Introduction

• Social Cognition

  • The area of social psychology that focuses on how people think about others and about the social world

  • Study how people make sense of themselves and others to make judgments, form attitudes, and more predictions about the future

  • Has illustrated many social factors that can influence these judgments and predictions about the future

  • Illuminated many social factors that can influence these judgments and predictions

Simplifying the Social World

• Schema

  • A mental model, or representation, of any of the various things we come across in our daily lives

  • Kind of like a mental blueprint for how we expect something to be or behave

  • An organized body of general information or beliefs we develop from direct encounters, as well as from secondhand sources

  • Greatly reduce the amount of cognitive work we need to do and allow us to “go beyond the information given”

  • We can hold schemas about almost anything – individual people (person schemas), ourselves (self-schemas), and recurring events

    • Event Schemas: allow us to navigate new situations efficiently and seamlessly

• Heuristics

  • Mental shortcuts that reduce complex problem-solving to more simple, rule-based decisions

  • A common instance of using heuristics is when people are faced with judging whether an object belongs to a particular category

    • Representativeness Heuristics

      • One can simply judge the likelihood of the object belonging to a category, based on how similar it is to one’s mental representation of that category

      • When base-rate information representativeness information, use of this heuristic is less appropriate

    • Availability Heuristic

      • Evaluate the frequency or likelihood of an event based on how easily instances of it come to mind

      • Heuristic can be less reliable when judging the frequency of relatively infrequent but highly accessible events

Making Predictions about the Social World

• We rely on our predictions about the future to guide our actions

• “Thin-Sliced Judgments”

  • Has shown that perceivers are able to make surprisingly accurate inferences about another person’s emotional state, personality traits, and even sexual orientation based on just snippets of information

  • Judgments are predictive of the target’s future behaviors

• More information there is available, the more accurate many of these judgments become

• While our own assessment of our personality traits does predict certain behavioral tendencies better than peer assessment of our personality, for certain behaviors, peer reports are more accurate than self-reports

• Although we are generally aware of our knowledge, abilities, and future prospects, our perceptions are often overly positive, and we display overconfidence in their accuracy and potential

• Planning Fallacy

  • We tend to underestimate how much time it will take us to complete a task

  • Helps explain why so many college students end up pulling all-nighters to finish writing assignments or study for exams

  • The tasks simply end up taking longer than expected

  • Positive side: can lead individuals to pursue ambitious projects that may turn out to be worthwhile

    • If they had accurately predicted how much time and work it would have taken them, they may have never started it in the first place

• Predictions about future feelings are influenced by:

  • Impact Bias: the tendency for a person to overestimate the intensity of their future feelings

  • Durability Bias: refers to the tendency for people to overestimate how long or the duration positive and negative events will affect them

    • Much greater for predictions regarding negative events than positive events, and occurs because people are generally unaware of the many psychological mechanisms that help us adapt to and cope with negative events

Hot Cognition: The Influence of Motivations, Mood, and Desires on Social Judgment

• Hot Cognition: refers to the mental processes that are influenced by desires and feelings

• Directional Goal: we are motivated to reach a particular outcome or judgment and do not process information in a cold, objective manner

  • Can bias our thinking in many ways, such as leading to motivated skepticism:

    • Skeptical of evidence that goes against what we want to believe despite the strength of the evidence

    • People often continue to believe what they want to believe, even in the face of nearly incontrovertible evidence to the contrary

• Need for Closure

  • The desire to come to a firm conclusion

  • Often included by time constraints (when a decision needs to be made quickly) as well as individual differences in the need for closure

• Mood-Congruent Memory

  • Tendency to recall memories similar in valence to our current mood

  • The mood we were in when the memory was recorded became a retrieval cue, our present mood primes these congruent memories, making them come to mind more easily. Furthermore, because the availability of events in our memory can affect their perceived frequency (availability heuristic), the biased retrieval of congruent memories can then impact the subsequent judgments we make

  • Moods can influence the broader judgments we make. This sometimes leads to inaccuracies when our current mood is irrelevant to the judgment at hand

  • Mood can shape our thinking even when the mood is irrelevant to the judgment, and our motivations can influence our thinking even if we have no particular preference about the outcome

Automaticity

• Our behaviors can be determined by unconscious processes rather than intentional decisions

• Many of our behaviors are, in fact, automatic

  • A behavior or process is considered automatic if it is unintentional, uncontrollable, occurs outside of conscious awareness, or is cognitively efficient

  • A process may be considered automatic even if it does not have all these features

  • A process can become automatic through repetition, practice, or repeated associations

  • Some automatic process, such as fear responses, appear to be innate

  • Other innate automatic processes may have evolved due to their prosocial outcomes

• Chameleon Effect

  • Individuals nonconsciously mimic the postures, mannerisms, facial expressions, and other behaviors of their interaction partners

  • An example of how people may engage in certain behaviors without conscious intention or awareness

• Automatic mimicry has been shown to lead to more positive social interactions and to increase liking between the mimicked person and the mimicking person

