chapter 3: social cognition

Question 1

what is social cognition

Answer 1

-How people think about themselves and the social world
-How people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgment and decisions

Question 2

what are the two kinds of thinking in social cognition

Answer 2

Lots of ways to divide up thought
-We’ll talk about..
-Automatic thinking: The kind of thinking that occurs without any effort
-Controlled thinking

Question 3

what is automatic thinking

Answer 3

-Quick: No conscious deliberation of thoughts, perceptions, assumptions
-Thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless
-Not precise – can lead to poor decisions
-But has unlimited capacity – good for lots of data
-Helps us process a lot of things at once, helps us deal with a greater amount of information
-Decision quality does not deteriorate with increasing complexity

Question 4

what is controlled thinking

Answer 4

-Effortful and deliberate, based on rules, precise
-Thinking about self and environment
-Carefully selecting the right course of action
-Best for simple choices with few factors to consider
-Best to use when dealing with small pieces of information

Question 5

is controlled thinking good for complex choices

Answer 5

Not good for complex choices – too much to think about
-Logic problems (having more premises for these kinds of problems makes them more difficult)
-Decision quality goes down when decisions are very complex

Question 6

how do automatic and controlled thinking relate

Answer 6

Often, they work together

Question 7

what are schemas and what kind of thinking are they

Answer 7

-automatic thinking
-Mental structures that organize our knowledge of the social world
-Influences what people notice, think about, and remember
-Based on information learned in the past
-We have schemas (or scripts) about everything
-Schemas are generally good because we can generalize a lot of information, but they can be hurtful when they are used about people

Question 8

what are scripts

Answer 8

Scripts are schemas that are used for events, e.g. going to a restaurant

Question 9

what are schemas used to do

Answer 9

Organize information
-E.g. can drive a car even if you have never driven it before

Interpret new situations quickly
-Especially ambiguous ones
-E.g. laundry video
-Answer some questions…

Fill in blanks of memory
-Remember schema relevant info
-Misremember information consistently with schema
-E.g. person is left in office and recalled things in office that were not actually there; remembered things that were typically in an office

Question 10

explain the study that shows how schemas affect perception (guest lecturer in class)

Answer 10

Kelly (1950): guest lecturer
-Teaching a class and told both groups there was a guest lecturer for each class, both classes got the same lecture; classes were then asked questions about the lecture
-Condition 1: People who know him consider him a rather cold person, industrious, critical, practical, and determined.
-Told this to one class
-Condition 2: People who know him consider him a very warm person, industrious, critical, practical, and determined.
-Told this to the other class

DV: How did students rate the person’s arrogance and sense of humor?

Results:
-Arrogance: rated the same
-unambiguous trait
-Sense of humor: rated as funnier in warm condition compared to cold condition
-ambiguous trait

Question 11

when do we use schemas

Answer 11

When they’re accessible (three ways they are accessible)

1) Chronically accessible
-E.g. you study alcoholics so this is something that is constantly on the forefront of your mind

2) Related to current goal
-E.g. you are writing a paper on alcoholism for your current class

3) Temporarily accessible (something in your environment that primes a certain schema)
-Priming: subconsciously exposing people to stimuli that will impact their thinking and behavior later on without them knowing about it

Question 12

explain the study that shows priming (list of words about Donald)

Answer 12

Memorize words
-Condition 1: Adventurous, self-confident, independent, persistent
-Condition 2: Reckless, conceited, aloof, stubborn
-Told people that they were going to be shown some words and had to remember words
-In the second part of the study which they believed was a part of a different study, they had to read a description of a guy named Donald and then rate him

Donald is a high sensation seeker; people had to rate how positively they rated Donald

Results: people in condition one rated Donald more positively because this condition had words that were positive about an adventurous person

Question 13

what is a self-fulfilling prophecy (why schemas come true)

Answer 13

-An expectation about what another person is
-That influences how you act toward that person
-This causes that person to behave that way
-This makes your expectation come true.
-Ex. With your significant other, when you think someone is mad at you and they actually start getting mad at you

Question 14

explain the study about self fulfilling prophecy and IQ scores

Answer 14

-Interested to see if they could influence people’s IQ scores, told teachers in school that the test would identify children who would do really well, gave the test to the children and went back to the teachers and told them a group of students they found would make great improvements the rest of the year, the other students are normal
-No difference between the two groups, it was actually random assignment
-Group 1: academic bloomers; group 2: regular students
-Researchers then left and left the teachers to interact with the students the rest of the year, came back at the end of the year and gave the students another IQ test at the end of the year
-Results: found that that students in the bloomers group actually got smarter to a larger extend than the students in the normal group

