psy235 rn: social cognition and attitudes

Learn how we simplify the vast array of information in the world in a way that allows us to make decisions and navigate our environments efficiently.

We use cognitive shortcuts, such as schemas and heuristics, to quickly process and categorize vast amounts of information. These tools help us make fast decisions and predictions without overwhelming our cognitive resources.

Understand some of the social factors that influence how we reason.

Our reasoning is influenced by emotional states, motivations, desires, and social context, often leading to biased or automatic conclusions. This includes motivated reasoning, where we process information based on desired outcomes.

Determine if our reasoning processes are always conscious, and if not, what some of the effects of automatic/nonconscious cognition are.

conscious vs. automatic cognition: Not all reasoning processes are conscious. Many behaviors and judgments occur automatically (e.g., fear responses, stereotypes), often shaped by past experiences or unconscious associations.

Understand the difference between explicit and implicit attitudes, and the implications they have for behavior.

Explicit attitudes are consciously held and expressed, while implicit attitudes are automatic, unconscious beliefs that can influence behavior, often in ways people are unaware of (e.g., racial biases). Implicit attitudes can shape actions without the person intending to do so

Affective forecasting

Predicting how one will feel in the future after some event or decision.

Attitude:

A psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor.

Automatic: 

A behavior or process has one or more of the following features: unintentional, uncontrollable, occurring outside of conscious awareness, and cognitively efficient.

Availability heuristic:

A heuristic in which the frequency or likelihood of an event is evaluated based on how easily instances of it come to mind.

Chameleon effect:

The tendency for individuals to nonconsciously mimic the postures, mannerisms, facial expressions, and other behaviors of one’s interaction partners.

Directional goals:

The motivation to reach a particular outcome or judgment.

Durability bias:

A bias in affective forecasting in which one overestimates for how long one will feel an emotion (positive or negative) after some event.

Evaluative priming task:

An implicit attitude task that assesses the extent to which an attitude object is associated with a positive or negative valence by measuring the time it takes a person to label an adjective as good or bad after being presented with an attitude object.

Explicit attitude:

An attitude that is consciously held and can be reported on by the person holding the attitude.

Heuristics:

 A mental shortcut or rule of thumb that reduces complex mental problems to more simple rule-based decisions.

Hot cognition:

The mental processes that are influenced by desires and feelings.

Impact bias

 A bias in affective forecasting in which one overestimates the strength or intensity of emotion one will experience after some event.

Implicit Association Test:

An implicit attitude task that assesses a person’s automatic associations between concepts by measuring the response times in pairing the concepts.

Implicit attitude

An attitude that a person cannot verbally or overtly state.

Implicit measures of attitudes:

Measures of attitudes in which researchers infer the participant’s attitude rather than having the participant explicitly report it.

Mood-congruent memory: 

The tendency to be better able to recall memories that have a mood similar to our current mood.

Motivated skepticism: 

A form of bias that can result from having a directional goal in which one is skeptical of evidence despite its strength because it goes against what one wants to believe.

Need for closure: 

The desire to come to a decision that will resolve ambiguity and conclude an issue.

Planning fallacy:

A cognitive bias in which one underestimates how long it will take to complete a task.

Primed:

A process by which a concept or behavior is made more cognitively accessible or likely to occur through the presentation of an associated concept

Representativeness heuristic:

A heuristic in which the likelihood of an object belonging to a category is evaluated based on the extent to which the object appears similar to one’s mental representation of the category.

Schema:

A mental model or representation that organizes the important information about a thing, person, or event (also known as a script).

Social cognition:

The study of how people think about the social world.

Stereotypes:

Our general beliefs about the traits or behaviors shared by group of people.