Chapter 3Social Cognition: How We Think about the Social World

Social CognitionHow people think about themselves and the social world, or more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments and decisions.

• The study of social cognition is a central topic in social psychology.• The assumption is that people are generally trying to form accurate impressions of

the world and do so much of the time. • Because of the nature of social thinking, however, people sometimes form

erroneous impressions.

Police officers did not pause and think about what might be in Amadou Diallo’s pocket; when they saw him reach for something, they opened fire. They acted “without thinking”—that is, without consciously deliberating about what they saw and whether their assumptions were correct.

Two Kinds of Social Cognition1. Quick and automatic “without thinking,” without consciously deliberating one’s own

thoughts, perceptions, assumptions.2. Controlled thinking that is effortful and deliberate, pausing to think about self and

environment, carefully selecting the right course of action.

Quite often the automatic and controlled modes of social cognition work very well together. Think of the automatic pilot that flies modern airplanes, monitoring hundreds of complex systems and adjusting instantly to changes in atmospheric conditions. The autopilot does just fine most of the time, though occasionally it is important for the human pilot to take over and fly the plane manually. Humans, too, have “automatic pilots” that monitor their environments, draw conclusions, and direct their behaviors. But we can also “override” this automatic type of thinking and analyze a situation slowly and deliberately. We will begin by examining the nature of automatic thinking.

On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking• People often size up a new situation very quickly: they figure out who is there, what

is happening, and what might happen next. • Often these quick conclusions are correct. • You can tell the difference between a college classroom and a frat party without

having to think about it.• Imagine a different approach: Every time you encounter a new situation you stop

and think about it slowly and deliberately, like Rodin’s statue “The Thinker.”• Imagine driving down the road and stopping repeatedly to analyze every twist and

turn.• Imagine meeting new person and excuse yourself for 15 minutes to analyze what

you learned from them.• Sounds exhausting, right?

• Instead, we form impressions of people quickly and effortlessly and navigate new roads without much conscious analysis of what we are doing.

• We do these things by engaging in an automatic analysis of our environments, based on our past experiences and knowledge of the world.

Automatic ThinkingThinking that is non-conscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless.• We form impressions of people quickly and effortlessly and navigate new roads

without much conscious analysis of what we are doing. • We engage in an automatic analysis of our environments, based on past experiences

and knowledge of the world.

Although different kinds of automatic thinking meet these criteria to varying degrees, for our purposes, we can define automaticity as thinking that satisfies all or most of these criteria.

People as Everyday Theorists: Automatic Thinking with Schemas

SchemasMental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social world around themes or subjects and that influence the information people notice, think about, and remember.

The term schema encompasses our knowledge about many things:• Other people• Ourselves• Social roles (e.g., what a librarian or engineer is like)• Specific events (e.g., what usually happens when people eat a meal in a restaurant)

In each case, our schemas contain our basic knowledge and impressions that we use to organize what we know about the social world and interpret new situations.

For example, our schema about the members of the Animal House fraternity might be that they’re loud, obnoxious partygoers with a propensity for projectile vomiting.

Stereotypes about Race and Weapons• When applied to members of a social group such as a fraternity or gender or race,

schemas are commonly referred to as stereotypes.• Stereotypes can be applied rapidly and automatically when we encounter other

people. • Payne and colleagues rapidly showed college students pairs of pictures.• Participants were told to pay attention to press one key if certain pictures showed a

tool and another key if it was a gun, in only ½ second.

• Another study involved awarding video game players points for shooting characters holding weapons but subtracted points for shooting characters holding tools.

• Results showed they made the most errors, shooting an unarmed person, when a black person was not holding a gun.

• When the men in the picture were white, participants made about the same number of errors whether the men were armed or unarmed.

• The authors argue that knowledge of a cultural stereotype can influence people in insidious ways, even if the people are not themselves prejudiced.

