Ch. 3 Social Cognition

Question 1

Social Cognition

Answer 1

SOCIAL COGNITION – How people think about themselves and the social world – how people use social information to make judgments and decisions. There are two different types of social cognition: automatic vs. controlled thinking.

Question 2

Accessibility and Priming

Answer 2

The social world is full of ambiguous information that is open to interpretation

ACCESSIBILITY – 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. Something can become accessible for three reasons: Past Experiences, Related Goals, or Recent/Current Experiences.

1. Some schemas are chronically accessible because of PAST EXPERIENCES, constantly active and ready to use to interpret ambiguous situations.
   
   • Ex: Suppose you see a disheveled, disoriented guy on the bus:
     
     • If there is a history of alcoholism in your family, traits describing a person with alcoholism are likely to be chronically accessible to you, increasing the likelihood that you will assume that the man on the bus has had too much to drink.
     • If someone you know has a mental illness, however, thoughts about how people with mental illnesses behave are likely to be more accessible than thoughts about someone with alcoholism, leading you to interpret the man’s behavior very differently.
       
       • So your past and current experiences partially determine which schemas you use to make judgments.
2. Something can become accessible because it is RELATED TO A CURRENT GOAL. 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, this concept might be temporarily accessible. 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.
3. Schemas can become temporarily accessible because of our RECENT EXPERIENCES This means that a particular schema or trait happens to be PRIMED by something people have been thinking or doing before encountering an event.

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

• A classic experiment illustrates the priming effect – A teacher (Donald) was being evaluated. How did the participants interpret Donald’s behavior? Well, it depended on whether positive or negative traits were primed and accessible prior to the evaluation.
  
  • Researchers gave two groups different words to memorize.
    
    • People who had first memorized the words adventurous, self-confident, independent, and persistent later formed positive impressions of Donald, viewing him as a likable man who enjoyed new challenges.
    • People who had first memorized reckless, conceited, aloof, and stubborn later formed negative impressions of Donald, viewing him as a stuck-up person who took needlessly dangerous chances.
  • Importantly, in another study where general positive or negative words were used, the traits didn’t influence the subjects’ impressions of Donald because the words did not apply to Donald’s behavior.
    
    • So, thoughts have to be both accessible and applicable before they will act as primers, exerting an influence on our impressions of the social world.
    • Priming is a good example of automatic thinking.

Question 3

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Answer 3

SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY – People have an expectation about what another person is like, which influences how they act toward that person, which causes that person to behave consistently with people’s original expectations, making the expectations come true.

• A famous study in social psychology, (ROSENTHAL and replicated by JACOBSON) demonstrated the self-fulfilling prophecy in an elementary school. They administered a test to all the students in the school and told the teachers that some of the students had scored so well that they were sure to “bloom” academically in the upcoming year. In fact, this was not necessarily true.
  
  • In reality, the only way in which these students differed from their peers was in the minds of the teachers
  • RESULTS: Students in each class who had been labeled as “bloomers” showed significantly greater gains in their IQ scores than the other students did. The teachers’ expectations had become reality.
  • Teachers have been found to treat bloomers (the students they expect to do better) differently in four critical ways:
    
    1. They create a warmer emotional climate for bloomers, giving them more personal attention, encouragement, and support.
    2. They give bloomers more material to learn and material that is more difficult.
    3. They give bloomers more and better feedback on their work.
    4. They give bloomers more opportunities to respond in class and give them longer to respond.
• In real life, the student’s gender, race, social class, or family history can serve to instill expectations in the minds of the teachers and lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. Evidence supports this.
  
  • Teachers who think a child from a low-income family doesn’t have what it takes to succeed in school inadvertently acted in ways that made that child do more poorly in school.

Question 4

Automatic Thinking

Answer 4

AUTOMATIC THINKING – Thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless.

• Ex: We form impressions of people quickly and effortlessly, without much conscious analysis of what we’re doing, unconsciously analyzing our environments, based on our past experiences and knowledge of the world.
  
  • Using this background, our brains categorize, compartmentalize, group, and associate every new peice of information with currently held mental structures called SCHEMAS.
• SCHEMAS – Mental structures people use to ORGANIZE their knowledge about the social world around themes or subjects. SCHEMAS influence the information people notice, think about, and remember.
  
  • Schemas contain our basic knowledge and impressions that we use to organize what we know about the social world and interpret new situations.
  • SCHEMAS come into play when the situation we’re experiencing is confusing or ambiguous.
    
    • A classic study by HAROLD KELLEY – In a situation where students were required to assess a particular teacher they’d just met (ambiguity), the students gave an assessment that was determined by a biological note they had received about the teacher prior to meeting him.
      
