Social Cognition and Social Attribution Review

PSYCH 201 - UIUC

Social Cognition

The encoding, storage, retrieval, and processing of information in the brain which relates to members of the same species

Gives us useful information about the strategies and rules that people follow to make judgments

Construal

Impact how people process and remember social information differently

Bias

The tendency to put disproportionally more weight in favor of or against an idea/beleif/thing. It’s systematic.

Snap Judgment

People tend to make very complex inferences about motives and personality based on very small amounts of information. The two dimensions people use are trustworthiness and dominance.

Pluralistic Ignornance

Misperception of a group norm that results from observing people who are acting at variance with their private beliefs out of a concern for the social consequences—actions that reinforce that erroneous group norm

Self-fulfilling Prophecy

A situation in which people: Have an expectation about what another person is like, which influences how they act toward that person, which causes the person to behave consistently with the original expectation, thus making the expectation come true

Primacy Effects

Information presented first has an overly strong influence on later judgments

Recency Effects

Information presented last has an overly strong influence on later judgments

Framing effects

The influence on judgment resulting from the way that information is presented

Spin framing

Changing the way something is phrased/framed so that it looks more favorable or unfavorable

80% lean or 20% fat

Temporal Framing

How actions and events are framed within a particular time perspective

Construal level therory

Distant actions are though about abstractly, whereas close actions are thought about concretely

Confirmation Bias

The tendency to test a proposition by searching for evidence that would support it

Top-Down Processing

1. Theory Driven

2. Filter and interpret new data based on what you already know (Schemas)

3. Base your judgments/decisions on pre-existing expectations and knowledge

Bottom-Up Processing

1. Data Driven

2. Put together pieces of information to see what you get

3. Base your judgments/decisions on stimuli you encounter

Intuition

Quick, automatic, based on associations, performs many operations simultaneously

Reason

Slower, more controlled, based on rules and deductions, performs one operation at a time (serial)

Heuristics

Decision-making shortcut

Availability heuristic

A mental shortcut where you judge how common or likely an event is based on how easily examples of it come to your mind

Representativeness Heuristic

A mental shortcut where you judge the likelihood of something by comparing it to a stereotypical mental prototype or past experience rather than using actual math or logic

Fluency

The feeling of ease associated with processing information

Attribution Theory

A set of concepts explaining how people assign causes to the events around them and the effects of people’s casual assessments (how people explain the causes of events they observe)

Counterfactual Thoughts

Thoughts of might have, could have, or should have happened “if only” something has been done differently

Emotional Amplification

Emotional reactions to counterfactual thinking increases depending how how easily it is to imagine the alternative

Casual Attribution

Linking an event or behavior to a cause to explain the behavior

Covariation Principle

How people decide what caused a particular behavior

Consensus

Do most people do this in the situation?

Discounting Principle

Less weight is given to a particular cause of a behavior if there are alternative causes present

Interview being nice to you because you are the interviewee

Augmentation Principle

Greater weight is given to a particular cause of behavior if there are other potential causes that would normally process the opposite outcome

If a person comes into a job interview with a horrible wacky fit, we explain the cause of his attire to his personality, maybe he just has unique style

Consistency

Does the target person only do this in this particular situation?

Consistency

Does the target person do this all of the time in this situation, or was this a one-time occurence?

Situation Attribution

When consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency are high

Dispositional Attribution

When consensus and distinctiveness is low, but consistency is high

1. People rely more on consistency and distinctiveness than consensus

2. People don’t always have all three types of information

Self-Serving Attributional Bias

The tendency to attribute failures to external causes and successes to internal causes

Fundamental Attribution Error

The tendency to attribute a person’s behavior to personality while ignoring situation causes

Dual Process Model

1. We make initial, automatic dispositional attribution

2. WE characterize the person based on the behavior

3. Upon reflection, we tae what we know about the situation and adjust the dispositional inference

Actor-Observer Difference

A difference in attribution based on who is making the casual assessment

1. The actor (more likely to make situational attributions)

2. The observer (more likely to make dispositional attributions)

3. Apart of Fundamental Attribution Error

American-primed Participants

More likely to attribute behavior to individual choices of the fish

Chinese-primed Participants

More likely to attribute to the action of the group