PSYCH 3201 EXAM 2 Marquette university

Social cognition

How we interpret, analyze, remember, and use information about the social world.

Non-verbal communication

Sending and receiving of information using gestures, expressions, vocal cues, and body movements rather than words.

Facial Expressions

• Emotions signal other of of our intentions

• Some emotions are easily recognized across cultures, such as anger, surprise, and happiness

• Darwin argued that the ability to decode emotional expression is an aid to survival

  • Especially negative emotions that signal potential danger

Emotions Facilitate survival: 7 primary emotions

• anger

• disgust

• fear

• happiness

• surprise

• contempt

• sadness

Body movements

• Posture and motion convey social information

• Dress can convey information used to infer personality

• We often subtly mimic the movements of others: behavioral mimicry

  • we don’t know we are doing it

  • Mimicry can increase liking

Body movements : negatives

• Negative information carries more weight than positive information when forming impressions

• Why?

  • It is more unusual and therefore distinctive.

  • It may signal danger and is adaptive

Cultural Differences: collectivists and individualists

Equal in publicly expressing positive emotions

Cultural Differences: collectivists

• Greater discomfort publicly expressing negative emotions

Gender and nonverbal displays: contingent smile

• Women tend to be more overtly expressive than men, especially in smiling

  • Only the case in situations where others are present

contingent smile: people smile when

• Embarrassed

• Uncomfortable

• Miserable

• Socially apprehensive

Who are are better encoders and decoders? Men or Women?

• Women are both better encoders and decoders of emotion than men.

Why are women better encoders and decoders?

• Women are higher in?

  • General expressiveness

  • Smiling

  • Decoding accuracy

How accurate are our perceptions?

Dual- Process models of social cognition

How accurate are our perceptions?: Assumptions

• People employ two broad cognitive strategies in their social thinking

  • effortless/ automatic thinking

  • Effortful/ deliberate thinking

Accuracy of snap judgements? ( Todrov et al;, 2005) : explanation

• Participants asked to rate republican and democratic congressional race candidates for competency.

  • Shown picture for 1 second

Accuracy of snap judgements? ( Todrov et al;, 2005) : Results

• The candidate judged to be more competent won the election in 69% of elections.

What influences the development of perceptions of others?

• Self-fulfilling prophecy

• Schemas

• Scripts

• Heuristics

• Confirmation bias

What is a self- fulfilling prophecy?

• Process by which someones expectations about a person or group leads to the fulfillment of those expectations

Self- fulfilling prophecy involves a three-step process

1. Perceiver (the “prophet”) forms impression of target person

2. Perceiver acts toward target person consistent with impression

3. Target person’s behavior changes to correspond to the perceiver’s actions

Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) study of elementary school children: “ Potential bloomers”

Results: The bloomers did significantly better

Why?

• Teachers treated positively labeled students differently by:

  • Creating warmer socioemotional climate

  • Providing more feedback on academic performance

  • Providing more challenges

  • Providing greater response opportunity in class

Schema: Organized structure of knowledge

• Built from experience

• Contains casual relations

• Is a Theory about how the social world operates

Schema: Explained

• People with expertise on a topic have a well- developed schema about that topic

Schema: “ Scripts”

Schemas about events in well known situations

Gender Schema

• Cognitive structure for processing information according to perceived maleness and femaleness

• The use of gender schema reinforces social stereotypes about gender

• Not everyone is “ gender schematic”

Detecting D

Schemas affect information processing

• Once a schema is activated, we see more information consistent with the schema

• We process the information consistent with the schema

• We process the information more quickly

• We remember it better

• Schemas can be activated outside conscious awareness

Heuristics

• “ Mental shortcuts” that:

  • Save time

  • Conserve mental energy

• Reasonably, not extremely, accurate

Specific Kinds of Heuristics: Availability

Something is likely to occur, or is common, if I can easily think of an example

Specific Kinds of Heuristics: Representativeness

• Tendency to judge category membership of things basked on how closely they match the typical members of that group

Specific Kinds of Heuristics: Anchoring and adjustment heuristic

• Tendency to be biased toward the starting value or anchor in making quantitative judgements a

We most likely use heuristics when:

• We do not have time for systematic analysis

• We are overloaded with information and cannot process it all

• We don’t consider issue important

• We have little knowledge to use In making a decision

• Situation primes a give heuristic, making it cognitively available

• We are in positive mood, signaling that everything is fine and no effortful thinking is necessary

Confirmation Bias

• Tendency to seek out confirming information and avoid disconfirming information

• Once we form an impression, we seek to confirm it.

