Social Cognition Flashcards
Origins of Mental Reasoning
Do we think about people in the same way that we think about inanimate objects?
No we don’t think inanimate objects as same to people as objects are mindless.
Origins of Mental Reasoning
Theory of Mind
(image + notes)
Origins of Mental Reasoning
Social cognition
some arugue that a** mental conception of people** is an innate aspect of human psychology (like language)
* uniquely human
* present in fants before they can understand language
* genetically based
Origins of Mental Reasoning
Origins of Social Cognition
Chimp researchers Povinelli and Eddy (1996) wondered whether mental understandings are unique to humans.
* trained 4-5 year old chimps to beg food from only one of two people (one who had food)
* Tested whether they would beg for food only from people who could see them. In each trial, one person could see the chimp, whereas the other either had her back turned, was blindfolded, covered her eyes with her hands, had a bucket on her head, or eyes closed, or looking up in air.
* Only when experimenter had her back turned did the chimp quit begging
* In contrast, 3 year olds never gestured to people with buckets on their head
Origins of Mental Reasoning
Infant “Thoery of Mind”
(pair with notes)
* Just because infants code goals doesn’t mean they understnad mental states
* it’s possible they ahve a behaviorist interpretation of the goal directed behavior (like how you think about zombies)
Origins of Mental Reasoning
Development of Social Cognition
- Evidence suggesting infants don’t see people as being like zombies
- 5 month olds see the difference between happy and sad expressions, and between happy and angry expressions.
- 5 month olds also expect happy faces to make happy sounds, angry faces to make angry sound, sad faces to make sad sounds, and they react accordingly
Origins of Mental Reasoning
Development of Social Cognition (empathy)
Empathy
* requires understanding another’s emotion
* evidence of it early in development
* but young children are often poor at anticipating others’ distress
Origins of Mental Reasoning
Does empathy guide behavior?
(Development of Social Cognition)
- Babies do have empathy but not at right time and case
- By 2-3 yrs old, children typically understand “desires”
- But they don’t appear to represent otherss “beliefs” until age 4
Origins of Mental Reasoning
Do young children understand false belief?
(Look at notes)
Origins of Mental Reasoning
Flase picture task
Development of social cognition
(Pair with notes)
* Picture of apple taken
* apple is replaced by banna
* which object is in the pic?
This suggests certain generalization… (organ for social cognition)
Origins of Mental Reasoning
Organ for Social cognition (1) ?
Development of social cognition
Hypothesis: False belief and false pciture reasoning depends on distinct neural mechanism
* Flase belief mech. that is impaired in autists and young children but not older children
* False pic mech is spared in all
Origins of Mental Reasoning
Organ for social cognition support
(Sabbagh & Taylor (2000))
- Gave normal young children a false pci and a flase belief task and examined the areas of the brian that were activated
(Pair with notes)
Origins of Mental Reasoning
Summary for Origins
- By 4 years of age, typically developing human children have a unique, mentalistic way of thinking about other people.
- human beings ,in this view, are not like zombies and billiard balls– humans act according to their desires and beliefs about the world.
Attributional Logic (& Illogic)
What are attributions?
Attributions are claims about the cause of someone’s behavior
Attributional Logic (& Illogic)
Person Vs. Situation Attributions
(Pair with notes)
Have to decide whether behavior is due to personality or situation.
(Kelley’s Attributional Logic)
* Does this person regularly behave this way in this situation?
* Does others regularly behave this way in this siutation?
* Does this person behave this way in many other situations?
Attributional Logic (& Illogic)
6 influences on social cognition
- person bias
- visual perspective
- insufficient prior info
- personal appearance
- pre-existing attitudes
- stereotypes
Attributional Logic (& Illogic)
1 Person bias
- People give too much weight to personality and not enough to situational variables
- Person bias aka fundamental attribution error
- Conditions promoting person bias
-when task has goal of asssessment of personality - when person is cognitively loaded
- Conditions promoting a situation bias
-when goal is to judge the situation
Two stage Model of Attributions
(Pair with notes)
1. First stage is rapid & automatic
* bias according to goal (person/situation)
2. slower & controlled
* won’t occur if cognitively loaded
* we correct our automatic attribution
Cross cultural differences
person bias
(notes + data)
Western culture
* people are in charge of own destinies
* more attributions to personality
Some eastern cultures
* fate in charge of destiny
* more attributions to situations
Attributional Logic (& Illogic)
2 Visual Perspective
- Attribute personality causes of behavior when evaluating someone else’s behavior
- attribute situational when evaluating our own behavior
- Why?
- Self knowledge hypothesis:
-we know our behavior changes from situation to situation, but we don’t knwo this about others - Visual orientation hypothesis:
-When we see others persom an action, we concentrate on actor, not situation- when we persom an action, we see environment, not person.
Storms (1973)
visual perspective
Storms
* Group A watched themselves on tape
* Group B watched a film from another’s perspective
* Trait attributions, A> B; situation attributions, B> A
* Support for visual orientation hypothesis
Attributional Logic (& Illogic)
3 Effects of Prior Information
Mental Representations of people (schemas) can effect our interpretation of them
* Kelley’s Study:
* students had a guest speaker
* before the speaker came, half got a written bio saying speaker was very warm while other half was rather cold
* very warm group rated guest more positively than rather cold group
