Lecture 5. Social Cognition Part 2

Question 1

What helps encoding? What did Hamilton et al’s experiment show about this?

Answer 1

When you make a person invoke a concept or schema of a person. When you are asked to form an impression of a person, you remember more about that person.

Question 2

What did Asch show about the trait list paradigm?

Answer 2

When presented with a list of a stranger’s traits, people will attempt to unify traits in order to form an impression.

Question 3

What is an impression?

Answer 3

Coherent schema

Question 4

What is the primacy effect?

Answer 4

Earlier presented information determines the impression

Question 5

How do impressions persist through time?

Answer 5

Data that led to conclusion gets lost, but overall impressions persist

Question 6

What was the online vs. memory based impression making experiment?

Answer 6

Online Ps were tasked to update their impressions as they read about a person. While the other condition was Ps were forming an impression after they read the entire bio (refrain from forming an impression throughout). The results showed that in the first condition, locked into their first impression while the Ps in the memory-based conditioned Ps formed an impression that correlated with the traits that they remembered most saliently.

Question 7

How do people process types of information (neutral, consistent, inconsistent behaviour)

Answer 7

Participants have the worst memory for neutral behavior and best memory for inconsistent behavior, with consistent information landing somewhere in between.

Question 8

Why do we remember inconsistent information better? (2) What is this called?

Answer 8

1. Novelty is more salient
2. We perform extra cognitive work to process the incongruent info so we remember it better

Incongruency effect

Question 9

When does the incongruency effect dominate?

Answer 9

1. When people are motivated to form an “accurate” impression not a “good enough” one
2. When people believe that traits are incremental and malleable (incremental theory) vs entity theory (traits are fixed).

Question 10

What kind of information would people who are entity theorists have most memory for?

Answer 10

Consistent information

Question 11

What did the familiarity study by Stanger and Ruble show?

Answer 11

It showed that when people are more familiar with a group (pre-exposure), they will show more of a congruency effect. Showed in experiment that the group of Ps that saw a presentation containing 30 behaviors performed by one of the frats before they saw a presentation of 60 behaviors by both frats (30 each) showed a stronger congruency effect (recalled the congruent information).

Question 12

What are unconscious inferences?

Answer 12

Built in assumptions that fill in gaps in our knowledge. It corrects information that is coming in through our senses.

Question 13

According to attribution theory, when people act they are demonstrating ____________________

Answer 13

some inner psychological characteristics

Question 14

What is attribution?

Answer 14

what we do when we extract dispositions from behaviour, an additional step which adds a “because” whether it’s because of internal or external factors

Question 15

What is behavior guided by? (2)

Answer 15

1. Capacity

2. Motivation

Question 16

What is capacity?

Answer 16

ability of doing a behavior + a favorable environment

Question 17

What is motivation?

Answer 17

strategy (right technique) and effort (lack of effort = no go)

Question 18

The equation for a behavior is best captured by:

Answer 18

ability + environment + strategy + effort (missing one = attribution)

Question 19

What is the correspondent inference theory? When do we tend to make these inference?

Answer 19

The correspondent inference is when we judge that a person’s personality matches their behavior. Since novel and unusual behavior is more salient, it is when we are more likely to make a correspondent inference.

Question 20

What are the two types of attributions we make?

Answer 20

1. External attribution

2. Internal attribution

Question 21

What three factors govern our attribution? Modelled after Harold Kelly’s Covariation Model.

Answer 21

1. Consistency (does this person usually behave this way in this situation? why?)
2. Distinctiveness (does this person behave differently in this situation than in others?)
3. Consensus: (do others behave similarly in this situation?)

Question 22

What is the discounting principle?

Answer 22

When behavior covaries with another cause, observer has less confidence in either explanation.

Question 23

What is the augmentation principle?

Answer 23

When behavior covaries with a situational factor that increases confidence in a cause (e.g., despite being sick, she got a really high mark, she must be smart)

Question 24

What is the basic operating sequence of attribution? (4)

Answer 24

1. Identify the behavior
2. Attach intentionality to the actor
3. Disambiguate the behavior using (construct accessibility and unconscious inferences)
4. Attribution of dispositions.

Question 25

Why are we so quick to make trait attribution? What helps alleviate this?

