Social Cognition

Social Cognition

The process of how people think about themselves and the social world

This is how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments and decisions

Schemas, Heuristics, Social beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors

Factors affecting one’s social cognition

Social Beliefs

Beliefs of an individual of what the person thinks society and government should be

It covers a wide range of things such as the war, religion, government, etc

Belief Perseverance

It is the tendency to hold on to one’s initial beliefs, even after they have been refused

Its tendency is strengthened if an explanation for our belief has been created. One way to reduce this is to get a person to argue the opposite position

Hostile Media Phenomenon

It is the finding that opposing partisan groups both perceive neutral, balanced media presentations as hostile to the other side, because the media have not presented the facts in the one-sided fashion the partisans “know” to be true

Biased sampling

Making generalizations based on information from others that are known to be biased

Perseverance Effect

Finding that people’s beliefs about themselves and the social world persist even after the evidence supporting it is discredited

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Occurs when a person have expectations about what another person is like, which influences how they act towards the person, which causes the person to act and behave according to the person’s original expectations

Mental Strategies and Shortcut

We use _____ and ______ to make decisions and judgments easily

Two different approaches that can be taken in reasoning and decision making situations the algorithmic and heuristic approach

Algorithmic Approach

A specific rule or solution procedure, often quite detailed and complex is guaranteed to furnish the correct answer if it is followed correctly. Simply, algorithm is a set of rules that needed to be applied correctly so you could provide the correct answer or decision

Heuristic Approach

A rule of thumb, an informal strategy or approach that works under some circumstances for some of the time, but is not guaranteed to yield the correct answer

Availability Heuristic

A mental rule of thumb where people base a judgement on the ease with which they can bring something to mind

Counterfactual thinking

Mentally changing some aspects of the past as a way of imagining what could have been. It usually happens when something bad happens and we get to a close call

Representative Heuristic

A mental shortcut where people classify something or someone based on how similar they are to a typical case. It is often a reasonable thing to do

Base rate information

Is the information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population

Anchoring and adjustment Heuristic

A mental shortcut that involves using a number or value as a starting point and then adjusting one’s answer away from this anchor. People often do not adjust tjeir answers sufficiently

Social Thinkers

Those people who have the ability to understand and think about other people

Cognitive Misers

The idea that people are so limited in their ability to think and make conclusions that they take mental shortcuts whenever they can

Motivated Tacticians

Those who have larger arsenal of mental rules and strategies and choose wisely among these strategies depending on their particular needs and goals. THey are also called “flexible social thinkers”

Automatic and Controlled Processing

People’s level of motivation is a key determinant of whether they engage in what is called ____ versus ____ thinking

Automatic processing

Can be defined as thinking that is unconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless. It allows us to use our minds in more important purposes

Controlled processing

It is the thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and needs a lot of effort. The purpose of this is to check and balance automatic processing so we can avoid and control unusual events

Benedict Spinoza

A philosopher three centuries ago made a characterization: when people initially see, hear or learn something, they take it at face value and assume it is true. Only after accepting the reality of a fact do people go back and decide whether it is true or not.

Thought Suppression

There is another consequence of being preoccupied and unable to engage in much controlled processing. It reduces our ability to engage in thought suppression which is the attempt to avoid thinking about something we would just as soon forget.

Monitoring and Operating Process

Two processes in thought suppression

Monitoring Process

An automatic process which searches for evidence that the unwanted thought is about to intrude one’s consciousness

Operating Process

A controlled process that is effortful and consciously attempting to distract one’s self by finding something else to think about. But in suppressing thoughts, there would be times that the more a person tries to suppress a thought, the more the unwanted thoughts occur in high frequency.

Social Perception

The study of how we form impressions of make inferences about other people. To understand others, we rely on our impressions and theories, putting them all together and making our conclusion based on them.

Nonverbal communication

The way in which people communicate, intentionally, without words.

Affect blends

Where one part of the face registers another.