The Function of Schemas: Why Do We Have Them?Schemas are typically very useful for helping us organize and make sense of the world and to fill in the gaps of our knowledge.

Schemas are particularly important when we encounter information that can be interpreted in a number of ways, because they help us reduce ambiguity.

Students told that a speaker is warm will interpret his lecture more favorably even though people who were told he is a cold person do not receive his lecture as favorably, even though both groups hear the same lecture.

What if everything you encountered was inexplicable, confusing, and unlike anything else you’ve ever known? This is what happens to people who suffer from a neurological disorder called Korsakov’s syndrome. People with this disorder lose the ability to form new memories and must approach every situation as if they were encountering it for the first time, even if they have actually experienced it many times before.

Schemas as Memory Guides• Schemas also help people fill in the blanks when they are trying to remember things. • We don’t remember exactly as if our minds were cameras. • Instead, we remember some information that was there (particularly information

our schemas lead us to pay attention to), and we remember other information that was never there but that we have unknowingly added.

Examples:• Ask people what is the most famous line of dialogue in the classic movie Casablanca,

and they will probably say, “Play it again, Sam.” • Ask them what is the most famous line from the original Star Trek TV series, and they

will probably say, “Beam me up, Scotty.” • Here is a piece of trivia that might surprise you: Both of these lines are

reconstructions. The characters never said them.

Memory reconstructions tend to be consistent with one’s schemas.• People who read a story about a marriage proposal can later insert incorrect details

that had not been in the story (e.g., future plans, roses) but were consistent with a marriage proposal schema.

• The fact that people filled in the blanks in their memory with schema-consistent details suggests that schemas become stronger and more resistant to change over time.

• In a study on this, participants read a story that ended either with a man proposing to a woman or the man raping her.

• In a memory test two weeks later, those who read the proposal version often misremembered details that were consistent with a proposal schema, such as “Jack wanted Barbara to meet his parents” and “Jack gave Barbara a dozen roses.” Neither of these details had been in the story, but people in the proposal condition tended to think they were.

• Similarly, people who read the rape version were likely to misremember details that were consistent with a rape schema, such as “Jack liked to drink” and “Jack was unpopular with women.”

Which Schemas Are Applied? Accessibility and Priming

AccessibilityThe extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people’s minds and are therefore likely to be used when we are making judgments about the social world.

PrimingThe process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, or concept.

Something can become accessible for three reasons:1. Some schemas are chronically accessible due to past experience.

a. This means that these schemas are constantly active and ready to use to interpret ambiguous situations.

b. For example, if there is a history of alcoholism in your family, traits describing an alcoholic are likely to be chronically accessible to you, increasing the likelihood that these traits will come to mind when you are thinking about the behavior of the man on the bus. If someone you know suffers from mental illness, however, then thoughts about how the mentally ill behave are more likely to be more accessible than thoughts about alcoholics, leading you to interpret the man’s behavior very differently.

2. Something can become accessible because it is related to a current goal. a. The concept of mental illness might not be chronically accessible to you, but

if you are studying for a test in your abnormal psychology class, and need to learn about different kinds of mental disorders, then this concept might be temporarily accessible.

b. As a consequence, you might be more likely to notice the man on the bus and interpret his behavior as a sign of a mental disorder—at least until your test is over and you no longer have the goal to learn about mental illnesses.

3. Schemas can become temporarily accessible because of our recent experiences.a. This means that a particular schema or trait is not always accessible but

happens to be primed by something people have been thinking or doing before encountering an event.

Which Schemas Are Applied? PrimingSuppose you read about a man named Donald whose actions are ambiguous, interpretable in either a positive or negative manner.• People who previously memorize words like adventurous tend to form positive

impressions of him.• People primed with words like reckless and stubborn form negative impressions.

Priming is a good example of automatic thinking because it occurs quickly, unintentionally, and unconsciously.

The Persistence of Schemas After They Are Discredited• Even though a judge may instruct the jurors to disregard inadmissible evidence,

because of the way schemas work, the jurors’ beliefs can persist even after the evidence for them proves to be false.

