3. Social Cognition + Attribution

Lectures 6–7 + Chapter 4

Social cognition

How people select interpret and use social information

Thin slices

Brief observations used to infer characteristics

Snap judgment

Rapid impression from limited information

Consensus

Extent other people respond similarly to the same stimulus

Distinctiveness

Extent a person responds uniquely to a specific stimulus

Covariation principle

Inferring causes by observing what varies together

Discounting principle

Weakening one explanation when other sufficient causes exist

Dispositional attribution

Explaining behavior by internal characteristics

Situational attribution

Explaining behavior by external circumstances

Counterfactual thinking

Imagining how events could have happened differently

Emotional amplification

Stronger emotion when alternative outcomes are easy to imagine

Actor-observer difference

Greater tendency to explain others dispositionally and oneself situationally

Self-serving attribution bias

Credit successes to self and failures to outside causes

Correspondent inference theory

Inferring dispositions from behavior especially when actions have unique effects or are socially unexpected

Assumed desirability

How socially normative or expected a behavior is

Primacy effect

Earlier information has disproportionate impact

Recency effect

Later information has disproportionate impact

Framing effect

Equivalent information leads to different judgments based on presentation

Construal level theory

Psychological distance promotes abstract rather than concrete thinking

Confirmation bias

Searching for evidence that supports a hypothesis

Motivated confirmation bias

Favoring evidence consistent with desired conclusions

Bottom-up processing

Constructing judgments from incoming stimulus information

Top-down processing

Interpreting information using expectations and knowledge

Priming

Activation of a concept that makes it more accessible

Chronic accessibility

Frequent activation makes a schema habitually accessible

Subliminal

Below conscious awareness threshold

Self-fulfilling prophecy

Expectations influence behavior so that expected outcome becomes more likely

Belief perseverance

Maintaining a belief even after its evidence is discredited

Heuristic

Efficient mental shortcut for judgment

Availability heuristic

Judging frequency by how easily examples come to mind

Representativeness heuristic

Judging likelihood by resemblance to a prototype

Anchoring heuristic

Relying heavily on an initial value when making estimates

Base-rate information

Actual relative frequency of categories or events

Base-rate neglect

Ignoring prior frequencies in favor of a vivid description

Fluency

Subjective ease of processing information

Illusory correlation

Perceiving a correlation where none exists

Regression effect

Extreme values associated with less extreme values when correlation is imperfect

Regression fallacy

Misattributing regression effects to a causal intervention

Egocentric bias

Overestimating one's own role or contribution

False consensus effect

Overestimating how much others share one's views or behaviors

Attribution theory

Study of how people explain the causes of their own and other peoples behavior

Unique effects

Outcomes specific to one action that can help observers infer the actors intentions

Low assumed desirability

A behavior few people would perform in that situation, more informative about the persons disposition

High assumed desirability

A behavior most people would perform in that situation, less informative about personal disposition

Perceptual salience

Tendency to focus causal explanations on whichever person or feature attracts attention

Actor-observer effect

Tendency to explain ones own behavior more situationally and others behavior more dispositionally

Self-handicapping

Creating an obstacle or excuse in advance to protect self-esteem if performance is poor

Better-than-average effect

Tendency to evaluate oneself as above average on desirable characteristics

Schema-consistent memory

Memory shaped by existing expectations about what behavior fits a person or group

Behavioral confirmation

Expectations influence treatment of another person and elicit behavior consistent with those expectations

Ease-of-retrieval effect

The ease of recalling examples influences judgments of frequency or personal traits

Insufficient adjustment

Anchored estimates stay too close to an initial value even when the anchor is irrelevant