Chapter 5 Social Cognition

What is Social Cognition?

• The processes by which information about people is processed and stored

• Thinking about people

• Humans think about people more than anything else.

Why Don’t We Think Some Times?

• Cognitive Miser– Reluctance to do much extra thinking– We conserve our thinking

• We use shortcuts– Conscious thinking requires a lot of effort– We have limited thinking capacity.– STM = 7+/-2 items

Automatic versus Controlled Processes

• Automatic processes occur outside of conscious awareness and with little effort

– categorization of objects and people is an example

• Controlled processes are deliberate, intentional, and effortful

– mindfully determining the causes of a person’s behavior is an example

Elements of Automatic Thinking

• Intention – not guided by intention

• Control – not subject to deliberate control

• Effort – no effort required

• Efficiency – highly efficient

The Stroop Test

Online example

Automatic Processing

• Relies on Knowledge Structures

– Organized pieces of information

• Example

– Semantic Network

Dog

Walk Andy

Cat Max

Bird

Bark

Steve Fun Fest

Old House LBI

Panetta

NC

BCC

Other Knowledge Structures

• Schemas are mental representations of objects or categories of objects

– Aid in the categorization of events

– Aid in the predictability of events

– Influence our interpretation of events

• Scripts

– Schemas about certain events

Functions of Schemas

Priming and Framing

• Priming - activating a concept in the mind– Influences subsequent thinking – May trigger automatic processes

• Framing – presentation as positive or negative

Framing

• If you had the choice, would you chose

• 1) A situation in which 200 people will be saved (a 1/3 chance 600 people will be saved and a 2/3 chance nobody will be saved).

• 2) A situation where 400 people will die (a 2/3 chance 600 people will die and a 1/3 chance nobody will die).

Framing

• Should advertisers say the ground beef is

– 90% lean or – 10% fat

Thought Suppression

• Two processes to suppress thought– Automatic – checks for incoming

information related to unwanted thought– Controlled – redirects attention away from

unwanted thought

• Relax conscious control and mind is flooded with cues from the automatic system

• Trying to suppress thoughts tend to make those thought more prevalent.

Attributions

• Causal explanations; inferences we make about events or behaviors.

• “Intuitive scientists” seek explanations in a systematic, orderly way

– much like a trained scientist, laypeople gather evidence, weigh possibilities, form hypotheses, to understand others

Attributions

• Three dimensions

– Internal / External– Stable / Unstable – Global / Specific

Attributions: Explaining Success and Failure

• Two dimensions– Internal Stable - Ability– Internal Unstable – Effort– External Stable – Difficulty of task– External Unstable – Luck

• Self-serving bias

Actor/Observer Bias

• External – Internal Attribution– Actor (situation – external)– Observer (actor – internal)

• Fundamental Attribution Error

• Ultimate Attribution Error– Behavior freely chosen is more informative

about a person (Jones & Harris, 1967)

Fundamental Attribution Error

• Four possible explanations– Behavior is more noticeable than

situational factors– Insignificant weight is assigned to

situational factors– People are cognitive misers– Richer trait-like language to explain

behavior

Heuristics

• Representativeness Heuristic– Judge likelihood by the extent it resembles

the typical case

• Availability Heuristic– Judge likelihood by ease with which

relevant instances come to mind

• ESP beliefs

Heuristics

• Simulation Heuristic– Judge likelihood by ease with which you

can imagine it

• Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic– Judge likelihood by using a starting point

and adjusting from that point

Cognitive Errors and Biases

• Information Overload– Too much information, contradictions in

information, irrelevant information

• Generally access two types of information– Statistical information– Case History

• Generally pay closer attention to case history

Cognitive Errors and Biases

• Confirmation Bias– Tendency to notice and search for

information that confirms one’s beliefs and ignore information that disconfirms it

• Conjunction Fallacy– Tendency to see an event as more likely as

it becomes more specific

Cognitive Errors and Biases

• Illusory Correlation– Tendency to overestimate link between

variables that are related only slightly or not at all

– Hamilton & Gifford (1976)

Cognitive Errors and Biases

• Base Rate Fallacy– Tendency to ignore base rate information

and be influenced by distinctive features of the case

• Gambler’s Fallacy– Tendency to believe that a chance event is

affected by previous events and will “even out”

Cognitive Errors and Biases

• False Consensus Effect– Tendency to overestimate the number of

other people who share one’s opinions

• False Uniqueness Effect– Tendency to underestimate the number of

other people who share one’s prized characteristics or abilities

Cognitive Errors and Biases

• Statistical Regression– Statistical tendency for extremes to be

followed by less extreme or those closer to average

• Illusion of Control– A false belief that one can influence events

Cognitive Errors and Biases

• Magical Thinking– Assumptions that don’t hold up to logical

scrutiny

• Touching objects pass on properties to each other (contamination)

• Resemblance to something shares basic properties (contamination)

• Thoughts can influence physical world

Counterfactual Thinking

• Imagining alternatives to past or present factual events or circumstances– First instinct fallacy

• Upward counterfactuals – positive outcome– Help make future situations better

• Downward counterfactuals – negative outcome– Comfort it could have been worse

Are People Really Idiots?

• We make predictable errors– Cognitive misers– Heuristics are short cuts

• How serious are the errors– On trivial events – use heuristics and

automatic processing– On important events – use conscious

processing and make better decisions

Reducing Cognitive Errors

• Debiasing– Consider multiple alternative– Rely less on memory– Use explicit decision rules– Search for disconfirmatory information– Use meta-cognition

What Makes Us Human?

• Human thought uses and combines symbols

• Language allows for exploration of linkages of meaning

• Conscious mind is uniquely human– Complex patterns of thought

What Makes Us Human?

• Only humans engage in counterfactual thinking

• Human thought creates unique errors and unique capabilities to find the truth