      • Despite having observed the exact same class and exact same instructor behavior**, those who expected the instructor to be “**warm**” (which was how the biographical note given to these students described the teacher – **establishing a SCHEMA for them about the ambiguous teacher) gave him significantly higher ratings than the students who received a biological note about the teacher that described him as being “cold”.
        
        • The more ambiguous our information is, the more we use schemas to fill in the blanks. It is important to note that there is nothing wrong with what the students in Kelley’s study did. As long as people have reason to believe their schemas are accurate, it is perfectly reasonable to use them to resolve ambiguity.
  • 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. They seem to live without SCHEMAS.
• There are THREE primary types of Automatic Thinking: Automatic Goal Pursuit, Metaphors about the Body and Mind, and Judgmental Heuristics. (Each discussed in their own flashcard).

Question 5

Types of Automatic Thinking

Question 6

Automatic Goal Pursuit: Type of Automatic Thinking

Answer 6

AUTOMATIC GOAL PURSUIT – When it comes to setting goals for ourselves, such as what career path to follow, we often do so carefully and consciously, but most goals we pursue do not get the benefit of extended analysis and are instead made on the fly. Those goals are the ones of AUTOMATIC GOAL PURSUIT, and it turns out that they are highly susceptible to influence.

• A study on GOAL PRIMING by AZIM SHARIFF and ARA NORENZAYAN (2007) – Looked at the choices of two conflicting goals – get money or be nice? Which goal wins out?
  
  • ANSWER: It depends in part on which goal has been recently primed. Those primed with words that reminded them of being kind preferred the goal of being nice.
  • A recent meta-analysis has confirmed that priming religious thoughts increases the likelihood that people would act kindly toward their fellow human beings, but ONLY if people are religious to start with.
• BOTTOM LINE: Goals can be activated and influence people’s behavior without their knowing it.

Question 7

Metaphors About the Body and Mind: Type of Automatic Thinking

Answer 7

METAPHORS ABOUT THE BODY AND MIND – metaphors about the body and social judgments also influence our judgments and decisions. And so, priming metaphors about the relationship between the mind and the body influence what we do and think.

• It’s not just schemas that can be primed and influence people’s judgments and decisions. The mind is connected to the body, and when we think about something or someone, we do so with reference to how our bodies are reacting.
  
  • Ex: If the schema of helpfulness was just primed – maybe you just saw a clerk in the store go out of her way to help someone – you will be more likely to help the stranger. But your decision will also depend on whether you just smelled something fresh and clean?
    
    • Research shows that the scent of CLEANLINESS increases the degree to which people trust strangers and their willingness to help others.
    • This is because cleanliness is usually associated with morality, and dirtiness with immorality,
  • Ex: In another study, participants who held a cup of hot coffee thought that a stranger was friendlier than did participants who held a cup of iced coffee. Holding the hot or cold beverage seems to have activated the metaphor that friendly people are “warm” and unfriendly people are “cold.”
  • Ex: Also, college students who filled out a survey attached to a heavy clipboard thought that student opinion should be given more consideration on a local campus issue than did students who filled out the survey attached to a light clipboard. Why? There is a metaphor that associates weight with importance, as indicated by the phrases, “carries weight” and “adding weight to the argument.”
• In each of these studies, a physical sensation (smelling something clean, feeling a hot beverage, holding something heavy) activated a metaphor that influenced judgments about a completely unrelated topic or person.

Question 8

Judgemental Heuristics: Type of Automatic Thinking

Answer 8

JUDGEMENTAL HEURISTICS – Mental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently. Schemas and Body Metaphors are shortcuts.

• When making specific kinds of judgments and decisions, we may not have a ready-made SCHEMA to apply. Other times, there are too many SCHEMAS that could apply, and it is not clear which one to use. This is when HEURISTICS come into play.
• These shortcuts make decisions easier, allowing us to get on with our lives without turning every decision into a major research project. HOWEVER, these shortcuts do not always lead to the best decision.
• That said, mental shortcuts are efficient, USUALLY, lead to good decisions in a reasonable amount of time. In other words, they help us function reasonably well as we move through life.

AVAILABILITY HEURISTIC – A mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the EASE with which they can bring something to mind.

• Ex: Suppose someone asks you if your friend is assertive. If it is easy to think of times your friend acted assertively (e.g., the time he stopped someone from cutting in line in front of him at the movies), you will conclude that he is a pretty assertive guy. If it is easier to think of times your friend acted unassertively (e.g., the time he let a salesperson talk him into an expensive cell phone plan), you will conclude that he is pretty unassertive.
• 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.
  
