Social Cognition: Reality, Schemas, and Heuristics

Perception and Reality

• Ambiguity: The ability of a stimulus to take on more than $1$ value.

• Categorization Process: Perception, interpretation, and memory are active processes influenced by an individual's needs, wishes, and expectations.

• Naïve Realism (Jerome Bruner, $1950$'s): The tendency to perceive ambiguous stimuli as unambiguous, frequently confusing personal disambiguation with objective reality.

• Contextual Interpretation: The perception of a stimulus is a function of context (e.g., the character "$13$" is interpreted differently within the sequences "$ABC$" versus "$12, 13, 14$").

Influences on Perception

• Needs: Balcetis & Dunning ($2010$) found that thirst (IV) affects the perceived distance to water (DV).

• Wishes:   - Balcetis & Dunning ($2006$) demonstrated that participants saw what they desired (e.g., seeing "$B$" or "$13$" based on which category yielded a reward).   - Hastorf & Cantril ($1954$): Known as the "They saw a game" study, it revealed that perception of events is biased by affiliation, making individual versions of the same game feel equally "real."

Schemas

• Definition: Mental frameworks that bundle knowledge together in an organized way.

• Functions: Schemas serve as heuristics that make processing efficient and can be accurate.

• The Dark Side of Schemas:   - Bias the interpretation of evidence.   - Bias memory.   - Persist even after being discredited.

Priming and Accessibility

• Accessibility: The degree to which a concept is "active" in the mind or memory. High accessibility results in concepts coming to mind quickly; Low accessibility results in slow recall. Concepts are made accessible through Recency and Frequency.

• Priming: Recent experience with an object increases the accessibility of a relevant concept.

• Higgins, Rholes, & Jones ($1977$): Exposure to positive or negative trait primes influenced whether participants interpreted a character named Donald as "adventurous" or "reckless."

• Homophone Disambiguation (Halberstadt, Niedenthal, & Kushner, $1995$):   - Mood acts as an input to disambiguate words (e.g., writing "dear/deer," "bored/board," or "rose/rows" based on music-induced mood).   - Exposure to weapons (e.g., Berkowitz & Lepage, $1967$) increases the accessibility of aggressive thoughts, influencing behavior (the "weapons effect").

Judgmental Heuristics and Biases

• Counterfactuals (Madvec, Madev, & Gilovich, $1995$): Satisfactory outcomes depend on mental comparisons.   - Downward Counterfactual: Imagining a worse outcome.   - Upward Counterfactual: Imagining a better outcome (e.g., silver medalists are often less satisfied than bronze medalists because they imagine winning gold).

• Availability Heuristic: Estimating frequency based on ease of recall (e.g., fearing plane crashes over car crashes because they are more accessible in the news).   - Schwarz et al. ($1991$): Recalling $6$ assertive instances (high accessibility) led to higher self-assertiveness ratings than recalling $12$ instances (difficult recall lowered accessibility).

• Representativeness Heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, $1982$): Judging the category of an object based on its similarity to a typical schema.

• Base Rate Neglect (Kahneman & Tversky, $1973$): Ignoring statistical frequency in favor of schemas. In the "Lawyer or Engineer Problem," individuals often neglect the $70\%$ base rate of lawyers when a description (e.g., Jack, age $45$) matches an engineer schema.

Questions & Discussion

• Subliminal Messages: Can they influence behavior? While studied during the $1957$ film Picnic with Kim Novak, primes usually result only in small cognitive changes; the famous subliminal prime in that film did not work.

• Practice Question: After a long, $10$-hour shift at an animal shelter, Dan glimpses something moving. Due to concept accessibility, what is he most likely to perceive it as?

• Answer: c.) A dog.

• Course Logistics: Attendance for the $01/26$ video lecture was not collected via code; it is only collected for in-person sessions.

1. Ambiguity: Imagine you see a shadow that could be either a cat or a coat rack. How might your previous experiences shape what you perceive it to be?

2. Categorization Process: Think of a time you entered a new store. How did your expectations (e.g., price, quality) about the brand influence your immediate perceptions of the products?

3. Naïve Realism: During a debate about a controversial topic, consider how your beliefs may lead you to see the arguments of others as biased, while believing your perspective to be objective.

4. Contextual Interpretation: Consider a scene in a film where a character's actions are ambiguous. How would your interpretation change if the character was shown in a happy context compared to a sad one?

5. Influence of Needs: Suppose you are really thirsty after a workout. If you see a glass of water far away, how might your thirst affect your perception of the distance rather than if you were not thirsty?

6. Influence of Wishes: Picture a person hoping for a promotion. Do you think that their desire might make them interpret ambiguous feedback from their boss as positive?

7. Schemas: When meeting someone for the first time, how might your preconceived notions (schema) about their occupation or appearance color your initial judgment about them?

8. Priming and Accessibility: Imagine you recently watched a film featuring a heroic character. When you see someone helping another in a small way, you might immediately think of them as heroic too due to the activation of that concept in your mind.

9. Judgmental Heuristics: After just reading about car crashes in the news, you might unreasonably begin to overestimate the danger of driving, using recent and easily recalled information rather than statistical data.

10. Base Rate Neglect: If told a person is highly detail-oriented and analytical, which profession do you assume they belong to more easily: a lawyer or an engineer? How might neglecting the actual statistical distribution (base rate) impact your judgment?