Chapter 1 - Social Cognition Flashcards

Social Cognition

• Social cognition: How we think about ourselves and the social world; how we select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make decisions and judgments.

Automatic vs. Controlled Processing

• Two basic types of social cognition: automatic vs. controlled, also known as System 1 and System 2 thinking (Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky).

Automatic Processing

• When: Information overload, limited cognitive resources, depleted processing capacity, extensive experience with a task.

• How: Providing shortcuts to deal with large amounts of information and being accurate most of the time.

• Good or bad? Both!

  • Good: learning new skills (e.g., driving a car)

  • Bad: social thought (biases, errors)

• Neural bases:

  • Automatic: amygdala, hypothalamus, hippocampus—limbic system, paleomammalian or “old mammalian“ brain (memory, attention, quick decisions, emotional responses, hormonal regulation).

  • Controlled: frontal lobe/ prefrontal cortex (executive, higher-order functions, careful, conscious, complex, self-control, strategy, long-term goals, personality; neomammalian brain, neocortex).

• Phineas Gage case: Damage to left frontal lobe and prefrontal cortex leading to drastic personality changes.

Automaticity

• Automatic behavior/thinking: efficient, effortless, unintentional, uncontrollable, saves cognitive resources.

• Chameleon effect

• Priming: Usage of schemas or stereotypes.

Schemas

• Schemas are mental frameworks centering around a specific theme that help us organize related social information (e.g., what usually happens during an exam); a schema is a mental model of…

  • Ourselves

  • Others

  • Objects

  • Events

• Based on own experiences but also from secondhand sources.

• Impact on social cognition processes: attention, encoding, retrieval.

• More likely to be used if strong, well-developed, accessible/primed, under high cognitive load, in ambiguous situations.

• Once activated, they exert strong influence on our behavior.

• Fill in gaps in our knowledge (need for cognition, need to understand)

• Perseverance effect: schemas tend to remain unchanged, even when contradictory info is present (= distortion of our understanding of the world, subtypes to keep the schema untouched).

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

• Self-confirming nature of schemas via self-fulfilling prophecy (Merton, 1948); aka Pygmalion effect: expectations about others influence how we act towards them, causing them to behave consistently with the expectations.

• Teachers' positive expectations about students (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968):

  • IQ test; randomly selected „bloomers” indeed bloomed after eight months (extra attention, more challenging tasks, better feedback, more opportunities to respond, etc.)

• Beware of negative expectations…

• Asch’s study (1946) on peripheral and central traits, where central traits (such as the warm-cold dimension) affected the overall perception of a person?

• Kelley (1950): a guest lecturer described as warm vs cold (other traits were the same, random assignment to groups), conducted class for 20 mins, then was evaluated by students. Students also felt the lecturer is exactly as they expected, based on the description. Those, who expected the person to be warm were also more likely to actively partcipate in class activities and asked the lecturer more questions.

Other Types of Automatic Thinking

• Automatic goal pursuit: pursuing goals that have been primed.

• Metaphors about body and mind (embodied cognition): what we smell and feel affects how we evaluate social stimuli and act.

• fresh and clean smell = moral, pure, trustworthy

• heavy = important, light = less important or valuable

• warm = positive, cold = negative

• high = good, low = bad

• Automatic decision making: sometimes a period of distraction helps us make a better decision (Bargh, 2011), but must have a conscious goal, while a lot of information (e.g., pros and cons) are to be integrated. → Best approach is to use both conscious thinking and distraction, to switch on the autopilot (intermittently), for example, using heuristics!

Mental Shortcuts: Heuristics

• Mental shortcuts, simple rules of making complex decisions or drawing inferences in a rapid, efficient, and seemingly effortless manner (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974); rules of thumb, often derived from our practice (what worked for us in the past) rather than soundly evidence-based.

Representativeness Heuristic

• Judging by resemblance: How similar is A to B?

