Psych 253 - Lecture 4: Social Cognition and Heuristics pt. 2

schema

A schema is a mental model or representation that organizes the

important information about a thing, person, or event

Heuristic

A heuristic is a mental shortcut or rule

of thumb that reduces complex mental

problems to more simple rule-based

decisions.

Heuristics are necessary because

humans have bounded rationality:

people try to make rational choices but

are bounded by their cognitive

limitations (e.g., lack of information,

limited working memory, etc.)

Automatic & Controlled Processing

On Auto-pilot: Automatic Thinking

• We often size up a new situation very quickly

• Often these quick conclusions are correct

• E.g.—You can tell the difference between a college classroom

and a frat party without having to think about it

• E.g., You can tell if two people are a romantic couple or just

friends

• Imagine a different approach: slow and deliberate

thinking

• Imagine driving down the road and stopping repeatedly to

analyze every twist and turn.

• Imagine meeting a new person and excusing yourself for 15

minutes to analyze what you learned from them

• Schemas and heuristics are great examples of

automatic thinking; so, we know that automatic

thinking can often yield good judgments but not always

Accessibility and Priming

Accessibility is the extent to which schemas are at the

forefront of people’s minds and are therefore likely to be

used when we are making judgments about the social

world

Priming is the process by which recent experiences

increase the accessibility of a schema or concept

A schema or concept can be accessible for three main reasons:

1. Chronically accessible due to past experience (cocktail party - name)

2. Accessible because it is related to a current goal (eg. hungry)

3. Temporarily accessible because of our recent experience (priming)

A Note About Priming (challenges)

The kinds of priming studies that don’t replicate typically report

that some fairly minimal/subtle prime of a concept leads to a

behavioral or belief change

• The old age and walking speed study falls in this category

• Many “embodied cognition” findings, like the idea that holding a hot

drink increases warmth in social interactions

• Committing moral violations or reading about them (i.e., being primed)

leads people to physically cleanse themselves by washing hands or

using disinfectant

• Placing money in front of people makes them endorse capitalism and

the free market more

• For the currency-related stimuli, it seems

that, as people tried to replicate these

results more and more often, also with

larger sample sizes and more rigorous

methods (in line with the Open Science

movement), the sizes of the effects

more-or-less shrank into nothingness

• It is not the case that this means that priming is “untrue” as an

entire concept!

• Priming concepts like gender and race absolutely changes more

modest DVs, like reaction times and error rates

• Priming can also change how people evaluate ambiguous stimuli

• Priming can influence how easily we are able to recall events

(memory effects)

• Anchoring and adjustment is highly robust and is a form of

priming

Priming Stereotypes - Shooter task

Participants brought into the lab to play a simple computer game

IV #1: If you seen an armed target (e.g., gun), choose to “shoot” as quickly as possible If you see an unarmed target (e.g., wallet), choose to “not shoot” as quickly as possible

IV #2: The people holding the objects were either Black or White

DVs: % of trials in which the answer is wrong;

IVs:

▪ Race of target: Black v. White

▪ Object: Weapon v. Neutral

▪ Ps asked to quickly decide whether to “shoot” or “not shoot”

▪ DVs: Reaction times and error rate

When applied to members of a

social group such as race, gender,

political parties, religious groups,

etc., schemas are commonly

referred to as stereotypes

Momentary v. Retrospective Measures (Gender stereotypes)

• Independent variables (IVs): IV* #1: Gender (Women vs. Men) - *Pseudo-IV (can’t assign)

• IV #2: Type of measure

• Global

• Momentary/Live

• DV: level of emotions reported

How would you react to all of these emotions throughout the day? - some given a survey (self report) , some asked to click a button when they feel it through day

In the one when they are clicking button, no schema/bias involved, men and women were not that different.

Planning fallacy (how to mitigate) + Overconfidence definitions

• The planning fallacy describes how people underestimate the

amount of time a task is going to take

• Kind of a big deal when it comes to university!

• A useful strategy for counteracting the planning fallacy: break tasks

down into smaller portions/units and estimates will be more accurate

Overconfidence describes how people how people have greater

confidence in their judgments than is warranted by a controlled

or rational assessment

• if you ask people if they would be able to explain how household appliances work, they prob say yes and then when you ask them to do it, they can’t do it.

Strategies for Improving Outcomes - Automatic thinking (opt-in/ opt out)

In domains in which it is very important, it can be possible to

identify that automatic thinking or heuristics are leading to bad

outcomes, then effortfully substitute more controlled decision-

making to reach better outcomes

• Changing the environment (rather than trying to change people) can increase positive outcomes in aggregate

People tend to go with whatever is the default so better to have an Opt-out system than an Opt-in