Practice Questions to be used with Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture - Fiske & Taylor

MC Questions

1. Which of the following best describes what is meant by “sociometer”
theory?

1. Self-esteem is a measure of how others are evaluating you
2. Specialized neural mechanisms monitor interpersonal processes
3. Measuring self-schemas can only be done in social situations
4. Fragile self-views require frequent reinforcement from others

2. Although Sarah doesn’t particularly like children, she is getting her
teaching credentials because her parents expect her to have a career in
early education. This behavior is most in line with which of the
following?

1. Socially contigent self-esteem
2. Relational interdependence
3. Regulatory fit
4. Prevention focus

3. According to Kelley’s covariation model, which of the following would
be least helpful in making a causal attribution?

1. Consensus
2. Modality
3. Distincitviness
4. Prosociality

4. According to John and Davis’s Correspondent Inference Theory, which of
the following would be most informative in identifying intentions that
underlie actions?

1. Behavior that is situationally constrainted
2. Behavior that is low in social desirability
3. Behavior that changes from situation to situation
4. All above

5. Which of the following mindsets is most likely to lead to an objective
evaluation of several alternatives?

1. Goal shielding mindset
2. Motivational mindset
3. Consistency mindset
4. Deliberative mindset

6. Cognitive load would be most likely to impair which of
the following processes, according to the cognitive busyness
model?

1. Automatic categorization of a behavior
2. Dispositional attributions of behavior
3. Attributional correction for situational factors
4. Motivation to accurately characterize the targer

7. Imagine that you hold simultaneous goals of getting a
good night’s sleep, doing well on a particular assignment,
and attending a midnight release of a new movie. Because
you are an excellent student, you decide to stay home and
work all night on the assignment. Which of the following
would be likely to follow from a goal-shielding perspective?

1. You would show increased tenacity and goal pursuit in your efforts on the assignment, even if the assignment was not particularly important to you in general
2. Thoughts of sleep and the movies would be less accesible while you were working
3. In similar scenarios in the future, you would be less likely to choose sleeping or the movies
4. All of the above

8. Explicit causal reasoning is most likely to occur during which of the
following situations?

1. Walking in on a surprise birthday party that your friends threw for you
2. Learning of an unexpected tragedy while watching the news
3. Receiving a high score on an exam that you studied very hard for
4. Both A en B

9. Which of the following is not an advantage of automatic processing?

1. Allows people to decide how to failry judge others
2. Allows people to make rapid decisions
3. Allows people to evaluate complex targets and situations
4. Allows people to efficiently process a lots of information

10. Which of the following best describes what is meant by self-encoding in “person-situation-interaction” terms?

1. We have many different concepts of ourselves, and context determines which aspect will be activated
2. We encode representations of ourselves primarily based on our interactions with other people
3. There is a hierarchy of importance in encoding self-concepts. Most influential is the underlying person, followed by the situation the person is in, and finally the interaction between the two self-concepts are typically encoded as three separate nodes
4. The first encodes characteristics of the person, the second encodes aspects of experienced situations, and the third encodes likely ways in which they may interact

11. Which of the following properties of a stimulus is least likely to influence attention?

1. Salience
2. Vividness
3. Representation
4. Accessibility

12. Which of the following would be the best cue to rapidly direct Peter’s gaze to the left?

1. An arrow pointing left (as viewed from peters perceptive
2. A picture of eyes looking left (as viewed from Peter's perspetive
3. A finger and hand pointing left
4. Display the word left

13. A participant is unconsciously primed with a smiling face. The experiment comes back into the room and says, “Hey!” with an ambiguous tone. The participant evaluates this as a friendly exclamation. This is best described as an example of which of the following?

1. Assimilation effect
2. Contrast effect
3. Stimulus ambiquity
4. Self protective motivations

14. A vivid memory of your sixth birthday party would be best described as an example of which of the following?

1. Semantic memory
2. Episodic memory
3. Procedural memory
4. Declarative memory

15. Which of the following best describes the “associative network approach”?

1. When there exist more links from other concepts to a particular concept in memory, it is easier t oremember one because it can be accesed through a number of routes
2. A proposition, consisting of nodes and representative models, enables associative constructs that can delay retrieval of specific infomation though conficting parts
3. Associative features serve to strenghten the link between long-term memories and the short therm activations associated with them
4. When too many associations are linked to any given concept or memory node, processing speed is diminished as neurons may produce conflicting signals.

16. Which of the following is an advantage of the exemplar
view as opposed to the prototype view?

1. Exemplars have the ability to account for correlations of attributes within a category
2. Exemplars provide a simple way to model variability across category members
3. The exemplar view most directly accounts for knowledge of specific examples that guide one's understanding of a catagory
4. All of the above

Open Questions

1. “People sometimes prioritize efficiency over accuracy in
mental processing because they are limited in their capacity
to process information.” This statement best characterizes
which of the models of cognition?

2. What was one of the primary reasons for that the study of
introspection fell out of favor with researchers?

3. A participant is shown a picture of a smiling face that is flashed on
the screen for a few milliseconds – too fast for the participant to
recognize the image. Nonetheless, the participant then judges a
neutral image more positively. This is an example of what?

Answers MC Questions

1. A
2. D
3. D
4. B
5. D
6. C
7. B
8. B
9. A
10. A
11. C
12. B
13. A
14. B
15. A
16. D

Answers Open Questions

1. Cognitive miser
2. It is impossible to publically reproduce introspections, so the
   evidence could not be confirmed by other researchers
3. Subliminal priming