3. Social Cognition Flashcards
Define Social Cognition
How people think about themselves and the social world.
How people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments about the world.
Study:
Victim Derogation
- Want to believe that world is fair and just place
- sometimes things happen in their lives that threaten this belief, (if they can’t punish the perptrator of the crime) they must do something in order to balance the justice of the world.
- Victim Blaming
- Participants watched another “participant” receive painful shocks
- Given chance to stop the shocking and compensate victim, or told victim to suffer again
- Then asked to rate the victim
- when worldview threated, they report liking victim less, and less desire for friendship
Cognitive Psychology
- The scientific study of basic mental abilities–e.g., perception, learning, memory, language, problem-solving; focus on “information-processing”; use mind-as-computer analogy
- Empirical approach: vary information input, measure performance output
- Posits psychological processes inside the mind that account for observed effects
Study:
Prove Justice and Cognition
- News clip of assault victim
- Offender either punished or not
- No punishment should activate justice motive
- stoop task with neutral, negative and justice words
- Justice realted words would interfeer with peoples ability to do a common stroop task because you see the words are are activated
- people took longer to say the justice words then the neutral or negative words if there was no retribution
Automatic Cognitive Processing
- Nonconscious
- Unintentional
- Involuntary
- Effortless
Controlled Cognitive Processing
- Conscious
- Intentional
- Voluntary
- Deliberate
Automatic Thinking
•Limited cognitive resources
(don’t have tons of resources to deal with such a stimulis rich envirement)
•Message-dense environment
•“Cognitive Misers” (people operatite like cognitive misers. The brain works to find ways to save time and effort.)
•They originally thought that peple act like naieve scienctists. They would measure and analyse and rationalise. Look and come up with decisions.
-Automatic thinking helps us understand new situations by relating them to our prior experiences
Ap Dijksterhuis
•becuase of low processing capactity of brain, it’s kind maladatice for making complex descisions.
•He presented them with complex info and asked to make a decision
•1st conditon was asked to really think about it.
•2nd group engamed in a distractor task
•People made better decisios after distractions compared with really thinking about things.
•Another one about deciding on a vehicle
•there was a car with the greatest number of atributes
•when there were 12 ascpects of a car, the unconous made the better decision
•when only 4 aspects to evaluate, the concious was slightly better
therefore only for really complex decision
Explicit Self esteem
In order to determine a perons self esteem, they are engaging in a controlled cognitive process where they sit down and evaluate themselves
- Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale
- might be more sensitive to feedback in enviorment short term
- Explicit is belived to consiously control how you respond so its suseptible to social desireability
Implicit Self Esteem
Hoe you actually feel about yourself
- more long term
- Name Letter Effect measure
- maybe tend to rate your own first name letter as higher. Rate the astetic beuty of letters
Schemas
-Mental Shortcuts
-mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social world
-Influence what information we notice, think about, and remember
•Stereotypes: schemas about social groups
-First day of walking through the door is auto. You walk in, sit down, open computer, lok at teacher. We have schemas about how school/a lecture works
Why do we use schemas?
To organize & make sense of world
–To fill in gaps in knowledge
–To interpret ambiguous situations
•Serve as memory guides
–Better memory for schema-consistent information
Availability
is the concept present at all?
–“Camping” not accessible in “Taxi” schema
Accessibility
how readily available is the concept?
-the extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people’s minds and are therefore likely to be used when making judgments about the social world.
–NYC is more accessible than Robert DeNiro
–The bolder lines come up quicker, so yellow cab faster then tips
-individual diffrences. soemthing about individual setup or life makes that one thing more sccecible, kids growing up in bad chaoitic enviornments might have more acceble to danger schemas)
-related to a current goal (then all of a sudden a particular shcema might be accesible)
Study:
Schema and Memory
- pretend your a home buyer or pretend your a burglar
- read a passage about boys playing hooky from school
- items relevent to each group
- then asked to recall all the items from the story they can remember.
- They recal a greater # of items for the persoanlity that was primed
- Then switch personalities, they remembered more of their new personality items
