PSY220 Lecture 6: Social Cognition

Key Premise

• Human mind has a limited capacity to process social information

• People are cognitive misers

  • Frugal of how want to use cognitive resources

• We take shortcuts to understand our world

We assume social cognition is logical, but it is not always that way

We take shortcuts, have biases, that move cognition away from being solely logical

What are Heuristics?

• Heuristics are mental shortcuts that people use to make judgements quickly, though sometimes inaccurately, for decisions about uncertain events

They…

• Save time

• “Good enough” much of the time

• Prone to systematic error

• Issue is sometimes inaccurate

• If certain about something don’t use heuristics, if uncertain use mental short cuts

• They save time, don't have unlimited time

• Can lead us astray

What are Biases?

• Biases are a systematic error or deviation from rational judgment, which occurs due to the reliance on certain heuristics

• Biases related

• Discrimination, prejudice

• Because rely on heuristics have larger systematic biases

• Biases based upon the use of heuristics

Impressions & Attributions about Others

Impression we make about people & attributes about others behaviours

How do we form impressions about other people?

1) Snap judgments

What are Snap Judgments?

• A quick decision made without extensive deliberation or careful consideration of all the available information

  • Gut feelings

  • First impressions

• When form impressions, make them very quickly, call them snap judgements

• Sometimes "gut feelings" or first impressions

  • Happen quickly

 

• If you're in danager, make snap judgement protective & personal safety important

• When can they be bad?

  • Based on deeper stereotypes, not processing information in logical way, bringing own bias to bar

Judging Faces

• Research relies on faces as stimuli, remove other features, hair & background

• Show participants

• Asking participants to look at face & rate on these qualities

• Manipulated how long participants had to make judgments

  • One condition look as long as you need, look at face, make ratings (Gold standard)-as long as you need to make judgement

  • 1 condition 1s

  • Another condition 0.5

  • Last condition 100ms

  • Not long time to look at face & make judgement

 

• Ratings in other conditions highly correlated with top group

• Getting as much time as needed wasn’t producing wildly different results

• Suggest we doing a lot of processing of faces very quickly, making snap judgements of whether competent, likeable and do that very fast

• Initial impression happens very quickly, doesn't seem to change

Judging Faces: Trustworthy vs. Dominant

Most trustworthy = less dominant

Least trustworthy = more dominant

 

• 2 traits one's people make very snap: trustworthy, dominance

• High trustworthy faces look very different than non trustworthy an

• Negatively associated

 

• Eyebrows: dominant pronounced, eyebrow ridge, smaller eyes

• Eyes big in trustworthy, low dominance

• Dominant hyper-masculine, low dominance baby face

Are snap judgments accurate?

• Not always but can be predictive of what actually is going on

• If totally wrong would be selected out, can be useful but not always the way to go

• Reflect our own biases we bring in

Making Attributions

• We are meaning makers

• We seek to determine the cause of something

• We make attributions

• When have longer time more thoughtful

• Motivated to make attributions

  • We are meaning makers

  • How we create a predictable world

  • Interested in making attributions of why others ask the way they did.

Making Attributions about Others: What is the Covariation Principle?

1) Consensus

2) Distinctiveness

3) Consistency

What is the Covariation Principle?

• One way individuals go about making attributions and whether hearing or seeing reflection of person saying it or the actual environment

• Imagine friend of yours telling you there's a really good movie, do I spend money on this movie or this more of a reflection of this person, how should I make this attribution

• 3 covariations people attune to

1) Consensus

• What would most people do in a given situation?

• If consensus high "yes" other people also raving about this movie

• If low, ask other friends and they tell you it sucks

• Starting to see things differently

2) Distinctiveness

• What does the individual do in different situations?

• Does this friend rave about other films, that would mean low on distinctiveness, they always say that

• Versus friend doesn't like a lot of movies, and say I like this movie.

