Social Psychology – Social Cognition

What is social cognition?

How we think and make sense of the social world around us

What are the three main types of learning

1. Operant learning

• you learn from consequences of own actions

  • reinforcement → behavior likely to repeat

  • punishment → behavior likely to stop.

2. Associational learning (classical conditioning)

• learning via association between stimulus and automatic response/emotion

  • explains prejudice: seeing negative portrayals to a certain group creates negative attitudes

3. observational learning

• learning by watching others behaviours

  • ex bandura’s bobo doll experiment

What’s a cognitive schema?

Schemas give meaning to our world, help us to understand things, and organize our expectations

• mental representations of people, groups, situations

  • stored in prefrontal cortex

• we share similar cognitive schemas with others

  • schema = sigular

  • chemata = plural

• schemas are automatic and used without realizing

  • helps us predict and interpret social behaviour, and save cognitive energy (used more when tired)

• we also tend to remember and notice info that fits the schema and ignore conflicting info

Accommodation vs. assimilation

Accommodation: change schemas based on new info

Assimilation: reinterpret new info to fit existing schemas

• this maintains and develops schemas

What is confirmation bias?

When we seek out or favour information that confirms our beliefs

What is self-fulfilling prophecy?

when we act in ways that make expectations come true

What are scripts

scripts are schemas about how certain events unfold

What are stereotypes

they are schemas about other groups based on gender, race, etc.

• stereotypes tend to guide our judgements

Salience vs. Accessibility

Salience: when features of a person or situation stand out more are are more likely to attract attention

Cognitive accessibility: schemas or ideas that are easily retrieved from memory influence judgement

• also situational as they can be recently primed concepts

What are the two ways of thinking?

1. Unconscious:

• automatic, effortless, fast, no working memory necessary

  • thinking that happens in the background

2. Conscious:

• controlled, effortful, slow, requires working memory

How do we measure unconscious thinking?

Some measures are designed to tap into the unconscious thinking

• The implicit association test (IAT)

  • measures implicit biases (attitudes/stereotypes we hold unconciously)

• Affect misattribution procedure (AMP)

  • tests automatic responses and sees how an initial emotional reaction carries on

these ones seem to work

What is the Implicit Association Test? And how does it work?

It measures automatic associations to see how the unconscious mind quickly associates concepts to certain things

• often controversial due to the nature of the topics, and what results can suggest (stereotypes)

What is priming?

when a recent experience increases the accessibility of the schemata

What’s representative heuristic?

when we judge the likelihood based on how well something matches a stereotype or expectation, ignoring base rates

What’s availability heuristic

when we judge the frequency/probability of something by how easy it is for it to come to mind

• imagination makes it even more available

  • more available in memory

False consensus bias vs projection bias vs overconfidence bias vs optimism bias

False consensus: overestimating how much others share our beliefs or behaviours

projection bias: assuming others share our current thoughts or feelings

overconfidence bias: overestimating our own knowledge or abilities

optimism bias (planning fallacy): overestimating positive outcomes and underestimating time or recourses needed

What’s anchoring and adjustment heuristic

when initial information strongly influences subsequent judgements

Who is Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky?

famous psychologists who studied decision making, biases, and heuristics

Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics (2002) for this work.

What are heuristics as a whole?

They help us quickly and efficiently make decisions

• for the more part unconscious and automatic

but they are sometimes wrong which leads us to make errors

• unless we use our much slower and effortful conscious thinking to override them

Schemas vs. Heuristics

Heuristics are mental shortcuts that allow for quick decisions (process)

Schemas are mental frameworks/structures that organize knowledge (content)

What’s inattentional blindness

conscious attention is on something else which then leads us to miss things around us

What is change blindness

Failing to notice changes in the enviroment

• form of inattentional blindness

Why do we have two systems? (conscious vs unconcious)

• unconscious likely evolved first as a more primitive (basic, simple, early in development) way of surviving the environment

  • its a quick and easy way of processing information

• consciousness likely evolved after a a way to help with survival

  • allows for more complex processing

both systems are important

How does affect influence social cognition

• your current mood shapes judgements of people, places, and ideas

How does cognition influence affect?

arousal (psychological response) + cognitive appraisal (the processing of the arousal) = emotion