Question 15

why did they find the results they did in the bloomers study

Answer 15

Why did “bloomers” do better?
-Due to teachers’ automatic thinking; they applied a schema to one group of students and acted on that schema
-Teachers treated “bloomers” differently (replicated the study to see what the teachers were doing differently to the bloomers, to find out why they got the results they did)

Created warmer emotional climate for bloomers
-more personal attention
-encouragement
-support

Gave them more challenging material

Gave them more and better feedback

Gave them more and longer opportunities to respond in class

Question 16

what is another self fulfilling prophecy study about expectations and standardized test scores

Answer 16

-Low teacher expectations during first grade
-Predict poor standardized test performance 10 years later
-Particularly if students are from poor families
-Difference was only a few points, but still measurable

Happens outside of school, too!
-workplace

Question 17

what is automatic goal pursuit

Answer 17

a type of automatic thinking

-Prime goals in subtle way to see if it influences behavior

Question 18

explain the study about automatic goal pursuit (priming words about religion)

Answer 18

Gave people words that made a sentence, had people unscramble words to make sentences

Example: Shariff & Norenzayan (2007)
-Task 1: Primed goals via a sentence unscrambling task
-Condition 1: Words related to God (spirit, God, sacred, prophet)
-Condition 2: Neutral words
-Condition 3: Nonreligious words related to fairness (civic, contract)

Task 2: Economics game—given $1 coins ($10 total) to divide up between themselves and partner (thought task unrelated to first)

How much money would you allocate to yourself or to other people?

Results: Gave more money in the God ($4.56) and fairness ($4.44) than in the neutral ($2.56) condition

Question 19

what is automatic decision making

Answer 19

-Sometimes we decide without thinking
-Distraction improves decision making: (when we make decisions automatically)
-When we consciously want to make a good choice
-When decision requires integration of complex information
-Many moving pieces to make decision, people might tell you to focus on your feelings (e.g. deciding on a grad school)

Question 20

explain the study about automatic decision making with cars

Answer 20

Dijksterhuis et al
-Gave people information about different cars and people had to decide which car is a better car, there was a right and wrong answer to this question (not an opinion question, one car was objectively better)
-In one condition given 4 attributes about both cars, in another group given 12 attributes about both cars
-Another IV: told to either think about the decision or solve it using anagrams

Results: looking at what people made the right decision
-Found an interaction: when people were making a simple decision (4 attributes) people did best when they made a conscious decision; when people were making a complicated decision (12 attributes) people did best when they made an automatic decision by solving anagrams

Question 21

explain the other study about automatic decision making about Ikea

Answer 21

Dijksterhuis et al another study, this time in an Ikea store
-Done in Europe on people who were shopping in an Ikea for furniture (complex store) or a department store for simple day to day items like shampoo (simple)
-Asked people how much they thought about their decision to purchase what they did (a lot/conscious or a little/unconscious)

Results: people who thought about making a decision the most were the most satisfied in a department store; people who thought about making a decision the least were the most satisfied in Ikea

Question 22

what are heuristics

Answer 22

-Make judgments quickly and efficiently

Why use them?
-Often we don’t have time to fully search all options
-Usually lead to good decisions quickly
-Adaptive
-But occasionally lead us to make the wrong decision

Question 23

what is the availability heuristic

Answer 23

-basing a judgment on the ease with which something can be brought to mind
-The good: things that come to mind easily are usually more common or important
-If you can think of lots of instances of your friend tripping that person is probably clumsy
-The bad: sometimes what is easiest to remember is not typical of the overall picture, leading to faulty conclusions

Question 24

explain the schwartz et al study with the availability heuristic (listing assertive traits)

Answer 24

-Showed that we fall to the availability heuristic even when we are thinking about ourselves
-Ask people to list either assertive or unassertive things they have done in the past year (first IV)
-List 6 things in one of these categories or 12 things (second IV)
-Then asked people to rank how assertive they are
-Found an interaction: people listing assertive acts- those who listed 6 ranked themselves as more assertive; people listing unassertive acts- those who listed 12 ranked themselves as more assertive (people who had to list 12 assertive acts could not think of that many)

Question 25

explain the representative heuristic

Answer 25

Judgment based on how similar something is to a typical case
-Example: a random person is short, frail, glasses, reads a lot; people will rank this person as a professor of classes at an Ivy league rather than a truck driver (even though there are more truck drivers overall)
-problem: people ignore base rate information
-Information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population

Question 26

what are the two culturally different kinds of thinking

Answer 26

Analytic thinking style
-focus on objects without considering surrounding context
-associated with Western cultures