• Schemas can take on a life of their own, even after the evidence for them has been completely discredited.

Making Our Schemas Come True: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Self-Fulfilling ProphecyThe case whereby people 1) have an expectation about what another person is like, which 2) influences how they act toward that person, which 3) causes that person to behave consistently with people’s original expectations, making the expectations come true.

Self-fulfilling prophecies can have some serious consequences:• In U.S. elementary schools, girls outperform boys on standardized tests of reading,

writing, social studies, and math. By the middle school years, however, girls start to fall behind, and by high school, boys do better than girls on many kinds of standardized tests.

• On the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), used by many colleges to select students, males outscore females on the math and verbal sections.

• Many teachers, even if they are women themselves, believe that males are brighter and more likely to succeed academically than females.

• Parents hold similar beliefs about the talents of their children, and so do adolescents about their own talents.

Teachers led to believe particular students will bloom:1) Create a warmer emotional climate for those students, giving them more personal

attention, encouragement, and support,2) Give “bloomers” more challenging material,3) Give “bloomers” more and better feedback,4) Give “bloomers” more opportunities to respond in class and give them longer to

respond.

Some Limits of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies • People’s true nature can win out in social interaction. • Self-fulfilling prophecies are most likely to occur when people are distracted.

Which Schemas Are Applied? PrimingPriming is a good example of automatic thinking because it occurs quickly, unintentionally, and unconsciously.

Cultural Determinants of SchemasAn important source of our schemas is the culture in which we grow up.

In fact, schemas are an important way cultures exert their influence: by instilling mental structures that influence how we understand and interpret the world.

Mental Strategies and Shortcuts• When deciding which job to accept, what car to buy, or whom to marry, we usually

do not conduct a thorough search of every option (“OK, it’s time for me to get married; I think I’ll consult the Census Bureau’s lists of unmarried adults in my town and begin my interviews tomorrow”).

• Mental shortcuts are efficient, however, and usually lead to good decisions in a reasonable amount of time.

What shortcuts do people use? • One way is to use schemas to understand new situations. • When making specific kinds of judgments and decisions, however, we do not always

have a ready-made schema to apply.

• At other times, there are too many schemas that could apply, and it is not clear which one to use. What do we do?

Judgmental HeuristicsMental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently.• The word heuristic comes from the Greek word meaning “discover.”• Heuristics do not guarantee that people will make accurate inferences about the

world.• Sometimes heuristics are inadequate for the job at hand or are misapplied, leading

to faulty judgments. • As we discuss the mental strategies that sometimes lead to errors, however, keep in

mind that people use heuristics for a reason: Most of the time, they are highly functional and serve us well.

How Easily Does It Come to Mind? The Availability Heuristic

Availability HeuristicA mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind.

The trouble with the availability heuristic is that sometimes what is easiest to remember is not typical of the overall picture, leading to faulty conclusions. • Example: When physicians are diagnosing diseases, it might seem straightforward

for them to observe people’s symptoms and figure out what disease, if any, they have.

• Sometimes, though, symptoms might be a sign of several different disorders.• Do doctors use the availability heuristic, whereby they are more likely to consider

diagnoses that come to mind easily?• Several studies of medical diagnoses suggest that the answer is yes.

Do people use the availability heuristic to make judgments about themselves? • To find out, researchers had people remember examples of their own past assertive

behaviors.• People asked to think of six examples rated themselves as relatively assertive

because it was easy to think of this many examples (“Hey, this is easy—I guess I’m a pretty assertive person”).

• People asked to think of twelve examples rated themselves as relatively unassertive because it was difficult to think of this many examples (“Hmm, this is hard—I must not be a very assertive person”).

How Similar Is A to B? The Representativeness Heuristic

Representativeness HeuristicA mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case.

Base Rate InformationInformation about the frequency of members of different categories in the population.

