prime but no awareness
of its effects on subsequent reactions.
● Chronically Accessible Concepts: Reflect individual differences in how people
habitually code other people. Especially particular trait dimensions that tend to
capture attention and repeatedly surface in impressions.
● Proceduralization: The practice process that develops automaticity.
● Controlled Process: The perceiver's conscious intent substantially determines how
the process operates.
● Goal-Dependent Automaticity: Initially intentional and often conscious, but also
partially automatic. Lack of awareness of the process itself, not needing to monitor
the process to completion, and lack of intending all the specific outcomes.
● Spontaneous Trait Inferences: Describe accessible trait attributions coming to mind
when interpreting behavior. They bind the trait implications of a behavior to the
person committing the behavior.
● Goal-Inconsistent Automaticity: Occurs when a person's own unwanted responses
are governed by cognitive factors outside control and awareness → Thought
suppression.
● Rebound: Describes increased accessibility of a concept after attempted thought
suppression.
● Auto-Motives: Situations automatically cue certain motives.
● Meta-Cognition: People's beliefs about their own thinking processes.
● Mind-Wandering: Stimulus independent thoughts.
● Naturalistic Social Cognition: Studies ask participants to view tapes of their own
spontaneous interaction and report what they were thinking and feeling at specific
moments.
● Most Frequent Motives: Belonging, understanding, controlling, enhancing self, and
trusting ingroup → people's tactics / modes depend on the motive (motivated
tactician):
- Belonging: relatively automatic;
- Understanding: automatic and/or effortful;
, - Controlling: automatic and/or effortful;
- Enhancing Self: automatic and effortful;
- Trusting: automatic.
● Dual-Process Model of Impression Formation: People initially identify a person
automatically and stop there if the person is not relevant to their goals. If the person
is relevant, people personalize the other using individually tailored concepts in
memory.
● Continuum Model of Impression Formation: People engage in a continuum of
processes ranging from the most automatic to the most deliberate, depending on
motivation, capacity, etc.
● Dual-Process Model of Overconfident Attribution: First automatically and
effortlessly identify behavior, then people deliberately explain the behavior to infer the
person's disposition.
● Cognitive Business Model: Categorization of behavior and its characterization in
dispositional terms (both automatic), followed by controlled correction for situational
factors if the perceiver has both capacity and motivation (cognitive loads).
● Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM): Describes two routes to persuasion:
peripheral (automatic & superficial) and central (deliberate & controlled).
● Heuristic Systematic Model: Heuristic processing and systematic processing
operate in parallel, adding to each other.
● Unimode Model: Proposes that people's subjective understanding essentially tests
their everyday hypotheses, regardless of domain or mode.
● Self-Regulation: How people control and direct their behavior → goals are central to
this process.
● Social Intelligence: The wealth of knowledge, plans, and strategies that people
bring to answering specific questions in social interactions (examples p.693).
● Deliberative Mindset: The focus on incentives and expectations, choosing among
alternative goals and their implied course of action.
● Implementational Mindset: The focus on when and how to enact the intended
course of action.
● Goal-Shielding: Whereby the activated goal inhibits alternative goals' accessibility. If
alternative goals become subgoals, people do not goal-shield.
● Implementation Intentions: People make specific 'if-then' plans that specify how to
realize a goal.
● Social Cognition: The study of how people make sense of other people and
themselves. Focuses on how ordinary people think and feel about people.
● Phenomenology: To describe systematically how ordinary people say they
experience their world.
● Configural Model (Asch): Hypothesizes that people form a unified overall
impression of other people. The unifying forces shape individual elements to bring
them in line with the overall impression.
● Algebraic Model (Asch): Takes each individual trait, evaluates it in isolation, and
combines the evaluations into a summary evaluation. Meeting someone new,
combining their pros and cons to form an overall impression.
● Elemental Approach: Breaks scientific problems down into pieces and analyzes the
pieces in separate detail before combining them.
● Holistic Approach: Analyzes the pieces in the context of other pieces and focuses
on the entire configuration of relationships among them (Gestalt).
● Lewin's Person-Situation Field Theory: Neither person nor situation alone is
enough to predict behavior, a person contributes needs, beliefs, and perceptual
abilities, which act on the environment to constitute a psychological field. Cognition
and motivation are functions of both person and situation, jointly predict behavior,
cognition provides interpretation of the world and motivation predicts whether
behavior will occur or not.
