Social Cognition Flashcards
Lectures 7, 8, and 9
social cognition
- How we process social beings and social interactions
- How this differs from other things
- How human behavior involves mental state and is unique to how we think about people
theory of mind
the ability to think about mental states in ourselves and others; understanding that mental states influence behavior
theory of mind: critical aspects
must understand that:
○ People have mental states
○ Other people have mental states that are diff from our own
○ Mental states guide behavior (regardless of if those mental states are accurate)
§ They don’t need to be accurate to guide our behavior
False Belief: Sally-Anne Task
- Sally and Anne are friends! Sally has a basket and Anne has a box
- Sally puts her marble in her basket and walks away
- Anne takes the marble out of the basket and puts it in her box
- When Sally comes back, where will she look for her marble?
Children who don’t understand theory of mind assume that Sally will look for the marble in Anne’s box
False Belief: Smarties task
- A child will be presented with a box with a “Smarties” on the outside
- When they open the box, something that is not Smarties (maybe pencils) will be inside
- When asking children what their friends will think is in the box, they will think it’s pencils
theory of mind: age results
- children under 4 “fail” on traditional false belief tasks (no more than 25% 3 y/o in most countries were passing this test)
- children 4-5+ “pass” traditional false belief tasks
- Finding seems to be consistent across societies and cultures
- Developmental trend is strikingly consistent
theory of mind: controversy
what explains this development in theory of mind?
- Led to high debate of what explains this development to the false beliefs task
theory of mind development
changes in conceptual abilities to reason about mental states; children are changing the concept of other people’s minds and mental concepts
- “Theory” theory
- Modular theory
“Theory” theory
change in ways of thinking about mental states
- As kids develop, they change up their theories of theory of mind/mental state
§ What shifts is their intuition and move away from naive theories of mind
@ age 2: kids have theories that people have desires and desires guide behavior
@ age 3: kids shift their theories and change it up to now think that people have desires AND people have beliefs
@ age 4: kids shift their theories that people can have false beliefs
○ The qualitative shifts about people’s mental states
Modular theory
brain maturation
- all of us have an innate module for thinking about mental states
- What changes from 3 and 5 is brain maturation
- Good evidence that particular areas of the brain that are activated when we do this kind of thinking
○ areas become increasingly advanced and activated
○ allows us to conceptualize mental states and false beliefs
theory of mind development: changes in proccessing?
- younger children not able to pass false-belief tasks because they have difficulty with the processing demands of the task
- tasks too hard?
what’s required for Sally-Anne task (theory of mind development)
- Be able to speak
- Hold several concepts at the same time
- Memory capabilities
- Demands of keeping track of multiple things at the same time
- Prediction: need to be able to predict into the future, not just react to something
false belief: recent findings
Kids show the ability to reason about false beliefs earlier in development
- When we eliminate the difficulties of the Sally & Anne task, can children pass the test?
Broccoli and Goldfish experiment (theory of mind)
Most kids go for goldfish
Then: researcher will either say, “mmm, I love goldfish” and “bleh! I hate broccoli!”
○ Mismatch condition “bleh! I hate goldfish” and “mmm, I love broccoli!”
@ 14 months: babies will always share goldfish
@ 18 months: they’ll share what the researcher likes
○ Seem to understand that babies have different mental states from them
○ People can have mental states that are incorrect/inaccurate from their reality
theory of mind in infancy
longer looking times in True Belief and False Belief condition (i.e. putting objects in boxes and moving them)
- When adults do a surprising action, children look longer
theory of mind: task difficulty
- many studies show reasoning about mental states earlier in development
- some evidence infants can succeed in non-verbal false belief tasks
new Sally-Anne task (theory of mind)
- Instead of measuring a verbal response, looking time is measured
@ 15 to 18 months, they seem to respond accordingly
Controversy: is looking time an accurate measure of theory min
theory of mind development: executive function & inhibition?
- having to keep track of both reality and a person’s perception of reality
- having to inhibit your knowledge reality (curse of knowledge)
- an individual has to inhibit their own knowledge + answer from a 3rd party’s perspective
curse of knowledge
when we know something to be true, it’s hard to block that knowledge
- When we know something, it’s hard for us to override that and explain it in a way to those who don’t understand
- In regards to children: it may be difficult for children to eliminate the curse of knowledge
Sally-Anne task: outcome known vs. unknown condition
- When kids know where the ball is, they’re failing the test (curse of knowledge)
- When you eliminate the children’s knowledge, they pass the test
○ When the child doesn’t know where the ball is placed (i.e. they don’t know which box Anne placed the ball in), they will correctly answer and say that Sally will look where she initially placed the ball
Sally-Anne task: outcome known vs. unknown - age range
@ 3 y/o: most fail if outcome known; all succeed if outcome unknown
@ 4 y/o: almost all succeed if outcome known; all succeed if outcome unknown
@ 5 y/o: all succeed if outcome known; all succeed if outcome unknown
theory of mind: individual differences
- # of siblings
- pretend play
- parenting
- language
- autsim
theory of mind: siblings
kids who have more siblings tend to be better at theory of mind task
- More practice of thinking from other people’s perspective
theory of mind: pretend play
kids who engage in more pretend play do better at these tasks
○ When creating a world with other characters, you need to imagine things from different perspectives
○ You’re practicing stepping into other perspectives and minds
theory of mind: parenting
Children who have parents who talk more about emotion/mental states do better
theory of mind: language
kids who get more language exposure tend to do better
○ Esp kids who grow up bilingual
theory of mind: autism
often struggle with the classic theory of mind tasks
○ Neurotypical and down syndrome children will pass, but those with autism struggle much more
what does theory of mind do
- Why someone has done something
- To manipulate & decieve others
- Social capacity and communication
- Communication
Empathy
kids who score higher in theory of mind also score higher in:
- Prosocial skills: helping, sharing, cooperating
- Empathy
- Peer relationships
- Academic success
○ Better understanding in reading?
