11 checked facts

Social cognition

Everything on this site about social cognition — each one naming the study behind it.

You value information simply because a successful person said it.
Prestige bias is the tendency to assign greater weight to the opinions of people who are high-status, regardless of th…
Your brain groups unrelated information into a single story.
A 1944 study showed that people reflexively attribute intentional personality traits to simple geometric shapes moving…
The first attribute you notice determines your entire assessment.
The 'primacy effect' in social judgment dictates that initial impressions weight more heavily than subsequent informat…
Your attention is wired to follow where others look.
The gaze cueing effect shows that human attention shifts automatically to follow another person's eyes.…
You judge people by their actions but yourself by intent.
Jones and Nisbett (1971) proposed that actors tend to attribute their behavior to situational factors while observers …
You think media influences others, but not you.
People consistently perceive mass media as having a greater effect on others than on themselves.…
You believe your perception is the objective truth.
A 1996 study showed that people assume their perspective is rational, while disagreement implies others are biased or …
You explain your errors with context, others with character.
The actor-observer asymmetry is a hypothesis suggesting that people attribute their own actions to situational factors…
You lose the ability to teach once you learn.
The curse of knowledge describes the inability to imagine that other people do not know what you know.…
You overestimate how much the world focuses on you.
The spotlight effect describes your tendency to believe that your appearance and actions are more visible to others th…
You judge others by character and yourself by circumstance.
The actor-observer asymmetry explains why you interpret your own bad behavior as a situational necessity while labelin…