3) Consistency

• What does the person do in a given situation on different occasions

• Has to be high for you to make attribution, always

• Have to expect it was amazing on Monday, the same on wed, not totally different view

• Depending on pathways make very different attributions

• Imagine friend tells you movie amazing, other people don't think its amazing, always raves about the film, think its something about them , not going to pay and watch this movie

• Alternately other people rave, friend doesn’t rave, then maybe something about stimulus, world, movie that is generally good

• Use these 3 principles generally, to figure out how make attribution

  • About that person vs. reality, stimulus talking about

(1) Making Attributions: Is the cause internal (dispositional) or external (situational)?

• Go on a first date, have great time, then go on second date and say no not interested

• Try to make attributions to find out what happened

• Location of the cause

• Internal to person or external (situational)

 

• Maybe they have different personality and decided your not a good fit for them (internal)

• External: maybe wrong restaurant, loud, make different attribution if think external cause outside that person

(2) Making Attributions: Is the Cause Stable or Unstable?

• Is the cause stable or unstable?

• Maybe fundamental different between you two, won't change over time

• Maybe something specific at that one moment; bad day at work, stressed, in bad mood, unstable,

(3) Making attributions: Is the cause global or specific?

• Global or specific?

• Global cause effects many areas: other social areas, maybe that person doesn't like close relationships, impact friendships, romantic relationships, work ones, not into closeness with other people

• More specific: strong idea of what looking for in partner, doesn't extend to friendships

 

• Change how you approach situation

  • Unstable cause, external, more specific can try to address it, push for second date

  • If internal, stable & global reason best to give up and move on

  • Use this to decipher how should behave

What is Self-Serving Bias?

• Tendency to attribute failure and other bad events to external circumstances and to attribute success & other good events to oneself (more internal reasons)

Sports Study that shows Self-Serving Bias

• Attribution for own team wins and losses

• Blue bar ref calls or luck

• Orange outcome comes from own teams performance

 

• Self serving bias (team as yourself)

• If win, own performance

• If loss, attribute to some external (back calls or ref calls)

 

• Example of how people make attribution in self serving bias

What is the Fundamental Attribution Error?

• The tendency for people to underestimate situational influences and to overestimate person influences on other people’s behaviour

• Tend to think about other people behaviour driven by own internal dispositions and underestimated by external

• When driving: someone cuts someone off,  vs. when we do it

• Overreliance on internal qualities for other people

Castro Study

• In this study people asked to right short cogent essay defending or criticizing Castros Cuba

• Essay in support or against Castro

• Either assigned to condition or choose to write the essay

Castro Study

Fundamental Attribution Error in the real World

• would treat meanly, don’t take into account actor and think had some qualities as characters

• Internal attributions for other peoples behaviour

Why do we make the fundamental attribution error?

1. People are more salient than situations

2. Actor-observer Bias: tendency to focus on situational influences when you are an actor, but internal influences when you are an observer

• “everyone is responsible for their own behaviour… except me”

 

Actor observer bias

• Protective bias

• Combining fundamental and self serving

  • Fundamental only about other people

  • Self serving only about you

Judgement & Decision Making

Biases in Judgement & Decision Making

1) How information is presented

2) How we seek information

3) How we process information

1) How Information is Presented to us: What are Framing Effects?

• The influence on judgment from the way information is presented (including the order in which information is presented or the words used to describe the information)

• Prob go towards 80% fat free, sounds better

• Influences perception of it

• Its same yogurt just different descriptions

Order Effects

Things in beginning of sequence remembered & attended to more and end of sequence

Temporal Framing

 

• Its august ask to go to Muskoka October 17, paid for, you agree

• Now it’s the 14th stressed, need to study, colder than realized, car ride going to be long won't have enoyg

• All these concrete things coming to mind

Temporal Framing: What is Construal Level Theory?

