Chapter 5 Social Cognition

1. Chapter 5 Social Cognition

2. What is Social Cognition? • The processes by which information about people is processed and stored • Thinking about people • Humans think about people more than anything else.

3. Why Don’t We Think Some Times? • Cognitive Miser • Reluctance to do much extra thinking • We conserve our thinking • We use shortcuts • Conscious thinking requires a lot of effort • We have limited thinking capacity. • STM = 7+/-2 items

4. Automatic versus Controlled Processes • Automatic processes occur outside of conscious awareness and with little effort • categorization of objects and people is an example • Controlled processes are deliberate, intentional, and effortful • mindfully determining the causes of a person’s behavior is an example

5. Elements of Automatic Thinking • Intention – not guided by intention • Control – not subject to deliberate control • Effort – no effort required • Efficiency – highly efficient

6. The Stroop Test Online example

7. Automatic Processing • Relies on Knowledge Structures • Organized pieces of information • Example • Semantic Network

8. Other Knowledge Structures • Schemas are mental representations of objects or categories of objects • Aid in the categorization of events • Aid in the predictability of events • Influence our interpretation of events • Scripts • Schemas about certain events

9. Functions of Schemas

10. Priming and Framing • Priming - activating a concept in the mind • Influences subsequent thinking • May trigger automatic processes • Framing – presentation as positive or negative

11. Framing • If you had the choice, would you chose • 1) A situation in which 200 people will be saved (a 1/3 chance 600 people will be saved and a 2/3 chance nobody will be saved). • 2) A situation where 400 people will die (a 2/3 chance 600 people will die and a 1/3 chance nobody will die).

12. Framing • Should advertisers say the ground beef is • 90% lean or • 10% fat

13. Thought Suppression • Two processes to suppress thought • Automatic – checks for incoming information related to unwanted thought • Controlled – redirects attention away from unwanted thought • Relax conscious control and mind is flooded with cues from the automatic system • Trying to suppress thoughts tend to make those thought more prevalent.

14. Attributions • Causal explanations; inferences we make about events or behaviors. • “Intuitive scientists” seek explanations in a systematic, orderly way • much like a trained scientist, laypeople gather evidence, weigh possibilities, form hypotheses, to understand others

15. Attributions • Three dimensions • Internal / External • Stable / Unstable • Global / Specific

16. Attributions: Explaining Success and Failure • Two dimensions • Internal Stable - Ability • Internal Unstable – Effort • External Stable – Difficulty of task • External Unstable – Luck • Self-serving bias

17. Actor/Observer Bias • External – Internal Attribution • Actor (situation – external) • Observer (actor – internal) • Fundamental Attribution Error • Ultimate Attribution Error • Behavior freely chosen is more informative about a person (Jones & Harris, 1967)

18. Fundamental Attribution Error • Four possible explanations • Behavior is more noticeable than situational factors • Insignificant weight is assigned to situational factors • People are cognitive misers • Richer trait-like language to explain behavior

19. Attribution Cube • Covariation Principle • Consensus • Consistency • Distinctiveness

20. Attribution Cube and Excuses • Excuses • Raise consensus – it happens to everyone • Lower consistency – it doesn’t usually happen to me • Raise distinctiveness – it doesn’t usually happen in other situations

21. Heuristics • Representativeness Heuristic • Judge likelihood by the extent it resembles the typical case • Availability Heuristic • Judge likelihood by ease with which relevant instances come to mind • ESP beliefs

22. Heuristics • Simulation Heuristic • Judge likelihood by ease with which you can imagine it • Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic • Judge likelihood by using a starting point and adjusting from that point

23. Cognitive Errors and Biases • Information Overload • Too much information, contradictions in information, irrelevant information • Generally access two types of information • Statistical information • Case History • Generally pay closer attention to case history

24. Cognitive Errors and Biases • Confirmation Bias • Tendency to notice and search for information that confirms one’s beliefs and ignore information that disconfirms it • Conjunction Fallacy • Tendency to see an event as more likely as it becomes more specific

25. Cognitive Errors and Biases • Illusory Correlation • Tendency to overestimate link between variables that are related only slightly or not at all • Hamilton & Gifford (1976)

26. Cognitive Errors and Biases • Base Rate Fallacy • Tendency to ignore base rate information and be influenced by distinctive features of the case • Gambler’s Fallacy • Tendency to believe that a chance event is affected by previous events and will “even out”

27. Cognitive Errors and Biases • False Consensus Effect • Tendency to overestimate the number of other people who share one’s opinions • False Uniqueness Effect • Tendency to underestimate the number of other people who share one’s prized characteristics or abilities

28. Cognitive Errors and Biases • Statistical Regression • Statistical tendency for extremes to be followed by less extreme or those closer to average • Illusion of Control • A false belief that one can influence events

29. Is Bad Stronger Than Good?Good News and Bad News • People think more about bad things than good ones • Thinking is guided by search for explanations • More concerned with explaining bad events than good events • Bad news attracts more attention

30. Cognitive Errors and Biases • Magical Thinking • Assumptions that don’t hold up to logical scrutiny • Touching objects pass on properties to each other (contamination) • Resemblance to something shares basic properties (contamination) • Thoughts can influence physical world

31. Counterfactual Thinking • Imagining alternatives to past or present factual events or circumstances • First instinct fallacy • Upward counterfactuals – positive outcome • Help make future situations better • Downward counterfactuals – negative outcome • Comfort it could have been worse

32. Are People Really Idiots? • We make predictable errors • Cognitive misers • Heuristics are short cuts • How serious are the errors • On trivial events – use heuristics and automatic processing • On important events – use conscious processing and make better decisions

33. Reducing Cognitive Errors • Debiasing • Consider multiple alternative • Rely less on memory • Use explicit decision rules • Search for disconfirmatory information • Use meta-cognition

34. What Makes Us Human? • Human thought uses and combines symbols • Language allows for exploration of linkages of meaning • Conscious mind is uniquely human • Complex patterns of thought

35. What Makes Us Human? • Only humans engage in counterfactual thinking • Human thought creates unique errors and unique capabilities to find the truth