Chapter 3 Social Cognition: How We Think About the Social World Flashcards
Social Cognition
–How people think about themselves and the social
world
–How people select, interpret, remember, and use
social information to make judgments and decisions
The Controlled Thinker
Rodin’s famous sculpture, The Thinker, mimics controlled thinking, where people
sit down and consider something slowly and deliberately. Even when we do not
know it, however, we are engaging in automatic thinking, which is nonconscious,
unintentional, involuntary, and effortless.
Source: Sean Nel/Shutterstock
Two Kinds of Social Cognition
- Automatic thinking
- Controlled thinking
Automatic thinking
-Quick
–No conscious deliberation of thoughts, perceptions,
assumptions
Controlled thinking
–Effortful and deliberate
–Thinking about self and environment
–Carefully selecting the right course of action
We often size up a new situation very
quickly.
*Often these quick conclusions are correct.
–Example: You can tell the difference
between a college classroom and a frat
party without having to think about it.
Automatic Thinking (2 of 3)
*Imagine a different approach: slow and
deliberate thinking.
*Imagine driving down the road and stopping
repeatedly to analyze every twist and turn.
*Imagine meeting a new person and excusing
yourself for 15 minutes to analyze what you
learned from them.
Automatic Thinking (3 of 3)
Thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional,
involuntary, and effortless
*How do we do this?
–Relate new situations to past experiences
–Use schemas
▪Mental structures that organize our knowledge of
the social world
▪Influences the information people notice, think
about, and remember
schema
The term schema encompasses our knowledge
and impression of:
–Other people
–Ourselves
–Social roles
▪ E.g., what a librarian or engineer is like
–Specific events
▪ E.g., what usually happens when people eat a meal in a
restaurant
Schemas and Stereotypes
When applied to members of a social
group such as a fraternity, gender, or race,
schemas are commonly referred to as
stereotypes.
–Can be applied rapidly and automatically
when we encounter other people.
Schemas used to
–Organize what we know
–Interpret new situations
Korsakov’s syndrome
–Neurological disorder
▪Can’t form memories
–Each situation is new
Schemas as Memory Guides (cold vs warm person description)
*Two groups of students observe the same exact
lecture, but prior to the lecture students are given
different descriptions of the guest lecturer:
–Condition 1: People who know him consider him a
rather cold person, industrious, critical, practical, and
determined.
–Condition 2: People who know him consider him a
very warm person, industrious, critical, practical, and
determined.
*DV: How did they rate the person’s arrogance
and sense of humor?
Accessibility
The extent to which schemas and concepts are at the
forefront of people’s minds and are therefore likely to
be used when we are making judgments about the
social world
Priming
The process by which recent experiences increase
the accessibility of a schema, trait, or concept
Something can become accessible for
three reasons:
Something can become accessible for
three reasons:
–Chronically accessible due to past
experience.
–Accessible because it is related to a current
goal
–Temporarily accessible because of our recent
experience
Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson test
–Administered a test to all students
–Teachers led to believe particular students will
“bloom” academically in the upcoming year
–In actuality, students randomly assigned to condition
–At the end of the school year, students given an IQ
test
Why did “bloomers” do better?
– Example of automatic thinking
* Treated “bloomers” differently in four critical ways:
– Created a warmer emotional climate for those students, giving
them more personal attention, encouragement, and support
– Gave them more challenging material
– Gave them more and better feedback
– Gave them more opportunities to respond in class and gave
them longer to respond
Automatic goal pursuit
Prime goals in subtle way to see if it influences behavior
Example:
– 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)
– Results: Gave more money in the God ($4.56) and fairness
($4.44) than in the neutral ($2.56) condition
Automatic decision making
–Distracting oneself prior to making a decision
Ensuring distraction improves decision
making:
–Have a conscious goal to make a good choice
–Decision requires integration of complex
information
Physical sensations can prime metaphors
Example:
▪Scent of cleanliness
▪Cleanliness associated with morality; dirtiness with
immorality
Metaphors can influence decisions
–Holding hot coffee or iced coffee
–Encounter a stranger
▪Hot coffee: Primes “warm & friendly” metaphor
–Stranger rated as friendly
▪Iced coffee: Primes “unfriendly people are cold”
–Rate stranger as unfriendly
Mental shortcuts
–Efficient
▪Don’t usually have time to fully search all
options
–Usually lead to good decisions quickly
Schemas are a shortcut people use
–But we don’t have a ready-made schema for
every judgment or decision
–Sometimes there are too many schemas
available
Judgmental Heuristics
–Mental shortcuts people use to make
judgments quickly and efficiently
Availability Heuristic
A mental rule of thumb whereby people base a
judgment on the ease with which they can bring
something to mind
*The trouble: 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.
Availability Heuristic
A mental rule of thumb whereby people base a
judgment on the ease with which they can bring
something to mind
*The trouble: 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.
Representativeness heuristic
A mental shortcut whereby people classify
something according to how similar it is to a
typical case
Base rate information
Information about the frequency of members
of different categories in the population
We tend to perceive personality tests as
uncannily accurate, known as the “Barnum
effect”
*Why does this happen?
–Representative heuristic—statements are so vague
that everyone can find a past behavior similar to the
feedback
–We do not go beyond representative examples that
come to mind
Cultural Determinants of Schemas
–Culturally Universal
▪All people have schemas
–Culture Differences
▪Content of schemas
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
Eastern and Western cultures
–equally capable of using both styles
–environment in which people live “primes” one style
over the other
*Controlled Thinking
–Thinking that is conscious, intentional,
voluntary, and effortful
*Association between conscious thought
and behavior creates perception of free will
–But, forces outside of awareness may
influence behavior and conscious thoughts
▪May overestimate or underestimate amount of
control
Belief in free will predicts behavior
–Cheating
–Helping
Facilitated communication
–Developed to allow communication-impaired
people to express themselves
Counterfactual Reasoning
–Mentally changing some aspect of the past in
imagining what might have been
▪ “If only I had answered that one question differently, I would
have passed the test.”
–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
Emotional Consequences of
Counterfactual Reasoning
Positive consequences
–Motivation to improve in future
*Negative consequences
–If it leads to rumination—repetitive focus on
negative things
–Associated with depression