  • Physicians have been found to use the availability heuristic when making diagnoses. Their diagnoses are influenced by how easily they can bring different diseases to mind, which can obviously be an issue.
• Availability and Assertiveness – People asked to think of 6 times they had behaved assertively found it easy to do so and concluded that they were pretty assertive people. People asked to think of 12 times they had behaved assertively found it difficult to think of so many examples and concluded that they were not very assertive people.
• A college professor used this technique to improve his course evaluations. He asked his students to list either 2 or 10 ways that the course could be improved and then to rate their overall impression of the course. Who gave the course the highest ratings? Those asked to list 10 ways it could be improved, because they found it hard to think of that many examples and thus thought, “If I can’t come up with that many criticisms, it must be a great course!”

REPRESENTATIVENESS HEURISTIC – A mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case.

• Ex: Suppose you attend a state university in New York. At the student union one day, you meet a student named Brian. Brian has blond hair and a deep tan, seems to be very mellow, and likes to go to the beach. What state do you think Brian is from? Because Brian matches a common stereotype for Californians, you might guess that that is his home state. If so, you would be using the representativeness heuristic, because Brian matches your conception of Californians.
• Categorizing things according to REPRESENTATIVENESS is completely reasonable and often useful when the information about the person is very RELIABLE, but often leads to incorrect conclusions if the person ignores BASE RATE INFORMATION – Information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population. People often IGNORE Base Rate Information in favor of Representativeness because Representative data seems to make more sense at the time due to our deep association between the description and our ingrained beliefs of what something should be like.
  
  • Ex: What do people do when they have both BASE RATE INFORMATION (e.g., knowing that there are more New Yorkers than Californians at a university) and CONTRADICTORY INFORMATION about the person in question (e.g., knowing that Brian is blond and mellow and likes to hang out at the beach)?
    
    • ANSWER: People do not use base rate information sufficiently, paying most attention to how representative the information about the specific person is of the general category (e.g., Californians). Given that the base rate of Californians attending state universities in New York is low, you would need to have very good evidence that this person is a Californian before ignoring the base rate and guessing that he is one of the few exceptions. And given that it is not that unusual to find people from eastern states who have blond hair, are laid-back, and like to go to the beach, you would be wise to use the base rate in this instance.
  • People often focus too much on the individual characteristics of what they observe and too little on the base rates. So try to learn or recall the base rate before making an incorrect assumption or decision.
• BARNUM EFFECT – the tendency to accept certain information as true, such as character assessments or horoscopes, even when the information is so vague as to be worthless.
  
  • Most people believe that this personality description describes them so well partially because o the REPRESENTATIVE HEURISTIC: The statements are vague enough that virtually everyone can find a past behavior that is similar to (representative of) the feedback.
  • The reason the feedback seems to describe us so well is that we do not go beyond the representative examples that come to mind and think, “Actually, there are just as many times when I didn’t feel or act this way.”

Question 9

Cultural Differences in Social Cognition – Holistic vs. Analytical

Answer 9

CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN SOCIAL COGNITION – the content of our schemas is influenced by the culture in which we live and so, culture can influence the kinds of thinking people AUTOMATICALLY use to understand their worlds.

• HOLISTIC THINKING – A type of thinking in which people focus on the overall context, particularly the ways in which objects relate to each other; this type of thinking is common in East Asian cultures (e.g., China, Japan, and Korea).
  
  • East Asians are more likely to notice differences in the backgrounds of the pictures.
• ANALYTIC THINKING – A type of thinking in which people focus on the properties of objects without considering their surrounding context; this type of thinking is common in Western cultures.
• THINKING STYLE AND EMOTIONS – these differences in thinking styles also influence how we perceive emotions in other people. Suppose, for example, that you ran into a classmate who was surrounded by a group of friends.
  
  • If you grew up in the West, you would likely focus only on your classmate’s face (the object of your attention) to judge how he or she is feeling.
  • If you grew up in East Asia, you would likely scan everyone’s face in the group (the overall context) and use this information to judge how your classmate is feeling.
• In a study that hypothesized that the very environment of the EAST vs. WEST helped to diferentiate between thinking styles – that EASTERN cities would have much more information in view than WESTERN cities.
  
  • People who saw the photos of Japanese cities were more likely to detect changes in the background of the test pictures, whereas people who saw the pictures of the American cities were more likely to detect changes in the main object of the pictures.
    
    • This finding suggests that people in all cultures are capable of thinking holistically or analytically (they have the same tools in their mental toolbox), but that the environment in which people live, or even which environment has been recently primed, triggers a reliance on one of the styles.

Question 10

Controlled Social Cognition and Free Will

Answer 10

CONTROLLED THINKING – Thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and HIGH EFFORT.