Holistic thinking style
-focus on the overall context, relation between objects
-associated with Eastern cultures

These different kinds of thinking affects what we can remember*

Question 27

main cultural difference in social psychology

Answer 27

The main cultural difference talked about in social psychology is that cultures in Eastern world are more collectivistic and countries in Western world are more individualistic
-Primary way research is done in this field even though it is not the only way

Question 28

cultural differences example of pictures of airport

Answer 28

Ex. Looking at pictures of airport scene and determining the differences between the two pictures

Find that when they show these pictures to people in different cultures, people notice different kinds of differences
-People from Western cultures will be able to notice object differences (focus more on details); people from Eastern cultures look at things holistically so can see the differences in positions of things

Question 29

what is the first explanation for two different kinds of thinking

Answer 29

Explanation 1: philosophical traditions (different ones in different parts of the world)
-Eastern philosophical traditions
-Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism – emphasis connectedness
-Western philosophical traditions
-Greeks – emphasize laws governing independent objects, analysis
-Reductionism: breaking things down into its pieces to help you understand it

Question 30

what is the second explanation for two different kinds of thinking

Answer 30

Explanation 2: environments (influence the things we pay attention to in the world)
-Eastern environments are busier, more objects – draws attention
-Ex. A taxi goes by and we do not notice it as much, rather look at how the taxi fits into the rest of the picture
-Western environments are more austere (is not as much to look at)
-Ex. A taxi goes by so we focus on this fully

Question 31

explain the study of priming one style of pictures with another (statue of liberty vs. great wall of China)

Answer 31

Used pictures to prime people with one style of thinking vs. another
-Ex. Statue of liberty vs. Great Wall of China

People were more likely to notice differences in objects vs. people were more likely to notice difference in positioning of things
-Once primed, people saw changes associated with the culture of the picture
-Indicates that people are equally capable of using both styles
-environment in which people live “primes” one style over the other

Question 32

explain controlled social cognition and when we need to

Answer 32

Controlled Social Cognition: High Effort Thinking
-Controlled Thinking (good when we are not dealing with a lot of information, but we are thinking about it consciously)
-Thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful

Question 33

explain controlled thinking and free will

Answer 33

Correlation between conscious thought and behavior creates perception of free will
-Correlation is not causation
-Erroneous thinking to say that because you have a thought that leads to a conclusion that this is what influences behavior; cannot say this; could be another force that is causing your thoughts and behavior

Ex. Getting ice cream because you think that you want it, could be possible that there is a biological process in your body or an advertisement that leads you to have the thought and do the behavior
-Forces outside awareness

Question 34

study about the belief free will predicts behavior (e.g. people who believe in free will tend to behave better)

Answer 34

Cheating vs. Helping

-Gave people information to read and were interested in how reading this information would affect their future behavior (cheating on a test or helping others)
-One statement said free will does not exist, the other group read a statement that says free will does exist
-Results: when people do not think free will is a thing they are more likely to cheat and less likely to help; the opposite is true when people think free will is a thing

Question 35

what is counter factual reasoning

Answer 35

Mentally changing some aspect of the past by imagining what almost happened…
-Can make you feel good: I almost failed that test
-Can make you feel bad: I almost passed that test
-The easier it is to mentally undo an outcome, the stronger the emotional reaction to it
-Can have a big influence on our emotional reactions to events

Question 36

bronze medal win example for counter factual reasoning

Answer 36

Analyses have shown who is the happiest with their place (1st, 2nd or 3rd)
-Happiest is 1st place, 3rd place is second happiest
-Easier for them to imagine not placing at all; person who came in 2nd is thinking I could’ve come in first

Question 37

emotional consequences of counterfactual reasoning

Answer 37

Silver medal winners (2nd place) often express greater dissatisfaction than bronze medal winners (3rd place)
-Silver
-May imagine ways they could have placed first and won gold

Bronze
-May imagine ways they would not have won any medal

Positive consequences
-Motivation to improve in future

Negative consequences
-If it leads to rumination—repetitive focus on negative things
-Associated with depression

Question 38

how can we improve human thinking

Answer 38

Make people more humble
-Ask people to consider the point of view opposite to their own
-People realize there are other ways to construe the world
-Make fewer judgment errors

Teach basic statistical principles
-Facilitates application of principles to everyday life
-e.g., base rates

Question 39

study about grad school programs and knowledge about statistics

Answer 39

Looked at students in grad school for psychology, medicine, law, and chemistry and asked them all basic statistical reasoning questions
-found that people in medicine and psychology did much better on these questions, psychology did better than medicine
-people in these programs take classes that apply to these things