• Strategy based on the extent to which current stimuli or events resemble other stimuli or categories; similar to stereotypes!

• The more similar an individual is to typical members of a given group, the more likely they are judged to belong to that group.

• Ignoring base rates: frequencies with which given events or patterns actually occur in population (Koehler, 1993).

Availability Heuristic

• If I can (easily) think about it, it must be crucial.

• Strategy based on how easily specific kinds of information can be brought to mind.

• Priming: increased availability in memory or consciousness of specific types of info held in memory due to exposure to specific stimuli or events; can be automatic = we are not aware of the priming stimuli (Bargh & Pietromonaco, 1982).

Anchoring & Adjustment Heuristic

• Where you begin makes a difference.

• Strategy involving the tendency to use a number, value or personal experience as a starting point, to which we then make adjustments.

• Adjustments are often insufficient

Culture and Social Cognition

• Schemas used everywhere to understand the world

• Content of schemas may differ across cultures

• Holistic vs. analytic thinking style, possibly rooted in different philosophical traditions of the East (Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism) vs. West (Greek tradition, focus on laws governing objects, independent of their context)

  • Analytic: focusing on properties of objects, less consideration of the surrounding context, more common in Western cultures

  • Holistic: focusing on the overall context, ways in which objects relate to one another, common in East Asian cultures

Biases in Social Cognition

• Automatisms are both beneficial (adaptive, save resources) and problematic (errors in social judgment)

• Bias = mistake, error in cognitive processing and/or social perception

• Many of those, just to list a few:

  • fundamental attribution bias

  • actor-observer

  • self-serving

  • negativity bias (and positive bias)

  • Pygmalion effect

Fundamental Attribution Bias

• Correspondence bias (Lee Ross, 1977) “You fell, because you ARE clumsy!“

• Underestimating the situational impact, overestimating the extent to which one’s behavior reflects their traits, attitudes, etc. (= dispositions; dispositional attribution)

• Even when we know the person is constrained! (Jones & Harris, 1967: Anti-Castro essay assigned vs. chosen)

• Role of perspective (focus on other people vs. focus on our environment, when analyzing ourselves)

• Does not apply to our own behavior, here we focus more on situations, our reactions to some stimuli

• Culture dependent = less likely in Eastern cultures.

Self-Serving Biases

• False uniqueness: “I am better than average driver/mother/employee….!“

• Taking credit for positive events, outcomes (“I DID great on the test.“), blaming outside factors for negative results (“Mean teacher GAVE me a bad mark.“)

• Other examples: unrealistic optimism (“Chances for others are low, but I will be lucky.“ and false consensus (“Most people agree with me.“)

• Bias-blind spot! ”Others may be biased, but I sure avoid biases, inluding self-serving attributions.” (Pronin et al., 2002)

• Why? Social perception (recall), but also a defense mechanism to protect SE

• Adaptive (high SE = feeling good, buffering stress, good = secure, e.g., terror management theory (Greenberg et al., 1997); protection from depression (Taylor et al., 2003)

• Maladaptive = people blaming own faults to others/ situations often less than those who acknowledge their mistakes; no possiblity to correct those (Peterson et al., 1981)

Negativity Bias

• Greater sensitivity to negative than to positive information.

• Friendly and threatening faces—which type is easier noticed? Threatening ones (Ohman, Lundqvist, & Esteves, 2001)

• Evolutionary perspective: paying attention to negative info = ability respond and stay safe; tendency that seems to be built into our brains (Ito et al., 1998; Cacioppo et al., 2003)

Optimistic Bias

• Thru the rose-colored glasses!