Answer 25

We are social creatures, and so the person is always more salient than the environment. Anchoring and adjustment heuristic help, but insufficient because situational discounting is inadequate.

Question 26

What did Trope say affected attribution? (2)

Answer 26

1. Actor’s prior actions (prior behavior affects both identification and attribution in the same way)
2. The current situation (affects identification and attribution in opposite ways aka situational discounting)

Question 27

What kind of behavior would envoke the augmentation principle?

Answer 27

Extremely novel behavior!

Question 28

What did Tulving and Thompson discover in their encoding specificity experiment?

Answer 28

Items or events encoded together can serve as retrieval cues for each other.

For example, if given a list of different people exhibiting different behaviors, a later recall test where the experimenters gave a semantic OR a trait cue would get Ps to recall the part of the sentence that related to a person or the part of the sentence that related to a behavior respectively. This is happening outside of our awareness.

Question 29

What are situational corrections?

Answer 29

When we undo automatic trait attributions, we can do these more effectively when we don’t have a lot of cognitive load.

Question 30

What are the three steps in the multistage model?

Answer 30

1. Automatic Behaviour Identification
2. Automatic Dispositional “Characterization”
3. Controlled Situational Correction (modulated by cognitive load)

Question 31

What experiment showed the effect of cognitive load on situational correction?

Answer 31

Ps saw silent video of woman acting anxiously (biting lip, etc)
½ told that she’s talking about an anxious topic
½ told that she’s talking about a relaxing topic
½ put under cognitive load (memorize a #); ½ not under cognitive load
DV: how anxious of a person is she?
Results: Low cognitive load people perform situational correction when told that she’s talking about a sensitive topic (discounting) and when it’s a relaxing topic (augmenting). High cognitive load, people rated her more anxious in both situations, failing to make situational corrections.

Question 32

What is the fundamental attribution error?

Answer 32

Tendency to overestimate the role of dispositional causes and underestimate the role of situational causes in explaining an actor’s behaviour

Question 33

What was Jones and Harris’s famous Castro experiment that showed fundamental attribution error?

Answer 33

Participants read an essay that was either pro-Castro or anti-Castro, half of the Ps told that student had freely chosen to write the essay, half were told that person had been assigned to the position
Ps asked to estimate writer’s true attitude about Castro (higher # more pro castro)
Even when told that the topic was assigned, Ps said that the student writer was Pro-Castro. If people were truly taking account the situation, there wouldn’t be a huge difference between Pro-Castro vs Anti-Castro in the assigned case
We don’t know anything about this person.

Question 34

What did Schachter and Singer suggest about the cognitive element of attribution?

Answer 34

People are uncertain about how they feel in a particular situation (ambiguous) and so make a cognitive judgement based on their environment.

Question 35

Explain two experiments where people mis(attributed) some physiological event to emotion?

Answer 35

1. Ps injected with a drug and not told what the drug does deferred to what emotions a confederate was feeling to guide their own emotions (attributed their psychiological state to either anger or euphoria)
2. Capilano Suspension bridge and flirting. (you know this one)

Question 36

What effect does culture have on the fundamental attribution error? List three experiments.

Answer 36

Much stronger in North America and Europe than the rest of the world, because they are more likely to attribute things to dispositional factors rather than situational factors

1. Miller - Indian/American read scenarios and give attribution
2. Morris and Peng - American/Chinese newspapers
3. Choi and Nisbett: replicated Castro assignment between American and Korean subjects (found that Americans and Koreans lacked situational discounting, but when the situational information was make more salient/described better, Koreans did significantly more situational discounting than Americans.

Question 37

What did the cross-cultural replication of the anxious woman study show?

Answer 37

Chinese Ps demonstrated lots of situational correction regardless whether they were in the high or low cognitive load. It was almost second-nature to apply situational discounting.

Question 38

What was the bi-cultural priming experiment.

Answer 38

Ps randomly assigned to be primed with either US symbols or China symbols via screensaver (either Statue of Liberty, Great Wall of China or other symbols)
All participants asked to explain various scenarios (e.g., why a child misbehaved in a class). Found that depending on what they were primed with, the Ps showed more or less situational discounting.