Lecture 2 - Social Cognition and Biases Flashcards
Social psychology
Perceptions and behaviour and how it is influenced by others
Social cognition
How we process and store social information, and how this affects our perceptions and behaviour (give rise to new hypotheses and perspectives)
Dominant area in social psychology
Attribution
Process of assigning a cause to our own and others’ behaviour (understanding why someone acts the way they do)
Social schemas
Knowledge about concepts
Make sense of our world with limited information (fill in blanks and predict behaviour)
Facilitate top-down (theory-driven) processing
Can have self-schemas, schemas about other people (stereotypes), events, places e.g. restaurant
Category
Organised hierarchically (associative network = connected stimuli activated in different circumstances)
Fuzzy sets of features organised around a prototype (boundaries around categories are fuzzy)
Categorise what we perceive
Prototypes
Cognitive representation of typical defining features of a category (average category member)
Casual attribution
An inference process through which perceivers attribute an effect to one or more causes
Metaphors for how lay people practice psychology/process social material:
Naïve scientist
People are rational and scientific-like in making cause-effect attributions.
All want to understand what happens to us
Biased/intuitionist
but information is limited and driven by motivations (leads to errors and biases)
Cognitive miser
People use least complex and demanding info processing (cognitive short-cuts)
Motivated tactician
Think deeply when required (only when we need to). Most common now
More efficient
Combination of previous metaphors
Think carefully and scientifically about certain things (when personally important or necessary)
Think quickly and use heuristics for others (when less important so that can do things quickly and get more done)
Naïve psychologist (Heider, 1958)
Heider and Simmel (1994) = presented stimuli and asked participants to write down what they saw e.g. circles/triangles trying to get out of room – ascribe human feelings to abstract stimuli
Anthromorphising – ascribing human feelings to non-human objects
Homo rationalis
Analytical, cogent, balanced, logical
Hypothesis testing
Attribute cause to effects to create a stable world that makes sense
Three principles of need
(1) Need to form coherent view of the world (search for motives in others’ behaviour)
(2) Need to gain control over the environment (search for enduring properties that cause behaviour)
(3) Need to identify internal (personal) vs external (situational) factors
Attributional theory (Weiner, 1979)
Causality of success or failure
Multi-dimensional approach:
Locus (internal/external)
Stability (e.g. natural ability/mood) – whether behaviour is always the same
Controllability (e.g. effort/luck) – whether things can be changed
Dynamic model:
Performance (success/failure) -> feelings (positive/negative) -> attributions -> specific emotions (e.g. pride) -> expectations ->…
Attributional retraining
People are encouraged to make more optimistic attributions
Outcomes are controllable
Success attributed to internal causes
Parker et al. (2018)
University athletes prone to difficult transition from school
RCT = attributional training or waitlist control
Attributional training = better grades explained by increased perceived academic control
When people believed outcomes were under their control (internal), increased motivation
Used in clinical practices e.g. CBT
Correspondent interference theory (Jones & Davis, 1965)
Whether behaviour reflects an internally driven behaviour (intentional)
Non-common effect = effect of behaviour unusual compared to other behaviours
Socially desirable = more likely to be produced by situation
Personalism = whether behaviour designed to affect you e.g. positive consequences
But: overly focused on internal attribution
Covariation model (Kelley, 1967)
Use multiple observations to try and identify factors that co-vary with behaviour (more scientific)
Assign causal role to the factor(s)
Whether behaviour is internal or external is key
Look for 3 bits of information:
Consistency
Does this behaviour always co-occur with the cause?
Low (e.g. never failed before after nights out) -> discounting – look for different cause
High (always fail if go out night before) -> these are linked
Distinctiveness
Is the behaviour exclusively linked to this cause or is it a common reaction?
High (e.g. I never failed other exams) -> attribute to external cause
Low (e.g. I generally fail exams) -> internal attribution
Consensus
Do other people react in the same way to the cause/situation?
High - strengthens attribution to external cause (e.g. realise not to drink before exam)
Low - internal attribution (e.g. may just affect me in an adverse way)
Mental health
People with depression attribute negative events to internal, global and stable causes (Abramson et al., 1989)
E.g. “I failed because I am stupid” = internal attribution
Key aspect Psychotherapy – stop explaining events in an overly pessimistic, self-defeating way (Ebeck et al., 1979)
Critiques
BUT: Covariation really used? Salience of prior info? – maybe focus on information that stands out/obvious
Empirical evidence suggests that we are actually quite poor at assessing covariation
Covariation = Correlation ≠ Causation!
Are we really all information seekers and rational scientists?
Attribution biases
Systematic errors indicative of shortcuts, gut feeling, intuition
False consensus
Use our opinions as representative of others
How common is your opinion?
Ross et al. (1977) – asked students would you walk around campus to advertise cafeteria and if other people would do it
Yes = 62% think others will also say yes
No = 67% think others will also say no
Why = seek out similar others to hang out with which gives us a biased view of the world, salience of own opinion (our opinions stand out), self-esteem maintenance (like to validate our own behaviours)
People with extreme views often overestimate others who have similar views e.g. vaccines cause autism (Rabinowitz et al., 2016)
Fundamental attribution error
Tendency to attribute behaviour to enduring dispositions rather than situations (even when clear situational causes)
Ross et al. (1977) – assigned some to knowledgeable quiz master role and some to contestant
Other audience still watching
Rated quiz master as more knowledgeable
Clear situational cues but people still think behaviour is internal/dispositional
Why = focus of attention/saliency effect
Target most salient -> internal attribution most accessible
More likely to forget situational causes -> dispositional shift
Also known as correspondence bias (children don’t demonstrate this bias and we don’t find it in the same strength across cultures)
Actor-observer bias
Extension of fundamental attribution error
More likely to make situational attributions for our behaviour and dispositional to others
Internal for others, external for yourself
Jones and Nisbett (1972)
A shop assistant it rude to you
They are a rude person (internal)
You are rude to a shop assistant
You are simply stressed (external)
Why = perceptual focus, informational difference (got more information about ourselves)
Moderators – positive behaviour makes dispositional more likely, perspective taking reverses effect (put yourself in their position reduces dispositional attribution and increases understanding of the situation)
Self-serving bias
Olson and Ross (1988)
Success = internal
Failure = external
E.g. Kingdon (1976) – self-serving bias in American politicians
Why = expectations and self-esteem
Motivational: maintenance of self-esteem (split into self-enhancing and self-protecting bias)
Cognitive: intend/expect to succeed -> attribute internal causes to expected events
Operates at a group level too (e.g. football wins/losses)
Attribution heuristics
Cognitive shortcut
Avoid effort, resources expenditure
Rule of thumb, not complex mental judgement
Quick and easy
E.g. which are deadlier – sharks or horses? – most people are more scared of sharks but it is horses (shark deaths are more salient)
Availability heuristic
Judge frequency or probability of events by how easy it is to think of examples (memory accessibility)
Representative heuristic
Categorise based on similarity between instance and prototypical category members
Allocate a set of attributes
E.g. may judge new outbreak of a disease compared to covid because its familiar and in that category
Anchoring and adjustment heuristic
Make a judgement based on a starting point (or initial standard) influences subsequent judgements, even if its an arbitrary starting point
