Page 2: What is Social Cognition?

• Definition of Social Psychology: scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and behavior are influenced by the presence of others

• Definition of Social Cognition: structures and processes involved in perceiving, interpreting, and acting on social information

• Focus on choices of which social events to pay attention to, how to interpret them, and how to store them in memory

• Emphasis on personal subjective experience of the environment

Page 4: What is Impression Formation?

• Impression formation is assigning characteristics to other people

• Example: Daily Beast poll describing candidates with one word during the 2012 U.S. Election

Page 5: Acquiring Knowledge

• Nativist View: some knowledge is innate, emphasis on evolution and genes

• Empiricist View: all knowledge comes through the senses, emphasis on experience and learning

• Kantian Synthesis: knowledge acquired through experience, experience structured through innate schemata

Page 6: Asch's Configural Model

• People make holistic judgments based on specific information in impression formation

• Central traits are disproportionately influential and useful for organizing and summarizing information about a person

Page 8: Biases in Impression Formation

• Primacy Effect: earlier information has stronger influence than later information

• Negativity Bias: negative information has stronger influence than positive information, especially in sociability and morality domains

• Halo Effect: assumption that someone with known positive or negative qualities possesses additional undisclosed qualities

Page 10: Schemas

• Schema: set of expectations about the world that affects the information we attend to and remember

• Schemas influence social perceptions by guiding expectations

• Types of schemas: person schema, self schema, role schema, event schema, content-free schemas

Page 11: Group Schemas

• Prejudice: general attitude towards members of a social group

• Stereotype: general belief about members of a group

• Discrimination: behaviors directed toward others because of group membership

Page 12: Stereotype Suppression

• Stereotype-specific study: suppressing stereotypical thoughts leads to stronger link between group and stereotype

• Ironic thought suppression: rebound effect where intruding thoughts come up regardless of suppression

Page 15: Self-Knowledge

• Self-fulfilling prophecies: others' expectations can cause us to behave in a way that confirms those expectations

• Self-perception theory: learn about ourselves by observing how we behave

• Social-comparison theory: gain accurate self-evaluations by comparing ourselves to others

Page 18: Attributions

• Attribution theory: explanation of how people develop a causal understanding of human behavior

• Situational factors: external causes in the environment

• Dispositional factors: internal causes related to individual personality characteristics

Page 19: Kelley's Covariation Theory

• Attributions made using three principles: covariation, consensus, and distinctiveness

• Covariation: comparing behavior in different situations

• Consensus: how others behave in the same situation

• Distinctiveness: how the behavior is different from other situations

Page 25: ATTRIBUTIONAL BIASES

1. Actor-Observer Effect

2. Fundamental Attribution Error

3. False Consensus

4. Self-Serving Bias

Page 26: ACTOR-OBSERVER EFFECT

• When we look for causes of behavior, it matters if we are the actor or the observer

• As an actor, we perceive our behavior as influenced by the situation

• As an observer, we perceive the behavior of others as due to personal dispositions

• The information available differs when we are the actor vs. when others are acting

Page 27: FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR

• Definition: the tendency to consider behavior to reflect underlying and immutable properties of people

• Also known as correspondence bias

Page 28: FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR

• Jones & Harris (1967) study

• Participants read essays arguing pro-Castro or anti-Castro issues

• They were told that the writer was given a choice or given no choice in the side to debate

• Measured: How pro-Castro is the essay writer?

Page 29: FALSE CONSENSUS

• Definition: the tendency for people to believe that their own behavior is widely shared and that their own views are consensual

• Example: smoking, political views

• Possible reasons: surrounding ourselves with similar others, self as an anchor

Page 30: SELF-SERVING BIAS

• Definition: tendency to attribute one's success to dispositional characteristics and one's failures to situational factors

• Example: attributing success to intelligence and failure to unfair questions

• Related to self-enhancement

Page 32: COGNITIVE SHORTCUTS

• Used due to limited cognitive resources

• Heuristics are mental shortcuts used for quick judgments based on past experience

• Advantages: speed

• Disadvantages: not always accurate

• Types: representativeness heuristic, availability heuristic, anchoring and adjusting heuristic

Page 33: REPRESENTATIVENESS HEURISTIC

• Definition: classifying something as belonging to a certain category based on its similarity to the typical case

• Problems: ignoring additional information such as base-rate

Page 38: AVAILABILITY HEURISTIC

• Definition: estimating the likelihood of an event based on the ease with which instances of that event come to mind

• Example: comparing the danger of driving in a car vs. flying with a commercial airline

Page 39: ANCHORING AND ADJUSTMENT HEURISTIC

• Definition: estimates are made by starting with an initial value (anchor) that is adjusted to reach an answer

• Example: estimating the number of hours per week to study for