Chapter 3 - Social Cognition Flashcards
What are Schemas?
-Mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social world.
-They influence the information we notice, think about, and remember.
-We build and rebuild schemas over time; the more we experience something the more a schema can be built.
-Schemas are the foundation of automatic thinking and social cognition.
What are the functions of schemas?
-Help us organize and make sense of our world, and to fill in the gaps of our knowledge.
-Help us to have continuity and to relate new experiences to our past.
-Help us know what to do in ambiguous or confusing situations (context helps).
What is Jean Piaget’s influence on schemas?
-Jean Piaget suggested that we construct schemas from a young age to better understand the world around us and to make the world more predictable as we develop cognitively.
-There are two components regarding the formation, manipulation, and management of schemas:
1. Assimilation: the integration of new information into existing schemas
2. Accommodation: the alteration of existing schemas to adapt to new information (ex: feeling discomfort due to information coming in, so we adjust our schema).
What is Frederic Barlett’s influence on schemas?
-Frederic Barlett argued that memories are reconstructions, and that each reconstruction is affected by our past experiences and viewpoints (not objective).
-The reconstruction of memories are affected by: selectivity of relevant information (or perceived relevance); rationalization of details (memory becomes more selective based on information we already have); cultural factors related to the interpretation of the event.
Which Schemas are applied in ambiguous situations?
-It depends on their 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 judgements about the social world (how quickly and often we think of something affects the likelihood of the schema being activated).
-Schemas can be accessible for three reasons:
1. they can be chronically accessible due to past experience (continually exposed; expert).
2. they can be temporarily accessible because they are related to a current goal (focused).
3. They can be temporarily accessible as a result of priming, whereby a recent experience increases the likelihood that a particular schema will be accessed.
What are the cultural determinants of schemas?
-The content of our schemas is influenced by our culture; we pay most attention to and best remember information that is important in our culture (ex: Bantu herdsmen know each cow).
-People from North American and Eurocentric cultures tend to have an analytic thinking style, whereby they focus on the properties of objects/people without considering the surrounding context.
-People from East Asian cultures tend to have a holistic thinking style, in which they focus on the whole picture, i.e., the person/object and the surrounding context.
-Differences in the amount of information presented in the culture (e.g., in city scenes, on web pages), forces people to develop different information search strategies.
Explain the study on cultural determinants of schemas by Miyamoto et al.
-Japanese and American university students were primed with either Japanese or American city scenes.
-Those primed with Japanese city scenes (which were busier) were more likely to notice changes to the background between two images.
-Those primed with American city scenes were more likely to detect changes in the main object of the pictures.
-These results showed that people in all cultures are capable of thinking holistically or analytically; the environment we’re in influences our thinking style.
What is Priming?
-A phenomenon in which exposure to one stimulus subconsciously alters the way we feel, behave, or think about the proceeding event or stimulus.
What is Embodied Cognition?
-Another form of priming is embodied cognition, whereby bodily sensations activate mental structures such as schemas.
-Ex: holding a cold vs hot drink can influence how you see someone (hot drink = friendly/kind person; cold drink = rude person)
What is the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?
-People can inadvertently make their schemas come true by the way they treat others, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
-It happens when peoples’ expectations about another person influences their behaviour towards that person, causing the person’s behaviour to become consistent with the original expectation (Cyclical nature: treating someone as shy, they act shy, your expectation is confirmed and you keep treating them the same way).
-A good demonstration of the self-fulfilling prophecy is Rosenthal & Jacobson’s (1968) classic experiment in which teachers’ (manipulated) expectations of their students’ potential influenced the students’ actual performance.
What are Heuristics?
-They are mental strategies and shortcuts, called judgemental heuristics, used to make judgements and decisions quickly and efficiently (might be necessary for survival).
-Although they do not always lead to accurate conclusions, heuristics are, for the most part, quite useful.
What are the two kinds of heuristics?
-Availability heuristics: a mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgement on the ease with which they can bring something to mind (ex: 12 times assertive, 6 times unassertive).
-Representativeness heuristic: a mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case (based on prototype; racism, prejudice).
-Base rate information: information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population (statistics, facts). Not a heuristic
Are we more likely to rely on base rate information or contradictory representativeness information?
-People will rely more on the representativeness heuristic.
-Ex: assume that a shy person is a librarian when it is far more likely that they are a sales person (3 times more sales people than librarians).
-Ex: we think that if we flip a coin multiple times its more likely to vary between heads or tails but it has equal odds of having tails 3 times in a row.
What is Hot Cognition?
-Mental processes that are influenced by desires and feelings.
-Ex: going grocery shopping while hungry, we wanna buy a lot more food than we need but we also try to restrict ourselves (alternating schemas; we know we shouldn’t be buying too much food/snacks).
What is Affective Forecasting?
-Problems with predictions
-Impact Bias: we overestimate and underestimate how much an event will affect our future (ex: we think winning the lottery will change our life but it doesn’t really change it).
-Durability Bias: we are bad at predicting how long the affects will last (ex: how long we’ll be sad after a breakup).
