Lecture 6 - Social cognition and social perception Flashcards
Social cognition
The ways in which people think about and make sense of other people, themselves, and social situations
- Involves cognitive processing
Adaptive unconscious
Mental processes that are inaccessible to consciousness but that influence judgments, feelings, or behavior
Implication of adaptive unconscious
Consciously, we may have little or not direct introspection for our thoughts, feelings, or motivations
Mental control
The ability to control one’s own thoughts
Two Processes of Mental Control
- Monitoring process
2. Operating process
Monitoring process
Process of mental control
- An automatic process
- Searches for failures of mental control
Operating process
Process of mental control
- A conscious process
- When mental control fails, the operating process provides replacement thoughts (distractors)
Ironic effects of mental control
- The automatic monitoring process increases the accessibility of the unwanted thoughts
- If the controlled operating process fails, the result Is an increase in the unwanted thoughts
The conscious, effortful operating process may fail if:
- heavy mental load (cognitively taxed)
- tired
- distracted
- Anytime you are not motivated or able to engage the operating process
Chameleon Effect
The tendency to unconsciously mimic the behavior of an interaction partner
Adaptive aspects of the chameleon effect
When others mimic your behaviors, you:
- Think that the interaction went smoothly
- Like the interaction partner
Ideomotor Action
“Thinking” about a behavior increases the likelihood of that behavior occurring
When is behavior automatically influenced by the context?
- The automatically activated behavior is applicable to the situation
- Effort is not made to consciously override that automatic influences
Impression formation
Process by which a person integrates various sources of information of others into an overall judgment
People tend to weigh information more heavily if it:
- Is learned first (The Primacy Effect)
- Is negative
- Describes unusual or extreme characteristics
Expectations of a group or person influence:
o Attention – what we attend to
o Memory
o Information processing
o Behavior
How do schemas infl our interaction w the social world?
- Confirmation Bias – Look for info that confirms that schema
- Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
- Primacy Effect
Confirmation bias
The tendency to search for only expectancy-consistent information
Belief perseverance
We act towards others in a manner that is consistent with what we already believe
Causal attributions
The process by which people use information to make inferences about the causes of behaviors or events
Heider’s (1958) Theory of Attribution
People act like “naïve scientists” in their attempt to explain behaviors or events
- Two types
Types of attributions
- Internal (personal)
2. External (Situational)
Internal attribution
Personal
- An attribution that assigns the cause of behavior to an internal characteristic of a person
External attribution
Situational
- An attribution that assigns the cause of behavior to a situation or event external to a person
Jones’s Correspondence Inference Theory
When observing an actor perform a single behavior, people try to determine if the behavior corresponds to a stable personal characteristic of the actor
People are likely to make a correspondent (dispositional) inference if the behavior:
o Is perceived to be freely chosen
o Is socially undesirable
o Results in unique (non-common) effects
Discounting and Augmentation applies to situations in which
a person views an individual perform one behavior in one situation
Discounting principle
- If there are multiple explanations for a behavior, each explanation is discounted
- An adjustment away from a dispositional attribution
Augmentation principle
- If a behavior occurs despite the presence of inhibitory factors, the explanation for that behavior is augmented
- An adjustment toward an even more dispositional attribution
Kelley’s (1971) Covariation Model
For something to be the cause of behavior:
- It must be present when the behavior occurs
- It must not be present when the behavior does not occur
Kelley’s covariation model - When people make an attribution, they look for three kinds of information
- Consensus info
- Consistency info
- Distinctiveness info
Consensus info
- How would most people act in the situation?
- Less likely to make a dispositional attribution
Consistency info
- How does the person act in the same situation, but at another time?
- More likely to ascribe that to some form of disposition
Distinctiveness info
How does the person act in other situations?
Attribution biases
Theories of attribution assume that people logically, rationally evaluate information to make an attribution - but # of biases
Correspondence bias
The tendency to attribute behavior of others to internal causes rather than to external causes (“Fundamental Attribution Error”)
Explanation for correspondence bias
- Perceptual Salience
- People stand out more as causes of events than situations - Dispositional inferences can be comforting
- “Just-World Hypothesis”
Actor-observer bias
People tend to attribute their own behavior to external causes
But tend to attribute others’ behavior to internal causes bc of perceptual salience
Self-serving bias
People tend to attribute positive events to internal causes and negative events to external causes
- bc enhances and protects self-esteem
Counterfactual thinking
The tendency to evaluate events based on what could have happened
Factors affecting counterfactual thinking
Any factor that makes it easier to imagine an event not happening will lead to larger effect of counterfactual thinking
Counterfactual thinking - what could have happened affects:
o Attributions
o Emotional Reactions
o Regret
Positive psychology
Area of psychology that focuses on what makes people happy and how optimism and happiness affect how people think and act
Cognitive heuristics
Area of psychology that focuses on what makes people happy and how optimism and happiness affect how people think and act
Representative heuristic
Instances that resemble stereotyped expectations are judged to be likely
Availability heuristic
How easily you can mentally draw images of something will influence how you in turn judge it
- How easy it is to think of examples of the event
Causes of the availability heuristic
o Content of recalled information
o Ease of recalling information
Anchoring and adjustment heuristic
- People begin with a rough estimation as the starting point fr a judgment (an anchor)
- People then adjust the estimate based on the characteristics of the situation
False consensus effect
The tendency to overestimate the extent to which others agree with us