• Primed: exposing participants to the (strongly associated) other one

• Stereotypes

  • Can automatically prime associated judgments and behaviors

  • Our general beliefs about a group of people and, once activated, they may guide our judgments outside of conscious awareness

  • Involve a mental representation of how we expect a person will think and behave

  • Schema vs Stereotype

    • Someone’s mental schema for women may be that they’re caring, compassionate, and maternal

    • A stereotype would be that all women are examples of these schema

• Social Context

  • Constantly bombards us with concepts

  • May prime us to form particular judgments and influence our thoughts and behaviors

Attitudes and Attitude Measurement

• Attitude

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

  • Our general evaluations of things that can bias as toward having a particular response to it

    • Bias can be long- or short-term and can be overridden by another experience with the object

• Attitude Measurement

  • Explicit Attitude Measures

    • Participants are directly asked to provide their attitudes toward various objects, people, or issues

    • Can be used to predict people’s actual behavior, but there are limitations

      • Limitations:

        • Individuals aren’t always aware of their true attitudes, because they’re either undecided or haven’t given a particular issue much thought

        • Even when individuals are aware of their attitudes, they might not want to admit to them

        • May be unreliable when asking about controversial attitudes or attitudes that are not widely accepted by society

  • Implicit Attitude: an attitude that a person does not verbally or overtly express

  • Implicit Measures of Attitudes

    • Infer the participant’s attitude rather than having the participant explicitly report it

    • Accomplish this by recording the time it takes a participant to label or categorize an attitude object as positive or negative

      • Implicit Association Test

        • Measuring how quickly the participant pairs a concept with an attribute

        • The participant’s response time in pairing the concept with the attribute indicates how strongly the participant associates the two

      • Evaluative Priming Task

        • Measures how quickly the participant labels the valence (i.e., positive or negative) of the attitude object when it appears immediately after a positive or negative image

        • The more quickly a participant labels the attitude object after being primed with a positive vs negative image indicates how positively the participant evaluates the object

    • Sometimes inconsistent with their explicitly held attitudes

    • May reveal biases that participants do not report on explicit measures

    • Especially useful for examining the persuasiveness and strength of controversial attitudes and stereotypic associations

• Even though individuals are often unaware of their implicit attitudes, these attitudes can have serious implications for their behavior, especially when these individuals do not have the cognitive resources available to override the attitudes’ influence

Social Cognition

• Set of mental abilities that guide interactions

• Thinking about relating

• 2 Aspects

  • Verbal

    • Interpreting social information

      • Social lingo

    • Subtle and voice inflexion

    • Appreciating nuances of communication

      • Where you put emphasis can make the sentence have different meanings

  • Nonverbal

    • Reading facial expression and body language

• Taking Action, Decision-Making, Navigating

  • Figuring out what to say, when to say, and how to say it

  • What to do, when to so, and how to do it

Social Thinking

• Attribution Theory

  • The theory that we can explain someone’s behavior by crediting either the stable, enduring traits – disposition – or the situation at hand

• Fundamental Attribution Error

  • The tendency of observers when analyzing another’s behavior to underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate the impact of personal disposition

• Central Route Persuasion

  • Involves calling on basic thinking and reasoning to convince people

  • When interested people focus on evidence and arguments at hand and are persuaded by the actual content of the message

• Peripheral Route Persuasion

  • Influences people by way of incidental cues like a speaker’s physical attractiveness or personal relatability

• Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon

  • The tendency for people to more readily comply with a certain big request after they’ve first agreed to smaller, more innocuous requests

  • Moral action strengthens moral convictions, just as moral action strengthens moral attitudes

• Cognitive Dissonance

  • The notion that we experience discomfort, or dissonance, when our thoughts, beliefs, or behaviors are inconsistent with each other

Attitudes

• How Attitudes are Formed:

  • Our strongest, most influential attitudes are learned via direct experience with attitude objects

    • Better thought out, stable, resistant, predictive

    • Ex. religious attitudes

  • Attitudes are learned via our social environment

    • Parents, friends, cultural or societal context

    • Observation and conversation

    • Reward and punishment (condition based)

    • Associative Learning: associating reward or punishment with our behavior

    • Evaluative Conditioning: something associated with attractive thing = positive attitude

  • Attitudes can have genetic basis

    • Thoughts occur in our brains, which we inherited from our ancestors

Measuring Attitudes

• Self-Report Measures

  • Do you support or oppose interracial marriage?

    • Response: Likert Scale

  • Can be biased:

    • How assessor asks the question (FRAMING EFFECT)

    • Social bias

  • Direct and straightforward but can be biased

  • Multi-item attitude scales can be more reliable

  • Bogus Pipeline

    • Can encourage honesty

    • Fake lie detection device

    • Based on the fake claim that the experimenter has a direct pipeline your true thoughts

• Covert Measures

  • Assess people’s attitudes without people knowing

  • Behavioral: body language, eye contact, distance, etc.

  • Physiological: HR, BP, GSR, CAT, MRI, facial EMG

  • Cognitive: reaction times, IAT