Psychology 161 Exam 2

Social Cognition

process by which people think about and make sense of other people, themselves, and social situations

- how people initially form impressions of each other's personalities, emotions, roles, and identities

Assumptions about social cognition

1) we're motivated to make sense of the world around us, so we walk around looking for ordered patterns

2) the social world is JAM PACKED with information

3) we can only attend to a small subset of the total stimuli we experience (limited attention & info processing)

4) to cope with being bombarded by all this info we have to strategize by being a cognitive miser

- We process a subset of it all, just enough to make correct judgement and proper decisions

3 Types of Simplification Strategies

1) Dispositional Inference Bias

2) Confirmatory Biases

3) Cognitive Heuristics

Dispositional Inference Biases

Attributing someone's behavior to their personal qualities rather than the situation (Jason did x, y, z, because HE is x, y, z)

- The bias is because we observe other people's behavior and we jump to conclusions about a behavior coming from personality, rather than situation

It's a fundamental attribution error: fundamental because we do it all the time, attributional because we infer an attribute from behavior, and error bc it's often wrong

Jones and Harris - Fidel Castro Experiment

Subjects given either pro or anti castro essays, and told they were written by debate team students.

Half of each group is told that the essay stance was freely chosen

the other half of each group is told the essay stance was from the prompt.

Subject asked to judge the writer's actual attitude towards Castro:

- In the unforced groups, people generally rated pro essays as pro writers, and anti essays as anti writers

- in forced groups, people rated pro essays as roughly 50% pro (expected), but people rated anti essays as still mostly anti

(means they made a dispositional inference by assuming that the action was indicative of the personality, even though its much more indicative of the situation (i.e. they were forced anti, but people assume they're actually anti)

Actor-observer bias

"behavior of others is due to personality; my behavior is due to the situation"

- apparently this bias is coded in language (?)

Reason for this imbalance:

- as the observer, the other person is the most tangible thing to place blame

- as the actor, the situation we are in is the most tangible (salient) thing to place blame

- motivation: we're motivated to protect our positive self view

Confirmatory Bias

Definition: it's the tendency to INTERPRET, SEEK, or CREATE information that confirms or verifies our currently existing beliefs

Darley and Gross - INTERPRETING confirmatory info study

Subjects asked to evaluate future academic potential of a 9 yo. when told in one group she is affluent and has high ed. parents, or in other group that she's poor and has uned. parents. Within each group, subjects either immediately judge 9 yo. or watch her perform tasks at an AVERAGE level and then judge her

- question: does the expectation that was given influence judgement

- Result: between "didn't watch" high and low expectation groups, the difference in rating is not large, but the difference increases when the high/low groups did get to watch.

Snyder and Swann - SEEKING confirmatory info study

Question: do we seek info objectively, or to confirm our beliefs?

Subjects would be interviewing someone, and were told the interviewee was either and introvert or extrovert. Subjects allowed to select a set of questions from a list they thought would be most capable at interviewing the person. Extrovert group interviewers picked questions focused on extroverts, and introvert group did the same.

CREATING confirmatory info + study (Snyder, Tanke, Bersheid)

"inaccurate expectation leads to expectation-consistent behavior"

Study: males have phone convo. with female, and told she's either attractive or unattractive, then they get to see picture of attractive or unattractive person, then male asked to judge female's responses friendliness

Result: attractive females' responses coded as more friendly than unattractive females'

Cognitive Heuristics (4 of them)

Mental shortcuts, are adaptive but can lead to mistakes in judgement

1) Anchoring and adjustment heuristic

2) Representativeness heuristic

3) Availability heuristic

4) Straightness heuristic

Anchoring and adjustment heuristic

Begin with a rough estimate, then adjust (based on given expectation) - we often use ourselves as an anchor for heuristics in every-day situations

Representativeness Heuristic

A mental strategy of basing likelihood judgments on prototypes/stereotypes - this often leads us to ignore other relevant and important info

Availability Heuristic

when likelihood estimates are based on how easily examples come to mind

Straightness Heuristic

Tendency to tidy up untidy realities to make more in line with prettier picture

- We oversimplify situations to have cognitive control over them

Unconscious Bias

People are generally not aware of their biases and mental shortcuts they use

Bonus Bias: Affective forecasting errors

The tendency to mispredict the intensity and duration of emotional reactions to future events, caused in part by:

- Focalism: the tendency to overestimate how much we will think about an event in the future (thinking I'll always be sad about breakup)

- Immune neglect: the tendency to overlook the important value of automatic coping processes, like forgetting painful memories, that help us overcome emotional events

Accessibility

Definition: Information that is more easily retrieved is more likely to be used

- Priming: temporarily increasing the ACCESSIBILITY of a concept by presenting a related stimulus (mind as a toolbox metaphor, reaching for wrong tool on top of the pile)

