chapter 12 social cognition and prejudice & stereotyping Flashcards
social cognition
how ppl think abt themselves & the social world
specifically, abt how ppl select, interpret, rmb, and use social info to make judgements & decisions
what are the 2 modes of information processing?
- automatic: non conscious, unintentional, involuntary, effortless
- controlled: conscious, intentional, voluntary, effortful
why do we use automatic thinking?
- the world has so much information
- the world is filled with ambiguous information
schemas (automatic thinking)
mental structure that organise our knowledge abt the world
experiment:
one condition: participants told the “ppl who know prof consider him a cold person, industrious, critical, practical, and determined
other condition: participants told “ppl who know prof consider him a warm person, industrious, critical, practical, and determined
->only diff is warm or cold
results: students in warm condition found prof to be warmer, asked more qns, more active in class part
which schemas do we use?
- accessibility (extent to which schemas & concepts are at the forefront of the mind)
-can increase by past experiences/relation to current goal/recent experiences - priming (process by which recent experiences increase accessibility of schema, trait, or concept)
-ambiguous situations are interpreted through the lens of available schema
self-fulfilling prophecy
ppl often make their schemas “come true” by the way they treat other ppl
e.g. experimenter artifact
experiment (self-fulfilling prophecy as an automatic process): participants either split into experimental (bloomers) group or control (non-bloomers) group
->teachers unconsciously treat the bloomers and non-bloomers differently by giving bloomers gap warmer emotional environment, more material + more difficult material to learn, more and better feedback, more opportunities to respond in class & longer period of time to respond
what is discrimination
behaviour towards a group or its members, simply due to group membership
what are stereotypes
overgeneralised beliefs abt the attributes of a group of ppl
what is prejudice
feelings towards a group and its individual members
shooter bias
participants play video game and see photos of ppl, asked to shoot when they see a gun: don’t shoot if they don’t see a gun
IV: black vs white individuals, gun vs other object (not gun)
DV: error when shooting
results: showed highest no. of errors per 20 trials for unarmed black ind
-> same effects with community sample (police don’t show the same error effects but show speed effects, suggesting they are good at correcting)
realistic group conflict (why we are biased)
prejudice arises when groups compete for the same limited resources
social categorisation processes (why we are biased)
organising ppl into diff social groups e.g. us vs them
-easy to invent a novel stereotype; fast to learn this stereotype
stereotype activation & application
categorisation–>stereotype activation (once a person is categorised, stereotypes are usually automatically activated)–>stereotype application (when stereotype informs judgement, depends on cognitive resources & motivation)
what do stereotypes do?
- fill in the gaps
- influences attention, memory & judgemets
- behavioural confirmation (when perceiver’s stereotype-driven behaviour creates stereotype-confirming behaviour amongst targets e.g. self-fulfilling prophecy)
implicit vs explicit attitudes
implicit: automatic, measured indirectly, predict nonverbal behaviour
explicit: conscious, measured by self-report, predict verbal behaviour
(ppl can hv unconscious biases that differ from their consciously held beliefs)
experiment: examined students attitudes towards African Americans
to assess implicit attitudes: implicit association test
-IAT measures strength of automatic associations btw mental representations of objects (African Americans) and attributes (positive/negative words) by measuring response times to various pairings
to assess explicit attitudes: self-report questionnaires
results: participants showed evidence of unconscious racial bias (implicit attitudes) even when they consciously rejected prejudice (explicit attitudes)