● Information Processing: The idea that mental operations can be broken down into
sequential stages.
● Attribution Theory: Concern how other people explain their own and other people's
behavior. Describe other people's causal analysis of the social world.
● Cognitive Miser Model: The idea that people are limited in their capacity to process
information. Therefore, they take shortcuts whenever they can.
● Motivated Tactician: A fully engaged thinker with multiple cognitive strategies
available. Chooses among these strategies based on goals, motives, and needs.
● People as Activated Actors: Social environments rapidly cue perceiver's social
concepts, without awareness, and almost inevitably cue associated cognitions,
evaluations, affect, motivation, and behavior → fast, implicit, spontaneous, or
automatic.
● Mentalism: The belief in the importance of cognitive representations.
,● Full Automaticity: Unintentional, uncontrollable, efficient, autonomous, and outside
awareness, as well as goal independent, stimulus driven, and fast.
● Subliminal Priming: When a concept is activated by the environment, but at
exposure times below conscious awareness.
● Postconscious Automaticity: Conscious perception of the prime but no awareness
of its effects on subsequent reactions.
● Chronically Accessible Concepts: Reflect individual differences in how people
habitually code other people. Especially particular trait dimensions that tend to
capture attention and repeatedly surface in impressions.
● Proceduralization: The practice process that develops automaticity.
● Controlled Process: The perceiver's conscious intent substantially determines how
the process operates.
● Goal-Dependent Automaticity: Initially intentional and often conscious, but also
partially automatic. Lack of awareness of the process itself, not needing to monitor
the process to completion, and lack of intending all the specific outcomes.
● Spontaneous Trait Inferences: Describe accessible trait attributions coming to mind
when interpreting behavior. They bind the trait implications of a behavior to the
person committing the behavior.
● Goal-Inconsistent Automaticity: Occurs when a person's own unwanted responses
are governed by cognitive factors outside control and awareness → Thought
suppression.
● Rebound: Describes increased accessibility of a concept after attempted thought
suppression.
● Auto-Motives: Situations automatically cue certain motives.
● Meta-Cognition: People's beliefs about their own thinking processes.
● Mind-Wandering: Stimulus independent thoughts.
● Naturalistic Social Cognition: Studies ask participants to view tapes of their own
spontaneous interaction and report what they were thinking and feeling at specific
moments.
● Most Frequent Motives: Belonging, understanding, controlling, enhancing self, and
trusting ingroup → people's tactics / modes depend on the motive (motivated
tactician):
- Belonging: relatively automatic;
- Understanding: automatic and/or effortful;
, - Controlling: automatic and/or effortful;
- Enhancing Self: automatic and effortful;
- Trusting: automatic.
● Dual-Process Model of Impression Formation: People initially identify a person
automatically and stop there if the person is not relevant to their goals. If the person
is relevant, people personalize the other using individually tailored concepts in
memory.
● Continuum Model of Impression Formation: People engage in a continuum of
processes ranging from the most automatic to the most deliberate, depending on
motivation, capacity, etc.
● Dual-Process Model of Overconfident Attribution: First automatically and
effortlessly identify behavior, then people deliberately explain the behavior to infer the
person's disposition.
● Cognitive Business Model: Categorization of behavior and its characterization in
dispositional terms (both automatic), followed by controlled correction for situational
factors if the perceiver has both capacity and motivation (cognitive loads).
● Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM): Describes two routes to persuasion:
peripheral (automatic & superficial) and central (deliberate & controlled).
● Heuristic Systematic Model: Heuristic processing and systematic processing
operate in parallel, adding to each other.
● Unimode Model: Proposes that people's subjective understanding essentially tests
their everyday hypotheses, regardless of domain or mode.
● Self-Regulation: How people control and direct their behavior → goals are central to
this process.
● Social Intelligence: The wealth of knowledge, plans, and strategies that people
bring to answering specific questions in social interactions (examples p.693).
● Deliberative Mindset: The focus on incentives and expectations, choosing among
alternative goals and their implied course of action.
● Implementational Mindset: The focus on when and how to enact the intended
course of action.
● Goal-Shielding: Whereby the activated goal inhibits alternative goals' accessibility. If
alternative goals become subgoals, people do not goal-shield.
● Implementation Intentions: People make specific 'if-then' plans that specify how to
realize a goal.