Taking Things at Face Value

Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic“A mental shortcut whereby people use a number or value as a starting point and then adjust insufficiently from this anchor.”

Suppose you’re a judge sentencing a felon after your friend had his 75th birthday. Without realizing why the number 75 came to your mind, you might think, “75 is too

high. I’ll sentence this person to 60 years.” What if your granddaughter just had her 5th birthday? You might impose a lower

sentence. This is, in fact, the kind of thinking judges showed in a recent study. The study also found that judges gave higher sentences when they read that a first-

year computer science student recommended a long sentence than when the computer science student recommended a short sentence, even though virtually all of the judges said that the computer science student’s recommendation had no bearing on their decision.

Many other studies have found that completely arbitrary starting values influence people’s judgments.

The problem with this is that completely arbitrary values can influence judgments. Tversky and Kahneman (1974), spun a wheel of fortune and asked people to consider

whether the number that came up was higher or lower than the percentage of African nations in the United Nations. People gave a higher estimate when the wheel of fortune stopped on a high number than when it stopped on a low number.

The Power of Unconscious Thinking• Part of the definition of automatic thinking is that it occurs unconsciously. • Although unconscious processes can sometimes lead to tragic errors, unconscious

thinking is frequently critical to navigating our way through the world.• Have you ever been chatting with someone at a party and suddenly realized that

someone across the room had mentioned your name?• The only way this could happen is if, while you were engrossed in conversation, you

were unconsciously monitoring other conversations to see if something important came up (such as your name).

• This so-called "cocktail party" effect has been demonstrated under controlled experimental conditions.

There is even evidence that our unconscious minds can do better at some tasks than our conscious minds do.• Suppose you were shopping for an apartment and after looking at several places,

you narrowed your choice to four possibilities.• Each one has pros and cons, making it difficult to decide which apartment to rent.

How should you go about making up your mind? • Given the importance of this decision, most of us would spend a lot of time thinking

about it, consciously analyzing the alternatives to determine what our best option is.

Dijksterhuis (2004) gave people a lot of information about four apartments in a short amount of time.

1. Immediate choice condition: He asked people to choose the apartment they thought was the best right way.

2. Conscious thought condition: He had people in this condition think carefully about the apartments for three minutes and then choose the best one.

3. Unconscious thought condition: He gave people a distracting task for three minutes so that they could not think about the apartments consciously, with the assumption that they would continue to think about the apartments unconsciously.

• Because people in this condition could not consciously think about the apartments, something else must have happened that produced the best choice.

• Subsequent research found that when people were distracted they were still working on the task unconsciously, organizing the information in a way that made the best choice more apparent to them (Dijksterhuis, 2004; Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2005).

Controlled Social Cognition: High-Effort ThinkingRacial profiling has received much attention since the events of September 11, 2001.

Because the terrorists who flew the planes into the World Trade Center were of Middle Eastern descent, some people feel anyone a similar background should receive special scrutiny when flying on commercial airlines.

On the New Year’s Eve after the attacks, U.S. citizens Michael Dasrath and Edgardo Cureg, having passed extensive security checks, were removed from a plane when passengers complained that their presence made them (and one woman’s dog) nervous. Neither man posed a threat, but because they had brown skin, they were singled out and refused service. Both have sued the airline.

Racial prejudice can result from either automatic thinking or conscious, deliberative thinking.

Controlled ThinkingThinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful. Mentally Undoing the Past

Counterfactual ReasoningMentally changing some aspect of the past in imagining what might have been.