  • perpetuates incorrect stereotypes

Thought suppression: Blue butterfly example

• Test: Do not think about a blue butterfly right now

• Not thinking about the blue butterfly:

Thought suppression: Blue butterfly example background

• Requires monitoring for the unwanted thought…

  • Which requires that some part of your thoughts must be focused on the unwanted idea

Thought suppression: Blue butterfly example cont.

• After suppression efforts end, thoughts rebound into consciousness

Detecting Deception

• We are generally about as good at detecting deception as we are at guessing coin flips

• “ Expressions given off” are better indicators than “ expressions given”

  • We overestimate importance of facial expressions, which are relatively controllable- especially with practice.

• With training, we can improve at detecting deception, but error rates remain high

Detecting Deception: signs

• Shorter answers

• Stories are less logical

• Tense voice - pitch rises

• Slower speech, more pauses and sentence hesitations

• Fewer first person singular pronouns ( I, Me)

• Less involved story telling

• More negative emotional words

Detecting Deception: Poor signs

• Smiling (to cover deception)

• Look in the eye (deliberate eye contact to portray truthfulness)

How do we explain people’s behavior?

Attributions

Attributions

• The way we explain the cause of an event or behavior

• Locus of causality (LOC)

Internal attributions

Behavior caused by qualities of the person ( personality, abilities, effort); also called dispositional attribution

External attribution

Behavior caused by outside factors ( other people, luck, nature of situation); also called situational attribution

Stability and controllability

• In addition to locus of causality, observers decide if cause is:

  • Stable (permanent, lasting)

  • Controllable

• People use these three dimensions (causality, stability, and controllability) to decide why things have happened, and how to respond to others.

  • We have more empathy and are more willing to help if uncontrollable, not stable, and not internal LOC.
    

Culture and casual attributions

• People from individualistic cultures pay more attention to internal factors

• People from collectivistic cultures pay more attention to social/ situational factors

Kelly’s covariation model of attributions

• Attributions are made based on multiple observations of behavior.

Kelly’s covariation model: Covariation Principle

• In order for something to be the cause of a particular behavior > it must be present when behavior occurs and absent when it doesn’t occur

Kelly’s covariation model: what are the three kinds of information required in making attributions?

• Consensus information

• Consistency information

• Distinctiveness information

Consensus information

are others reacting in same way to stimulus object as target?

Consistency information

Does target react in same way to stimulus object over time?

Distinctiveness Information

Does target react in same way to other stimulus objects?

Kelly’s covariation model: Statistics class result

Biases in attribution

Fundamental attribution error:

• Underestimate situational factors in explaining others’ behavior , and overestimate dispositional factors

• Significant cultural variation tendency to commit FAE

  • More common among westerners( individualists cultures) than Estern ( collectivistic cultures)

Real world application of FAE in Class

Hurricane Katrina

Background: Hurricane Katrina secretary of homeland security Micheal Chertoff

Biases in attributions

• Actor-observer effect:

  • A different in attributions based on who is making the casual assessment:

    • The actor- who is relatively inclined to make situational attributions

    • The observer- who is inclined to make dispositional attributions

Dual Process model of attributions

Implicit Personality

• Naive assumptions about certain “types” of people

  • Type of schema

  • Based on “Central traits”

Implicit Personality : Growth mindset

• Belief that personality such as intelligence can be changed and developed over time

Implicit Personality : Fixed mindset

• Belief that personality and IQ are unchangeable

Counterfactual thinking

• Tendency to evaluate events by imagining alternatives versions or outcomes.

When are we most likely to engage in counterfactual thinking?

• Following negative and unexpected events

• Thought generated usually deal with how negative outcome might have been prevented

Why do we engage in counterfactual thinking?: Emotional coping

It may help us feel better following negative outcome if we imagine and even worse outcome (“ it could have been worse”)

Why do we engage in counterfactual thinking? : Plan for future

It may help us better understand our mistakes and thereby improve our chances for future success.

Attitude

A positive or negative evaluation of an object

Tripartite model of attitudes

• Affect

• Behavior 

• Cognition 

In class attitude discussion

• Smoking 

  • Cigarette smoking gone down, while E- Cigarettes has gone up. Especially in highschoolers 

  • Health Implications

Implicit

• Attitude is activated automatically from memory

  • Outside conscious awareness

  • Simple, gut-level evaluation

Explicit attitude 

• Consciously held 

• careful and deliberate 

Implicit + Explicit attitudes

• May contradict each other

Do implicit and explicit attitudes correlate?