• FREE WILL – If our behavior is often under the control of automatic thought processes of which we are unaware, that means that a lot of things we think are ‘freely’ chosen are actually heavily influenced by other things like past experience and our environment.
• An Experiment by Daniel Wegner demonstrated that there can be an illusion of free will that is very much like the “correlation does not equal causation” problem. Your thought “I think I’ll do the chicken dance now” and your subsequent behavior (flapping your arms and hopping around the room) are correlated, making it seem like the thought caused the action. But they might actually have been produced by a third variable—namely, an unconscious intention that caused both the conscious thought and the behavior.
• People can actually be controlling things (unconsciously) more than they realize. A technique called FACILITATED COMMUNICATION was developed to allow communication-impaired people, such as those with autism and cerebral palsy, to express themselves. Essentially, a facilitator ‘helps’ the impaired person express themselves with a keyboard or other device.
  
  • But studies have shown that the facilitators were inadvertently guiding the impaired individuals to give the facilitator’s responses, not those of the impaired.
• The more people believe in free will, the more willing they are to help others in need and the less likely they are to engage in immoral actions such as cheating.
  
  • Why? When experiencing temptation, people who believe that they can control their actions probably exert more effort to do so, thinking, “I could easily steal some money, but I can control what I do, so it’s up to me to be strong and do the right thing.”

Question 11

Counterfactual Reasoning: Mentally Undoing the Past

Answer 11

COUNTERFACTUAL REASONING – Mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been.

• This often occurs when we experience a negative event that was a “close call,” such as failing a test by just one point. When you’re so close, you think, “If only…” and there is a higher level of anxiety than if you missed the mark by a large margin.
  
  • 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. You would probably be angrier at failing a test by one point than by 10 points, for example, because you can more easily imagine it turning out differently.
• The same is true about our reactions to positive outcomes. If you just pass by a single point, there is likely to be a big sigh of relief (if you feared failing) relative to a scenario where you passed by 30 points.
  
  • The feeling of a near-miss can also be painful in positive events.
    
    • Ex: Silver Medal winners tend to be LESS happy than bronze medal winners because they could more easily imagine themselves winning the gold “if only…”
• Spirituality and Religion – In a study, participants randomly assigned to write about how their lives would be worse, if something good in their lives had not happened, subsequently expressed more religious faith, compared to participants who wrote about how their lives could be better or who simply described a past event.
  
  • Those who imagined a good thing happened seemed to believe that God had a hand in making sure that that good thing had, in fact, occurred.
• Everyone takes part in Counterfactual Thinking, but depending on the person and the circumstance, this dwelling on the past can become obsessive, deteriorating into RUMINATION (repetitively focusing on past negative life events), which is a known contributor to depression.
• On the positive side, Counterfactual thinking can be useful as a learning tool, focusing people’s attention on ways they can cope better in the future. Thinking such thoughts as “If only I had studied a little harder, I would have passed the test” can be beneficial, to the extent that it gives people a heightened sense of control over their fate and motivates them to study harder for the next test

Question 12

Planning Fallacy

Answer 12

PLANNING FALLACY – The tendency for people to be overly optimistic about how soon they will complete a project, even when they have failed to get similar projects done on time in the past.

• One purpose of controlled thinking is to provide checks and balances for automatic thinking.
• Why are people overly optimistic about making deadlines? The problem is that people tend to think that this time will be different—surely nothing will get in the way of finishing this assignment on time, even though they know that in the past it was easy to get sidetracked.
  
  • Essentially, they ignored the BASE RATE information that the vast majority of the time, they were unable to make the deadline in the amount of time they estimate.
  • These faulty estimates can be improved by reminding the person that working toward their next deadline is likely to be similar to working toward past deadlines, including all the things that got in the way.
    
    • STEP 1. Have the person think about their past experiences with completing assignments and how those experiences might be similar to completing the current assignment.
    • STEP 2. Only after that exercise, have the person make an estimate of the time required to accomplish the assignment.
    • Studies have shown that this simple exercise produces much more accurate predictions of the time needed. As a result, deadlines were much more likely to be met.
• In general, the best approach to improving human thinking is to directly teach people some basic statistical and methodological principles about how to reason correctly,
  
  • Ex: If you want to generalize from a sample of information to a population, you must have a large, unbiased sample (People are constantly making incorrect, irrational decisions based on tiny samples (perhaps even as small as 1 data point).
    
    • This is because people weigh their limited samples with the emotional intensity of that data point.
      
      • Ex: If someone knows someone who died of a particular disease, that person might feel an outsized risk of also contracting and dying of that disease, however unlikely.