Higgins, Rholes, and Jones Study (accessibility)

people asked to either memorize a list of adventurous words, or a list of reckless words. Then asked to read a paragraph about "Donald" and then rate him on positive characteristics

- adventurous list group rated Donald more positively than reckless group bc of accessibility of positive attributes

Bargh, Chen, Burrows Study (accessibility)

Participants do scrambled sentence task, and there is a group that receives a lot of rude words, a group with neutral words, and a group with considerate words

- then asked to go to hallway where they'd meed experimenter for next part of study

- experimenter has conversation with someone else, and experiment counted the # ppl that interrupted within 10 minutes

- the rude group interrupted more often (63%) than neutral group (38%) than the polite group (17%)

→Affective Primacy + Murphy, Zajonc study (ideographs)

Emotional stimuli reactions occur before cognitive appraisal

briefly shown happy face, angry face, or neutral shape before being show Chinese ideograph for a few seconds,

then asked to rate how much they liked the ideograph from 1-5 (ppl liked the symbol more if they saw happy face first)

Holland, Hendriks, Aarts (priming by smell)

Subjects answer arbitrary questions in neutral, or citrus scented room, then go to another room and eat a biscuit, and the citrus group cleaned up more of the resulting crumbs than the neutral group

Attitudes

a favorable or unfavorable evaluative reaction towards something or someone

- Explicit attitude: consciously accessible

- Implicit attitude: unconscious association between object and evaluative response

The 4 Aspects of Attitude

1) attitude structure and measurement

2) how attitudes are formed

3) whether attitudes predict behavior

4) how and why attitudes change

Attitude Structure: Univariate or Bivariate?

Univariate: one dimension with two endpoints (positive/negative attitudes towards something are mutually exclusive)

Bivariate: attitudes are a function of positivity (low to high) and negativity (low to high)

Attitude Measurement

Explicit measures: self report (just ask), but problem is social pressure to answer untruthfully

Implicit: indirect measures -- its more likely you'll reveal a person's prejudice if you try to infer based on their opinions, uses Implicit association test (IAT)

Dual processing theories

Implicit and explicit attitudes are from separate processes, and so they don't always agree (since they come from separate processes)

- They can also change independently of each other

Explicit attitudes better predict deliberate, conscious behavior; implicit attitudes better predict automatic, uncontrollable behavior

Attitude Formation (6 Contributions)

Any given attitude can be due to any and all of these:

1) mere exposure

2) basic learning processes

a. classical conditioning

b. instrumental conditioning

c. observational learning

3) cognitive appraisal

4) self perception

5) physical movement

6) genetics

1) Mere exposure effect

more exposure leads to more positive feelings

Zajonc study: people shown a set of Chinese ideographs and each was shown a varying number of times, the more times a given character was shown, the more people thought those meant good things in Chinese

2) Basic Learning Processes

Classical Conditioning: initially neutral stimulus begins to evoke a reaction after repeated pairings with another stimulus

Instrumental Conditioning: rewards and punishments influence and direct attitudes and behavior

Observational Learning: due to vicarious rewards and punishments (you see someone do something, get reward) you then model that behavior in an effort to get that reward

3) Cognitive Appraisal

Literally just thinking rationally about a matter and consciously creating an attitude towards it (this doesn't actually make a large contribution to our sum total attitude in real life tho)

4) Self-Perception

Self-perception theory states that we infer our internal states from our behavior

- in the same way an observer would make inferences about our attitudes based on behavior

5) Physical Movement

Physical movement can produce attitudes (like forcing self to smile can make you feel happier?)

Strack et al.

- People held pen in teeth (forcing smile), lips, or in hand and watched funny cartoons, rated funniness, teeth group rated it most funny

Wells and Petty Study

People listened to editorial, one group shook head up and down (like nodding) and other group shook back and forth (like refusing) and asked to rate the persuasiveness of the editorial, and nodding group found it more persuasive

Embodied Cognition

Definition: brain and body influence each other, so thinking evokes bodily states and bodily states influence thinking

Focalism:

the tendency to overestimate how much we will think about an event in the future (thinking I'll always be sad about breakup)

-

Immune neglect:

the tendency to overlook the important value of automatic coping processes, like forgetting painful memories, that help us overcome emotional events

Conjunction Error:

(this can cause a representativeness heuristic) this is when the combination of two events is thought to be more likely than two independent events

- false consensus effect:

the tendency to overestimate others' agreement with us - we assume others drink a lot if we do too, since we can come up with lots of examples of things we ourselves do, overestimating the portion of pop. that also does those things

3 important facts of heuristics (why, effect, and studying it do?)

Generally adaptive because of necessity to be cognitive misers

speed/accuracy tradeoff

Studying errors teaches us how people typically process information