• Expectation for things to turn out well overall; Belief that one is more likely than others to experience positive events, and less likely to experience negative ones (Shepperd, Ouellette, & Fernandez, 1996)

• Overconfidence barrier: having more confidence in our judgements than it is justified (Vallone, Ross, & Lepper, 1985)

• Planning fallacy: tendency to make overly optimistic predictions concerning how long a given task will take for completion (Buehler, Griffin, & Ross, 1994)

• May make us fail, but also makes us pursue ambitious projects

Change Blindness

• Perceptual phenomenon, inability to spot a visual stimulus that is introduced or changed, especially when we do not expect the change to happen.

• “Our minds don’t work the way we think they do. We think we see ourselves and the world as they really are, but we’re actually missing a whole lot.” Christopher Chabris & Daniel Simons on The Invisible Gorilla

Thought Supression

• Efforts to prevent certain thoughts from entering our consciousness. (Wegner, 1992)

• Monitoring Process (Automatic)

  • EARLY WARNING: Searches for unwanted thoughts trying to intrude

• Operating Process (Controlled)

  • ACTIVE PREVENTION: Conscious attempt to distract oneself, thinking about sth else

• FAILURE!!! AN EVEN HIGHER RATE OF UNWANTED THOUGHTS!

Making Predictions

• Affective forecasting – Problems with predictions about our future feelings.

• Durability bias – overestimating how long positive/ negative events will affect us

• Impact bias – overestimating the intensity of our future feelings

Hot Cognition

• Mental processes that are influenced by our desires, motivations, and feelings = not in a cold or objective manner.

• Directional goals – motivated to reach a particular outcome

• Motivated skepticism – being skeptical about evidence against our beliefs, regardless of the strenght of those

• Need for closure – desire to form a firm conclusion quickly; issue of time constraints + individual needs

Mood-Congruent Memory

• Current mood affects our first impressions of people, reactions to new stimuli

• Positive mood = more favorable impression (Bower, 1991; Mayer & Hanson, 1995; Garcia-Marques et al., 2004)

• Mood-dependent memory: what we remember while in a given mood may be partially determined by what we learned when previously in that mood; current mood = retrieval cue

• Mood congruence effects: we are more likely to notice and remember positive info when in a positive mood, and negative information when in a negative mood (Blaney, 1986)

• Availability of events in our memory may affect their perceived frequency (availability heuristic)

Controlled Social Cognition

• High-effort thinking: conscious, intentional, voluntary, effortful, costly in terms of resources, most people can only think in such a way about one thing at a time

• Past few decades of research: automatic thinking is more prevalent that we used to believe, because it was critical to our survival to develop such skills, but…

• Notion of free will and the belief we posses it are crucial in our undertakings, e.g., more cheating in a study (Vohs & Schooler, 2008) after being primed with statements implying no free will (“We are determined by our biology.“) vs. those suggesting we have free will (“I am able to overcome the genetic and environtmental factors influencing my behavior.“)

Counterfactual Thinking

• “If only“

• Mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been (often when we experience negative events or “close calls“)

• As negative: More distress, it is easier to imagine a different (worse?) outcome compared to the tragedy that actually happened (Branscombe et al., 1995); taking up our mental resources, rumination and dwelling on the past, not moving forward (rumination as a contributor to depression (Watkins & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2014)

• As positive: focusing our attention on ways in which we can cope better in the future (“If only I studied harder, I’d have passed the test.“= Well, you can avoid similar failures in the future. Study harder is what you can surely do. So, do that next time).

Improving Human Thinking

• High-effort thinking can provide checks and balances for automatic thinking = both to be used (yes, the puzzle picture would fit here, again)

• Can we teach people to correct/avoid biases? Yes, we can, but it requires effort and resources

  • Education and training = knowing of biases may help us counter those, but only if we know how

  • Teach people logic, basic statistical and methodological principles, or critical thinking skills →how to reason correctly. You have an edge here, as students of psychology! (Malloy, 200, Nisbett et al., 1996; Spector & Ma, 2019)

  • Being more humble = avoiding overconfidence barrier by asking people to consider the possibility they may be wrong and that opposite views exist (Lord, Lepper, & Preston, 1984)