Social Cognition Flashcards
Define Social Cognition
Social Cognition refers to “how people think about the social world and in particular how people select, interpret and use information to make judgements about the world” (Sanderson & Safdar, 2012).
Four Core Processes of Social Cognition
- Attention – the process of consciously focusing on features of the environment or oneself. Attention is limited, and different people may focus on different features of the same situation.
- Interpretation – the process through which we give meaning to the events we experience. Many social situations can be interpreted in more than one way.
- Judgment – the process of using information to form impressions and make decisions. Because we often have limited information, many social judgments are “best guesses.”
- Memory – storing and retrieving information for future use. Memory can influence our decisions by affecting what we pay attention to, and how we interpret it.
Schemas
We use shortcuts such as schemas (mental frameworks) and heuristics (simple rules) in social cognition.
Schemas are mental frameworks centering on a specific theme that help organize, interpret and process social information.
Schemas are formed on the basis of experience and shaped by culture.The way a schema is primed affects our attention and processing. Schemas help us to make sense of a complex social world and encounter a new social situation. Schemas can result in inaccurate processing of information.
Types of Schemas
- Situations - Describe the typical sequence of events in common situations.
- People - Expectations about people’s behaviour based on personality traits.
- Occupations - Information about how occupational roles are performed.
- Social roles - Role/ behaviour expectations of persons occupying a certain role.
- Social groups - Collection of beliefs about the characteristics of a social group.
Impact of Schemas
Schemas influence:
* Attention (what we notice)
* Encoding (what we store in memory)
* Retrieval (what we recover)
Priming
Priming occurs when stimuli or events increase the availability in memory or consciousness of specific types of information held in memory. Recent experiences, make some schemas more active than what would otherwise be. Eg. Hearing the word bread makes us think of butter.
Priming occurs when stimuli or experience causes a schema to be triggered so that it will affect your interpretation of a new schema.
Disadvantages of Schemas
- Produces distortions in our understanding of the social world (basis for creation of stereotypes)
- Resistant to change and show a perseverance effect: tendency for beliefs to remain unchanged even in the face of contradictory information.
- Self-fulfilling effect refers to the way schemas influence our responses to the social world in ways that make our expectations come true, consistent with the schemas.
Modes of social thought
- Automatic processing: seemingly effortless, involves amygdala
- Controlled processing: effortful, involves prefrontal cortex
Automatic Processing and Automatic Social Behaviour
- After extensive experience with a task or type of information, schemas are so well learnt that we reach the stage where we can process the information in a seemingly effortless, automatic, and unconscious manner.
- Sometimes automatic processing may be superior to careful, conscious thought in terms of making excellent decisions (Dijksterhuis & van Olden, 2006). Having too many choices can be paralysing and encourages dissatisfaction with the choices we do make. When the best alternative for most people is strategically placed so people who are automatically processing are more likely to select that option, it can improve decision making and satisfaction with the outcomes.
Heuristics
Simple rules for making complex decisions or drawing inferences in a rapid, seemingly effortless manner.
We use them when:
- Information overload - instances in which our ability to process information is exceeded.
- Conditions of uncertainty - when the “right” answer is difficult to determine.
- We need to make decisions or inferences quickly
Types of Heuristics
- Representativeness: judging the likelihood of an event or the classification of a person or object based on how closely it matches (or represents) a particular prototype/stereotype.
○ The more similar an individual is to typical members of a given group, the more likely she or he belongs to that group.
○ Decisions or judgments made on the basis of this rule tend to ignore base rates, i.e., the frequency with which given events or categories occur in the total population.
○ Eg. Classification of all quiet women who read and wear glasses are librarians - Availability: If something can be recalled, it must be important or at least more important than the alternative. Eg. Plane crashes
- Anchoring and Adjustment: begin with an anchor or a starting point and adjusting from there. Eg. Sample size (we eat more when presented with a larger portion).
- Status quo: preference to keep things same or maintain previous decision. Eg. Doing things your own way despite there being better alternatives.
Sources of Error in Social Cognition
-
Negativity bias: tendency to pay extra attention to negative information.
- People show greater sensitivity to negative information than to positive information.
- Negative information reflects features of the external world that may threaten safety and
well-being.
- Bias may be explained by evolutionary factors
2.** Optimistic bias**: tendency to see the world through rose-colored glasses.
- Predisposition to overlook risks and expect most things to turn out well. -
Overconfidence barrier: tendency to have more confidence in the accuracy of our own judgments
than is reasonable. -
Planning fallacy: tendency to believe that we can get more done in a given period of time than we
actually can. -
Counterfactual thinking: tendency to imagine alternative outcomes in a situation other than the
ones that actually occurred. Often used to mitigate the bitterness of disappointments. -
Thought suppression: efforts to prevent certain thoughts from entering consciousness which
leads to a paradoxical effect, where the suppressed thought becomes more salient and occurs more
frequently. -
Magical thinking: thinking that is based on irrational assumptions, but feels compelling
nonetheless.
The Influence of Affect on Cognition
Affect and Cognition
- Moods influence perception (happiness makes us see things in a better light and vice versa)
- Mood influences decisions making (if you’re nervous you will engage in more cautious decision making- heuristic or systematic processing)
○ When we’re in a good mood we engage in heuristic processing - Mood affects encoding (mood congruent effects) and retrieval (mood dependent memory) of memory
○ Happy moods helps us to remember things better
○ We are also able to remember what happened/ what we learnt when we were in a particular mood
- Mood influences decisions making (if you’re nervous you will engage in more cautious decision making- heuristic or systematic processing)
Influence of Cognition on Affect
Affect and cognition
- Perception > physical arousal > emotion
- Schemas influence mood via perception or expectations
- Affective forecasting- we use cognition to make predictions about how we feel (this is grossly inaccurate because we are using cognitive system to predict but when we feel the emotion we are using the affect system)
- Thinking affects emotions such as rumination and worry (If we continuously think of something our negative emotion will heighten).
- Attention can change emotion
Social Neuroscience Evidence for Two Separate Systems
Neuroscience techniques show evidence that there are two distinct systems for processing
social information in the human brain (Cohen, 2005):
1. Logical thought - forward thinking, accepting of delays
2. Affect or emotion - impulsive, prefers immediate rewards
* These two systems although distinct, interact in many ways during problem solving, decision
making and other important forms of cognition.
