Social Cognition Flashcards
social cognition
- how people think about themselves and social world
- how they select, interpret, remember and use social information
- purpose is to make judgments and decision
- includes automatic and controlled thinking processes
automatic thinking
- generally unconscious, unintentional, involuntary, effortless
- helps understand new situations by relating them to prior experiences
- relies on schemas
schemas
- mental structures used to organize knowledge about social world
- influence info we notice, think about and remember
schema functions
- help create continuity + relate new experiences to past
- helps to know what to do in confusing/ambiguous situation
- organize + fill gaps of knowledge
schemas: Jean Piaget
- suggested we construct schemas from young age to:
- better understand world
- make world more predictable as we develop cognitively - formation, manipulation, management of schemas components
- assimilation
- accomodation
schemas: assimilation
integration of new info into existing schemas
schemas: accommodation
alteration of existing schemas to adapt new info
schemas: Frederic Bartlett
- argued memories = reconstructions
- each reconstruction = affected by past experiences and viewpoints
schemas: reconstruction of memories are impacted by ____
- selectivity of information
- rationalization of details
- cultural factors related to interpretation of the event
accessibility of schemas
extent to which schemas/concepts are likely to be used when making judgments
schemas can be accessible because ____
- due to past experience
- because they are related to a current goal
- due to priming
schemas and priming
where a recent experience increases likelihood that a particular scheme will be accessed
priming
exposure to stimulus subconsciously alters way we feel, behave and think
embodied cognition
- other form of priming
- bodily sensations activate mental structures, such as schemas
self-fulfilling prophecy
- people make their schemas come true by how they treat others
- Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) academic performance experiment
heuristics
- use mental shortcuts - judgmental heuristics
- to make judgments quickly/effectively
- do not always lead to accurate conclusions
- usually quite useful
types of heuristics
- availability heuristics
- representativeness heuristics
- base rate information
between contradictory representativeness and base rate, people tend to rely on representativeness
availability heuristic
- mental rule of thumb
- people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind
representativeness heuristic
- mental shortcut
- 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
hot cognition
mental processes that are influenced by desires and feelings
making predictions
affective forecasting can have issues
- impact bias
- durability bias
impact bias
- way things will be impacted
- not able to predict as well as we think we can
durability bias
bad at predicting how long these feelings will last
influence of culture on schemas
pay most attention to/remember information that is important to our culture
influence of culture on schemas: North American and Eurocentric thinking styles (powerpoint, slide 42)
- analytic thinking style
- don’t think of context
- focus on properties of people and objects
influence of culture on schemas: East Asian thinking styles (powerpoint, slide 42)
- holistic
- focus on whole picture + surrounding context
controlled thinking
- thinking = conscious, intentional, voluntary, effortful
- requires mental energy
- provides checks and balances for automatic thinking
- can only think in a controlled conscious way about 1 thing at a time
counterfactual thinking
- mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been (if only…)
- usually conscious and effortful
- not always voluntary and intentional
upward counterfactual thinking
focusing on hypotheticals on how a situation could have been better
downward counterfactual thinking
focusing on hypotheticals on how a situation could have been worse
increase of counterfactual thinking
- more likely when they can easily imagine alternative to an event
- easier to imagine alternative = the more stress people feel
- people tend to feel more sympathy for others in near-miss situations
use of counterfactual thinking
- if it focuses people’s attention on ways that they can cope better in the future
- if it motivates them to take steps to prevent similar outcomes from occurring in the future
overconfidence barrier
arises when people have too much confidence in the accuracy of their judgments
limiting overconfidence barrier
- ask people to consider other points of view than their own
- teach people basic statistical and methodological principles
