Vocabulary

Affective forecasting: Predicting how one will feel in the future after some event or decision.
Anchoring: The bias to be affected by an initial anchor, even if the anchor is arbitrary, and to insufficiently adjust our judgments away from that anchor.
Attitude: A psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor.
Audience design: Constructing utterances to suit the audience’s knowledge.
Automatic: A behavior or process has one or more of the following features: unintentional, uncontrollable, occurring outside of conscious awareness, and cognitively efficient.
Automatic empathy: A social perceiver unwittingly taking on the internal state of another person, usually because of mimicking the person’s expressive behavior and thereby feeling the expressed emotion.
Availability heuristic: A heuristic in which the frequency or likelihood of an event is evaluated based on how easily instances of it come to mind.
Awareness: A conscious experience or the capability of having conscious experiences, which is distinct from self-awareness, the conscious understanding of one’s own existence and individuality.
Basic-level category: The neutral, preferred category for a given object, at an intermediate level of specificity.
Biases: The systematic and predictable mistakes that influence the judgment of even very talented human beings.
Bounded awareness: The systematic ways in which we fail to notice obvious and important information that is available to us.
Bounded ethicality: The systematic ways in which our ethics are limited in ways we are not even aware of ourselves.
Bounded rationality: Model of human behavior that suggests that humans try to make rational decisions but are bounded due to cognitive limitations.
Bounded self-interest: The systematic and predictable ways in which we care about the outcomes of others.
Bounded willpower: The tendency to place greater weight on present concerns rather than future concerns.
Cartesian catastrophe: The idea that mental processes taking place outside conscious awareness are impossible.
Category: A set of entities that are equivalent in some way. Usually the items are similar to one another.
Chameleon effect: The tendency for individuals to nonconsciously mimic the postures, mannerisms, facial expressions, and other behaviors of one’s interaction partners.
Common ground: Information that is shared by people who engage in a conversation.
Concept: The mental representation of a category.
Conscious: Having knowledge of something external or internal to oneself; being aware of and responding to one’s surroundings.
Conscious experience: The first-person perspective of a mental event, such as feeling some sensory input, a memory, an idea, an emotion, a mood, or a continuous temporal sequence of happenings.
Contemplative science: A research area concerned with understanding how contemplative practices such as meditation can affect individuals, including changes in their behavior, their emotional reactivity, their cognitive abilities, and their brains. Contemplative science also seeks insights into conscious experience that can be gained from first-person observations by individuals who have gained extraordinary expertise in introspection.
Dichotic listening: An experimental task in which two messages are presented to different ears.
Directional goals: The motivation to reach a particular outcome or judgment.
Distractor task: A task that is designed to make a person think about something unrelated to an impending decision.
Divided attention: The ability to flexibly allocate attentional resources between two or more concurrent tasks.
Durability bias: A bias in affective forecasting in which one overestimates for how long one will feel an emotion (positive or negative) after some event.
EEG: (Electroencephalography) The recording of the brain’s electrical activity over a period of time by placing electrodes on the scalp.
Eureka experience: When a creative product enters consciousness.
Evaluative priming task: An implicit attitude task that assesses the extent to which an attitude object is associated with a positive or negative valence by measuring the time it takes a person to label an adjective as good or bad after being presented with an attitude object.
Exemplar: An example in memory that is labeled as being in a particular category.
Explicit attitude: An attitude that is consciously held and can be reported on by the person holding the attitude.
False memories: Memory for an event that never actually occurred, implanted by experimental manipulation or other means.
False-belief test: An experimental procedure that assesses whether a perceiver recognizes that another person has a false belief—a belief that contradicts reality.
First-person perspective: Observations made by individuals about their own conscious experiences, also known as introspection or a subjective point of view. Phenomenology refers to the description and investigation of such observations.
Foils: Any member of a lineup (whether live or photograph) other than the suspect.
Folk explanations of behavior: People’s natural explanations for why somebody did something, felt something, etc. (differing substantially for unintentional and intentional behaviors).
Framing: The bias to be systematically affected by the way in which information is presented, while holding the objective information constant.
Heuristics: A mental shortcut or rule of thumb that reduces complex mental problems to more simple rule-based decisions.
Heuristics: cognitive (or thinking) strategies that simplify decision making by using mental short-cuts
Hot cognition: The mental processes that are influenced by desires and feelings.
Impact bias: A bias in affective forecasting in which one overestimates the strength or intensity of emotion one will experience after some event.
Implicit Association Test: An implicit attitude task that assesses a person’s automatic associations between concepts by measuring the response times in pairing the concepts.
Implicit attitude: An attitude that a person cannot verbally or overtly state.