Women

Better at understanding and conveying emotions nonverbally

Social Role Theory

On sex differences, in many societies women have learned different skills, one of which is to be polite in social interactions thus overlooking the fact that someone is lying.

Implicit Personality Theory

Composed of our general notions about which personality traits go tohether in one person

Priming effect

A process whereby recent experiences increase a trait’s accessibility or ready availability on our minds

Correspondent Inference Theory

How we make internal attributions, or how we infer dispositions from corresponding behavior.

Attribution theory

We try to determine why people do what they do in order to uncover the feelings and traits that are behind their actions

Internal and External Attribution

Types of Attribution

Internal Attribution

The inference that a person is behaving in a certain way because of something about him or her, such as the person’s attitudes, character, or personality.

External Attribution

The inference that a person is behaving a certain way because of something about the situation he or she is in

Self-serving attribution

Occurs when people make internal attributions for their successes and external attributions for their failures

Defensive attribution and Unrealistic optimism

Types of defensive attributions

Defensive Attributions

Helps avoid people avoid feelings morality It is the belief in a just world, whereby we believe that bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people

Unrealistic Optimism

About the future, whereby we think that good things are more likely to happen to us than to other people, and bad things are less likely to happen to us than to others

Co-variation Model

Another theory of attribution, focuses on observations of behavior across time, place, different actors, and different targets of the behavior and examines how the perceiver chooses either and internal or an external attribution.

Actor-observer difference, Perspectives change with time, Self-awarenss, and Cultural Differences

Four Factors of Co-variation Model

Actor-observer difference

Our perspective differs when we observe others than when we act. When we act— the ”environment” becomes our focus, but when we observe others, “they” command our attention

Perspective change with time

As we get to know people, we tend to start attributing their behavior to situational factors

Self awareness

Shifting our focus on ourselves leads us to attribute more responsibility to ourselves. In such cases, we attribute our behavior to internal factors and less to the situation.

Cultural Differences

The error occurs most in Western cultures where we place emphasis on “individualism”

Attitude

The favorable or unfavorable evaluative reaction towards something or someone. It is exhibited in one’s beliefs, feelings, or intended behavior

Cognitively, Behaviorally, and Affectively Based Attitude

Factors of Attitude

Cognitively Based Attitude

Based mostly on people’s beliefs about the properties of the attitude object

Behaviorally based attitude

Based on people’s actions toward the attitude object

Affectively based attitude

Based more on people’s emotions and values. It can be created through classical or operant conditioning

Attitude change

Emotions influence attitude change in a number of ways. People in positive moods are less likely to analyze a message carefully than people in negative moods.

Reactance Theory

Those people who experience an unpleasant state called reactance when their freedom of choice is threatened

Leon Festinger

Concluded that changing one’s attitudes does not guarantee a change in behavior, but rather, maintained that it was the other way around

Bogus pipeline

A procedure that fools people into disclosing their attitudes; participants are convinced that a machine can measure their private attitudes.

Role

A set of norms that define how people in a given social position ought to behave; actions expected of those who occupy a particular social position

Self-presentation theory

We express attitudes that match our behavior to appear consistent, to the Extent that we pretend to hold attitudes that we don’t really believe in

Impression management

State that people or organizations must establish and maintain an image to others that are congruent with perceptions they want to convey to their audience.

Self-monitoring

Being attuned to the way one presents oneself in social situations and adjusting one’s performance to create the desired impression

Social-chameleons

They adjust their behavior in accordance to their appraisal of how they perceive other people look at them

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

We feel tension (dissonance) when two simultaneously accessible thoughts or beliefs are psychologically inconsistent; we adjust our thinking to deal with the tensions

This pertains mostly with discrepancies between attitudes and behavior

Insufficient Justification

The less justification people have for explaining their behavior, the more that they would believe in what they had done

Dissonance After Decisions

After making decisions, we notice what might have been

We also upgrade our choices while downgrading the option we did not take

Self-Perception

This theory suggests that when our attitudes are weak or ambiguous, we are in the position of someone observing us from outside — we turn to our behavior to determine what out attitudes about the situation are.