• Psychological distant actions & events are thought about in abstract terms

• Actions & events that are close at hand are thought about in concrete terms

Moving Study

• Participants imagine 7 different activities

• One condition think about moving a year from now, another group moving tomorrow, describe activities

 

• Ras went through and rated on whether abstract or concrete

• When thinking 1 year from now, listed more abstract activities

• Tomorrow: boxes, packing, specific activities, most activities were coded by Ras as concrete

Tedtalk: The Paradox of Choice

Having lots of choices, seems like a good thing but when faced with lots of options/choices, makes us less happy

2) How we Seek Information

What is Confirmation Bias?

• Tendency to test a proposition by search for evidence that supports it

• Have certain belief, look for info in way confirming belief

  • E.g. how search information matters, biased in how we do that

Interview Study

• Researchers asked participants to interview someone

• One group asked to determine whether interviewee extrovert, or introverted (shy)

 

• Participants trying to find extroverts asked more questions about being sociable

• Leading question

• In contrast those looking for introverted picked questions more focused on social withdrawal: not choosing same questions from list of possible questions

• Quickly questions about social connection, sociability (extrovert)

How news feed algorithms superchange confirmation Bias

3) How we Process Information

What is Top-down Processing? What is Bottom up processing?

Top-down

• Theory driven

• Individual filters & interprets new information in light of pre-existing knowledge & expectations

Bottom up

• Data-driven

• Individuals form conclusions based on stimuli encountered in the environment

Example

• Means nothing to you

• Imagine given schema: Washing Clothes

• Top-down

• Makes more sense

 

• Schemas help us make sense of the world

What is a Schema?

• A mental structure that helps people organize knowledge about a stimulus

  • Have schemas about everything

Schemas:

• Guides attention

  • e.g., count how many times the players wearing white pass the basketball

  • Gorilla suit

  • Gets filtered out, actually look at it

• Influences memory

• Guide Behaviour

  • Because tell us what to expect, can affect how we behave

Librarian/Waitress Study

• Watched video of husband and wife, half told wife librarin, half waitress

• Asked what kind of book wife received

• When told wife librarian recall she received a history book, schema of librarian,

• Participant told she was waitress, was romance novel

• How remember things influenced by schemas we have

Schemas Impact Behaviour: What is Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?

• We have expectations about what another person is like

• It influence how we act towards that person

• This causes that person to behave consistently with our original expectation

Behaviour Example: Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

• Done with elementary school kids and teachers

• Given IQ test, regardless of how tested some told scored highly (bloomers), or very low

• Chosen totally randomly did not reflect how students did

 

• Knowing 2 conditions create different expectations how does it change teachers behaviour

• teachers treated "bloomers" differently, more personal attention in classroom, more motivation and support

• Gave them more and better feedback on word, more material to learn, more difficult material

• More opportunities in class, pick on them

 

• Impacts how treated students

Behaviour Example: Self-Fulfilling Prophecies Results

• Everyone increasing

• Bloomers always increased more, doing better

  • Getting different environments by their teachers

  • These students doing better bc expectation of teachers such, created better environment

Heuristics vs. Rational Thinking

What is the Availability Heuristic?

• The tendency to judge the frequency or likelihood of a event by the ease with which relevant instances come to mind

  • causes people to overestimate the danger of a plane crash even though quite rare

WHat is Representativeness Heuristic?

• The tendency to judge the frequency or likelihood of an event by the extent to which it resembles the typical case

  • Stereotype of what a doctor looks like

  • Idea of what prototypical case of something is, when encounter case not prototypical struggle with it

What is the Anchoring Heuristic?

• People’s estimates of unknown quantities are easily biased by what values the consider, even when those values are obviously arbitrary & irrelevant

Anchoring Heuristic Study

• One condition not given any anchor

• Then in another given different anchor "suggested among 5 dollar for example)

 

• Control, no anchor

• Selling online, price higher anchor, negotiation

Why are Anchors so effective?

1. They are sometimes believed to be informative

2. In cases of extreme uncertainty, any value that comes to mind will seem plausible

3. Anchors are defaults

• move off them

Other Heuristics