Slide Session 2 Flashcards
What is social cognition?
- The manner in which we interpret, analyse, remember, and use information about the social world.
- How we think about the social world, our attempts to understand it, and ourselves, and our place in it.
- It includes automatic thinking that requires little or no effort and can be very efficient, lead to satisfactory judgements, but also lead to important errors in the conclusions drawn.
- It includes controlled processing when something unexpected happens which triggers careful, effortful thought.
What are Heuristics ? What different types do you know?
- Simple rules for making complex decisions or drawing inferences in a rapid manner and seemingly effortless manner.
- Information overload are instances where our ability to process information is exceeded (demands on cognitive system are greater than its capacity).
- Techniques used to deal with large amounts of information in conditions of uncertainty (correct answer is difficult to know/ requires great deal of effort to determine) often include heuristics.
Types are:
– 1.representativeness,
2. vailability,
3. anchoring and adjustment
4. Status Quo
Example for Representative Heuristic
e.g. Developed protoypes- To evaluate people. At the airport and we notice someone in Muslim traditional wear, we might assume that there is a possibility of danger but not based on frequency facts
Example for Availability Heuristic
e.g. If I can remember something or if I can remember something a lot then its valid or true. It’s personal recall not always based on facts –Motorbike safety based on experiences or belief
Example for Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic
e.g. Assumption that all doctors are men, are based on the anchor of previous information processed and then we adjust our cognition or behavior accordingly.
Example for Status Quo Heuristic
e.g. Products presented Neutrally but people tend to select the most common product or trend (Social context and Habit), Apartheid System.
Sometimes the Status Quo is safer e.g peer pressure
What are schemas?
What is their relationship to heuristics?
- Schemas are mental frameworks developed through experience that once formed help us to organise and make sense of social information.
- They have a powerful effect on what we notice (attention), enter into memory (encoding) and later remember (retrieval).
- They are often primed (activated by experiences, events or stimuli) and persevere (remain unchanged even when confronted by contradiction) until they are expressed in thought and behaviour.
- When this happens, unpriming occurs and the effects decrease. Metaphors can also shape how we perceive and respond to the social world.
What are the basic processes of schemas
Attention, encoding and retrieval
Attention refers to what information we notice.
Encoding refers to the processes through which information we notice gets stored in memory.
Finally, retrieval refers to the processes through which we recover information from memory in order to use it in some manner—for example, in making judg- ments about other people.
Which Schemas Guide Our Thought?
A) One answer involves the strength of various schemas: the stronger and better-developed schemas are, the more likely they are to influence our thinking, and especially our memory for social information
B) Second, schemas can be temporarily activated by what is known as priming— recent experiences make some schemas active, and as a result, they exert effects on our current thinking (e.g. violent movie)
Social psychologists describe unpriming as a process by which thoughts or actions that have been primed by a recent experience dissipates once it finds expression.
- once primed schemas are somehow expressed, unpriming occurs, and the influence of the primed schemas disappears.
- If primed schemas are not expressed, however, their effects may persist for long periods of time
Which do we remember better—information consistent or inconsistent with our schemas?
Depends on the memory measure employed. In general, people report information consistent with their schemas, but information inconsistent with schemas may be strongly present in memory, too.
Why Do Even Discredited Schemas Can Sometimes Influence Our Thought and Behavior?
- By influencing what we notice, enter into memory, and later remember, schemas can produce distortions in our understanding of the social world.
- Unfortunately, schemas are often resistant to change—they show a strong perseverance effect, remaining unchanged even in the face of contradictory information
- Perhaps even worse, schemas can sometimes be self-fulfilling: They influence our responses to the social world in ways that make it consistent with the schema!
- schemas can be a two-edged sword: They can help us make sense of the social world and process information efficiently, but they can also lock us into acting in ways that create the world that we expect, which was shown in an experiment in which teachers’ beliefs about the students had operated in a self-fulfilling manner: The students whose teachers believed they would “bloom,” actually did.
Name and describe potential errors in social cognition
- optimistic bias (Our predisposition to expect things to turn out well overall) which
a) overconfidence barrier (The tendency to have more confidence in the accuracy of our own judgments than is reasonable)
b) planning fallacy (The tendency to make optimistic predictions concerning how long a given task will take for completion) - Counterfactual Thinking (Thought Suppression; The tendency to imagine other outcomes in a situation than the ones that actually occurred (“What might have been”)
- Magical thinking (Thinking involving assumptions that don’t hold up to rational scrutiny— for example, the belief that things that resemble one another share fundamental properties), which is a form of
- Terror management: Our efforts to come to terms with certainty of our own death and its unsettling implications.
Law of similarities
suggests that things that resemble one another share basic properties,
How does Affect influence Cognition? (a-f)
a) Affect impacts our reactions to new stimuli (Thesis examiner in a good mood would probably give a better examination result),
b) Affect also impacts memory (Mood congruence effect (current mood acts like a filter)-positive mood = storing positive information = remembering positive information, AND VICE VERSA),
c) Affect influences what specific information is retrieved from memory - (Mood dependent memory - current mood acts as a cue = memories retrieved that were experienced in a similar mood.
d) Happy moods increase creativity,
e) Positive affect (good mood) triggers heuristic cognition (rules applied from past knowledge) allowing us to make quick decisions HOWEVER, it’s not helpful when the we are processing new tasks,
f) Affect influences our interpretation of the motives behind the behaviours of others. If in a good mood, we tend to attribute positive motives to others behaviour and vice versa.
How does Cognition influence Affect?
A) two-factor theory of emotion (Schachter, 1964).
This theory suggests that often, we don’t know our own feelings or attitudes directly. Rather, since these internal reactions are often somewhat ambiguous, we conclude their nature from the external world—from the kinds of situations in which we experience these reactions. For example, if we experience increased arousal in the presence of an attractive person, we may conclude that we are in love
B) A second way in which cognition can influence emotions is by activating schemas containing a strong affective component.
For example, if we categorize an individual as belonging to a group different than our own, we may experience a different emotional response (e.g. less empathy for them when we see them injecting a needle) than if we categorized that same individual as a member of our own group.