• Depends 

• Attitudes on socially sensitive topics( cigarette smoking, prejudice, etc) tend to have lower correlations 

Implicit and explicit attitudes toward cigarette smoking ( Sherman et al.,2003)

What happens when your explicit attitude opposes your implicit attitude

• Implicit attitude: Attitude activates automatically from memory,often without persons awareness that she or he possesses It

• Explicit: A consciously held attitude

• Simultaneous possession od contradictory implicit and explicit attitudes toward the same object 

Dual attitude= _________

ambivalence 

Reference groups

• A group

  • To which we orient ourselves
    ◦ With which we emotionally identify
    ◦ Whose standards we use to judge ourselves and
    others
    ◦ People we observe and imitate in our group are
    called
    role models

    • Observing role models might help children learn
      how to behave in larger society. (observational
      learning)

Mere Exposure

• Seeing an unfamiliar stimulus many times can lead to liking.
  ◦ As long as you do not have initial
  negative reactions to it

•  Requires no knowledge of the object

• Possible explanation: Familiar objects are unlikely to be dangerous.

Self-perception Theory

• Proposes that we infer our attitudes from observing our own behavior.
  ◦ The same way we infer others’ attitudes

• More likely when
  ◦ Behavior is freely chosen.
  ◦ Attitude is vaguely defined.
  ◦ We have little experience with attitude object.

•  May be how implicit attitudes become explicit

• How might this theory be related to smoking attitudes?
  

How do we feel when our attitudes and behaviors don’t match?

Example:I have a negative attitude toward smoking (it’s not healthy, it’s expensive) but I still do anyway.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory 

• We wish to appear consistent in our thoughts and behavior (cognitive consistency).

• Inconsistency is uncomfortable, aversive 

Dissonance reduction

• To avoid or reduce the aversive feeling, we engage in the following:
  ◦ Change attitudes
  ◦ Change behavior
  ◦ Add cognitions
  ◦ Reduce perceived choice
  ◦ Make self affirmations

Variations of Cognitive Consistency

• Consistency is more integral to individualist than collectivist societies.
  ◦ Behavior within collectivist societies is ideally more concerned with being
  appropriate to the situation than with being consistent.

• Within a given society, there are people with different tolerances for dissonance.

Theory of planned behavior

• Peoples conscious decisions to engage in specific actions determined by

  • Their attitudes toward the behavior 

  • Relevant subjective norms 

  • Their perceived behavioral control

Theory of planned behavior

How can we persuade people to engage in a behavior or change their attitude?

Elaboration likelihood model

Elaboration likelihood model (petty and cacioppo)

• A model of persuasion maintaining that there are 2 different routes to persuasion:

  • Central route

  • peripheral route 

Central Route

• People think carefully and deliberately about the content of the message

• Attend to the logic and strength of the arguments 

• Consider evidence carefully 

Peripheral route

• people attend to relatively easy- to-process superficial cues relate to persuasive message

• Length of message

• Expertise or attractiveness of the source of message

Audience characteristic people are more likely to use central tour if

• motivated, have time and cognitive energy to devote to a message

• Issue is personally relevant

• Knowledgeable in domain

• High in need for cognition

• Older

• In a negative mood

Audience characteristic cont more likely to use peripheral route if 

• low motivation or ability to think about message

• Issue is not personally relevant 

• Incomplete or hard to comprehend message

• Distracted or fatigued

• Happy mood 

• Low in need for cognition

Message source factors influencing persuasion

• credibility 

• Attractiveness

Credibility

• low credibility is a discounting cue

• How ever, over time, sources lack of credibility may be forgotten (sleeper effect)

Attractiveness

• likability

• Similarity to audience

• Physical appearance

Message Characteristics

Message is more presumptive when:

• High quality and provides both sides of arguments

• Rapid speech increases persuasion through peripheral routes

• Vividness

  • Identifiable victim effect

• Culturally appropriate 

• use of emotion in message

  • Humor

  • Fear induction 

Humor

is effective when it is relevant to the message

Can fear campaigns be counterproductive?

• Fear can induce helplessness if no clear alternative to the feared outcome is presented 

• Fear and anti-smoking campaigns 

  • Fear ads can induce defensiveness is the ads attack sense of self( Thompson et al,2009)

    • Especially if person Leo self-efficacy for quitting and perceives low health treat of smoking ( Popova & ling,2012)

  • However, fear Des are effective for high perceived threat, high self- efficacy smokers 

In-group

A group to which one belongs; us

Out-group

A group to which one does not belong; them

3 Primary groups we immediately categorize people

• Age

• Gender

• Ethnicity 

Other groups we create examples

• University you attend

• Religious practices

• Nationality

• Sports team 

• etc 

Stereotype

Cognitive component

Prejudice

Affective/ evaluative component

Discrimination

Behavioral component