“If only I had answered that one question differently, I would have passed the test.” Counterfactual thoughts can have a big influence on our emotional reactions to

events. The easier it is to mentally undo an outcome, the stronger the emotional reaction to

it. One group of researchers, for example, interviewed people who had suffered the

loss of a spouse or child. The more people imagined ways in which the tragedy could have been averted, by

mentally undoing the circumstances preceding it, the more distress they reported. Silver medal winners (2nd place) often express greater dissatisfaction that bronze

medal winners (3rd place). Silver medal winners may imagine ways events could have gone differently to allow

them to reach first place. Counterfactual thinking can be useful, however, if it focuses people’s attention on

ways that they can cope better in the future. It is not so good if counterfactual thinking results in rumination, whereby people

repetitively focus on negative things in their lives. Rumination has been found to contribute to depression.

Thought Suppression and Ironic Processing

Thought SuppressionThe attempt to avoid thinking about something we would prefer to forget.• The automatic aspect, the monitoring process, searches for evidence that the

unwanted thought is about to intrude on consciousness. • Then the operating process, comes into play. This is the effortful, conscious attempt

to distract oneself by finding something else to think about. • If a parent whose job is to distract the children from eating fast food falls down on

the job, for example, the kids will become even more aware that fast food joints are in the vicinity because they will keep hearing the other parent point them out.

• The irony is that when people are trying hardest not to think about something if tired or preoccupied (under cognitive load), these thoughts are especially likely to spill out unchecked.

• In one study, medical school students wrote about a personal topic once a day for three days. After each writing episode, some participants were asked to suppress all thoughts about what they had just written for five minutes. Compared to people who did not suppress their thoughts, people in the suppress condition showed a significant decrease in immune system functioning.

Potential Sources of Error

Negativity BiasPeople show greater sensitivity to negative information than to positive information.• People are faster and more accurate at identifying threatening facial expressions

than positive facial expressions. • Bias may be explained by evolutionary factors.

o Negative information reflects features of the external world that may threaten safety and well-being.

Optimistic BiasPredisposition to expect things to turn out well, overall.• People believe that they are more likely than others to experience good outcomes,

and less likely to experience bad outcomes.

Planning FallacyTendency to make optimistic predictions about how long it will take to complete a task.• It occurs because people tend to focus on the future while ignoring related past

events and they overlook important potential obstacles.

Bracing for LossAn exception to the optimistic bias • When people expect to experience something negative that has important

consequences for them, they tend to become pessimistic, anticipating a negative outcome.

• The desire to brace for a loss, may be an adaptive tendency that helps people protect themselves from bad news.

Magical ThinkingThinking based on irrational assumptions.

Examples are thinking that one’s thoughts can influence the physical world and thinking that things that resemble each other share basic properties.

o Failure to take account of moderating variables People are not good at acknowledging the roles that moderating

variables (factors that may be influencing an outcome) play.

Improving Human Thinking

Overconfidence BarrierThe fact that people usually have too much confidence in the accuracy of their judgments.Ways this might improve:• When asked to consider the point of view opposite to their own, people can realize

there were other ways to construe the world than their own way, and consequently make fewer judgment errors.

• Teaching people basic statistical and methodological principles about how to reason correctly may help them apply these principles in their everyday lives.

• So if you were dreading taking a college statistics course, take heart: It might not only satisfy a requirement for your major but improve your reasoning as well!

The Influence of Affect on Cognition Moods affect how new stimuli are perceived. Happy moods can increase creativity. Happy moods can make people more susceptible to social influence. Information that evokes emotional reactions may be processed differently than

other kinds of information. o Bad moods lead to more systematic thinking, while good moods lead to more

heuristic thinking.

Mood-Dependent MemoryInformation remembered while in a given mood may be determined, in part, by what was learned when previously in that mood.

Mood Congruence EffectsPeople are more likely to store or remember positive information when in a positive mood and negative information when in a negative mood.

The Influence of Cognition on Affect• Two-factor theory of emotion: the perception of situations can determine emotional

reactions• Activation of schemas containing a strong affective component can exert powerful

effects on current feelings and moods.• Thoughts can regulate emotions.

o The “I never had a chance” effect• Convincing oneself that “I never had a chance” helps regulate mood

by reducing disappointment. o Yielding to temptations can reduce negative affect.