Introduction to Social Cognition

The Domain of Psychology

• William James: The Science of Mental Life

• Mental structures and processes

  • Cognition

    • knowledge and belief

  • Emotion

    • affect and mood

  • Motivation

    • desires and goals

• Key questions of psychology

  • How do people do the above?

  • How does mental life cause behavior?

    • Doctrine of Mental Causation

The Cognitive Part of Psychology

• Cognition

  • knowledge and belief

    • Steps to form knowledge and belief about the world?

      • Sensation and Perception

      • Learning and Memory

    • How do people use these knowledge and belief?

      • Reasoning and Judgement

    • What are the core foundations of all of the above?

      • Intelligence and Language

      • Cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology

The Social Part of Psychology

• Mental structures and processes

  • Social structures and processes

    • dyads and groups

    • organizations

    • societies and cultures

Social Cognition: Two Aspects of Combining Social and Cognition

• Cognitive Mediation of Social Behavior

  • instead of the Doctrine of Situationism (B.F. Skinner Behaviorism)

    • how you behave now is determined by the objective situation

  • It’s not the Situation, It’s the Mental Representation of the Situation

    • how you perceive/mentally represent the situation

  • The Cognitive Construction of Reality

• The Cognition of Social Objects

  • family and friends

  • ourselves

  • social situations

  • interpersonal behavior

  • other people

    • perception, memory, neural bases

Why the Cognition of Social Objects isn’t equal to Nonsocial Objects

• To a great extend, the same principles apply to both domains

• However, there are critical differences!

  • Quantitative Differences

    • Poverty & Ambiguity of the stimuli

    • Conflicting Information of the stimuli

    • Emotional and Motivational Influences

      • “New Look” in Perception (Jerome Bruner)

      • “Hot” Cognition (Robert Ableson)

    • Context Effects

    • ex: 911 pic

      • what are these people feeling?

        • wondering, trying to process what’s happening, confusion, clueless

      • real answer: they know what was going on but they were looking for some comfort in each other/consolidation

      • very ambiguous

  • Qualitative Differences

    • Subject-Object Distinction

      • inannatiment objects like a table, plant, etc.

    • The Object as Sentient Being

      • Social object has feelings

    • Objects can control impressions

      • Impression Management

        • ex: we can dress in different ways

      • Self-Presentation

    • An Indefinite Series in Social Cognition (Cargile, 1970)

      • social object you’re precieving, you think how you’re being perceived and you change the way you act

      • like a mirror maze

      • overthinking about what you look like to other people? how others perceive you

The Cognitive Perspective Of Social Behavior

Social Behavior — What are the determining factors?

• P = Factors internal to person

  • motivation

• E = Factors in external environment

• B = f (P, E)

• Kurt Lewin (1930s), Lewin’s “Grand Truism)

• Father of Social Psychology

Two Cultures in Psychology

• Personality: B = f(P)

  • Traits, attitudes, emotions, motives, values

  • Correlate predictors with behavior

  • Environment as noise to be averaged out

• Social psychology: B = f(E)

  • physical (school) and social environment (friend groups)

  • experimental manipulations of the environment and its effect on behavior

  • How can we manipulate the environment?

    • ex: changing the temperature of a room

  • Treat persons as noise to be averaged out

  • Behaviorism: B = f(E)

Another Culture in Psychology

• John Watson (1910s)

  • Psychology would never make any progress so long as it is focused on people’s subjective mental life

  • Behavior & Conditions that can be observed & objectively measured

• Floyd Allport (1924)

  • Two forms of Social Behavior

    • One behavior serves as a stimulus

    • Another is a response to a stimulus

    • Connected to personality

      • personality is a characteristic

      • reactions to social stimuli

• Burrhus Skinner (1953)

  • The casual factors in behavior are external to the person

• What are the differences between social psychology and behaviorism?

  • B = Observable behavior only (in behaviorism)

  • B = Thoughts, feelings, and behavior (in Social Psychology)

  • E = Measurable environment only (in behaviorism)

  • E = perceived environment (in Social Psychology)

    • this is how cognition comes into play

The Cognitive Perspective of Social Behavior

• Gordon Allport (1954)

• Helping experiment

  • One condition: student alone in class

  • Found when a person is alone, and saw smoke coming into the room over 17 of them stood up to help

  • In contrast, when there were a lot of people around, fewer went to help

  • This seems to suggest that the situation is what controls the behavior

  • The same thing but changed the story about the broken foot

• How do you show the cognitive perspective matters?

• What were the people thinking?

  • fear

  • lack of skills

  • diffusion of responsibility

  • ambiguous situation: look to others for cues

• Lewin’s “Grand Truism” (1930s)?

  • B = f(P, E)

    • How a person influences the environment

      • Evocation

        • change the group dynamic

      • Selection

        • person can choose which environment they want to be in

      • Behavioral manipulation

        • climate change

      • Cognitive activity

        • come to class just because you have to

    • How the environment influences the person