Implicit measures of attitudes: Measures of attitudes in which researchers infer the participant’s attitude rather than having the participant explicitly report it.
Inattentional blindness: The failure to notice a fully visible object when attention is devoted to something else.
Ingroup: Group to which a person belongs.
Intention: An agent’s mental state of committing to perform an action that the agent believes will bring about a desired outcome.
Intentionality: The quality of an agent’s performing a behavior intentionally—that is, with skill and awareness and executing an intention (which is in turn based on a desire and relevant beliefs).
Joint attention: Two people attending to the same object and being aware that they both are attending to it.
Lexicon: Words and expressions.
Limited capacity: The notion that humans have limited mental resources that can be used at a given time.
Linguistic intergroup bias: A tendency for people to characterize positive things about their ingroup using more abstract expressions, but negative things about their outgroups using more abstract expressions.
Mere-exposure effects: The result of developing a more positive attitude towards a stimulus after repeated instances of mere exposure to it.
Mimicry: Copying others’ behavior, usually without awareness.
Mirror neurons: Neurons identified in monkey brains that fire both when the monkey performs a certain action and when it perceives another agent performing that action.
Misinformation effect: A memory error caused by exposure to incorrect information between the original event (e.g., a crime) and later memory test (e.g., an interview, lineup, or day in court).
Mock witnesses: A research subject who plays the part of a witness in a study.
Mood-congruent memory: The tendency to be better able to recall memories that have a mood similar to our current mood.
Motivated skepticism: A form of bias that can result from having a directional goal in which one is skeptical of evidence despite its strength because it goes against what one wants to believe.
Need for closure: The desire to come to a decision that will resolve ambiguity and conclude an issue.
Outgroup: Group to which a person does not belong.
Overconfident: The bias to have greater confidence in your judgment than is warranted based on a rational assessment.
Photo spreads: A selection of normally small photographs of faces given to a witness for the purpose of identifying a perpetrator.
Planning fallacy: A cognitive bias in which one underestimates how long it will take to complete a task.
Primed: A process by which a concept or behavior is made more cognitively accessible or likely to occur through the presentation of an associated concept.
Priming: A stimulus presented to a person reminds him or her about other ideas associated with the stimulus.
Projection: A social perceiver’s assumption that the other person wants, knows, or feels the same as the perceiver wants, know, or feels.
Psychological essentialism: The belief that members of a category have an unseen property that causes them to be in the category and to have the properties associated with it.
Representativeness heuristic: A heuristic in which the likelihood of an object belonging to a category is evaluated based on the extent to which the object appears similar to one’s mental representation of the category.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: The hypothesis that the language that people use determines their thoughts.
Schema: A mental model or representation that organizes the important information about a thing, person, or event (also known as a script).
Schema (plural: schemata): A memory template, created through repeated exposure to a particular class of objects or events.
Selective attention: The ability to select certain stimuli in the environment to process, while ignoring distracting information.
Shadowing: A task in which the individual is asked to repeat an auditory message as it is presented.
Simulation: The process of representing the other person’s mental state.
Situation model: A mental representation of an event, object, or situation constructed at the time of comprehending a linguistic description.
Social brain hypothesis: The hypothesis that the human brain has evolved, so that humans can maintain larger ingroups.
Social cognition: The study of how people think about the social world.
Social networks: Networks of social relationships among individuals through which information can travel.
Stereotypes: Our general beliefs about the traits or behaviors shared by group of people.
Subliminal perception: The ability to process information for meaning when the individual is not consciously aware of that information.
Synchrony: Two people displaying the same behaviors or having the same internal states (typically because of mutual mimicry).
Syntax: Rules by which words are strung together to form sentences.
System 1: Our intuitive decision-making system, which is typically fast, automatic, effortless, implicit, and emotional.
System 2: Our more deliberative decision-making system, which is slower, conscious, effortful, explicit, and logical.
Theory of mind: The human capacity to understand minds, a capacity that is made up of a collection of concepts (e.g., agent, intentionality) and processes (e.g., goal detection, imitation, empathy, perspective taking).
Third-person perspective: Observations made by individuals in a way that can be independently confirmed by other individuals so as to lead to general, objective understanding. With respect to consciousness, third-person perspectives make use of behavioral and neural measures related to conscious experiences.
Typicality: The difference in “goodness” of category members, ranging from the most typical (the prototype) to borderline members.
Unconscious: Not conscious; the part of the mind that affects behavior though it is inaccessible to the conscious mind.
Visual perspective taking: Can refer to visual perspective taking (perceiving something from another person’s spatial vantage point) or more generally to effortful mental state inference (trying to infer the other person’s thoughts, desires, emotions).