Building relationships?
theory of mind & lying
- lying starts to show up around age 2
–> shows major increases/maturity between ages 3-7 - proposed to be explained in part via theory of mind development
–> need to understand that you can create a false belief in another person
theory of mind & lying: other perspectives
Being better and more mature of thinking of other people’s perspectives
○ In order to successfully lie, you need to successfully create a false belief
○ People can have beliefs that are not true
theory of mind & lying: candy experiment - qusetion
does development of theory of mind cause developments in lying?
theory of mind & lying: candy experiment - initial experimental design
- Experimenter takes kid to play hide and seek game
- 2 cups: if you win this game 10 times, you’ll get a sticker! (incentivized to win)
- How to win: if they hide something and the experimenter doesn’t find it
- The child hides the candy
- Then: the experimenter asks the child where they hid the candy
○ They start to learn that if they lie, then they will win
most 3 year olds don’t do a lot of lying
theory of mind & lying: candy experiment - manipulation and control
Manipulation: give them theory of mind training
Control: training on conservation tasks
The question: if we give them back the deception/lying task, does it make them better/more inclined to lie?
theory of mind & lying: candy experiment - 2nd round after manipulation
the question: if we give them back the deception/lying task, does it make them better/more inclined to lie?
- children who received the training performed better on the theory of mind tasks
- tested again on whether children used deception –> 3 days after training, 4-10 days after training, 35 days after training
theory of mind & lying: candy experiment - finding
- Initially: nobody is lying
- 70% of the time: the children trained in theory of mind are lying
- When we increase the ability to lie/generate false beliefs, they lie more often
^ both on short and long term follow up
is lying good or bad? - debate
- This is a competition: when is it okay to lie? Are they just learning that in this task, it’s good to deceive?
- Being able to detect lies?
- Is lying bad? Is it a skill that’s helpful for social beings?
- Is lying necessary for safety
why humans categorize:
- in group and out group
○ Generate a sense of belonging
○ You know who your people and community are
○ A group that’s safer for you
○ Who’s like you - If we know who’s who, it allows us to better code switch/how to interact with them
- Children might readily reason into social groups
- How do kids reason about and think about race?
understanding of race: infants
prefer familiar race faces, respond to race as a perceptual category
understanding of race: 3 months
babies tend to look longer to their own race than to unfamiliar races
- When you show them the same racial face for a while and then a new one, they seem to notice a change
understanding of race: 3-4 years
can explicitly characterize race, reason about skin color as stable characteristic
- see skin color as something across development
understanding of race: uniform experiment
showing an adult with some type of uniform on, ask children “which one would be the adult as a child?”
○ Around 3-4 y/o: they’ll be able to determine it’s the same raced child, despite the uniform being different
understanding of race: switched at birth experiment
showing black parents with a white child and white parents with a black child
- ask the participant if the match is correct or incorrect
understanding of race: age 4
see skin color as something stable, regardless of the environment
- When they’re born with a certain skin color, it remains constant across development
- Remains constant to skin color, not necessarily seeing race as anything deeper than identify or culture
understanding of race: age 6-10
- Race as something as stable
- Race as something informative
understanding of race: later in development
start reasoning about race as a stable and informative feature of identity beyond appearance
understanding of race: 10 years old
Kids tend to think of race as something formative about their character
- Kids start to realize that if their race changed, they would be a different kind of person
- Stereotypes start to come up; race seen as formative
- Something internal to their race would be essentialist
- If you are black, you’re a certain type of person
understanding of race: children from marginalized groups
often deal with prejudice
- racial essentialism may be taught to you at an earlier age
explicit bias
direct, outward measures
- can be expressed directly
- aware of bias
- can deliberately access
- easily controlled
intergroup bias: in vs out group positivity
in dominant racial groups –> in-group positivity + out-group negativity
- declines with development
intergroup bias: self-reported bias
Younger children have greater positivity to their own racial group
How they test: show pictures of two kids, and ask “who would you like to be friends with?”
- @ 6: white six year olds play with the other white kids
- @ 10: a little bit less, but around ~80%; start to rate people of other groups more positively
- @ adulthood: less preferential but still likely to spend time with their racial group
Why do people become less positive about their own race compared to other races?
- Exposed to more people who are different from them in school
- Start to be more familiar with others
- Are they actually less biased, or do they know that there are acceptable and unacceptable answers
Historically: attributed it to decline of egocentrism
- They’re able to move out of their own perspective
Trend is seen across countries w/ their dominant racial group
Clark Doll Study
- showed Black children different dolls and asked them about their explicit preferences
- asked children hard questions about which doll was the nice doll, bad doll, pretty doll, ugly doll, etc.
Clark Doll Study: result
black children associated positive attributes (nice, pretty, kind, etc.) with white dolls and bad attributes (ugly, mean, etc.) with black dolls
intergroup bias: marginalized racial groups
- less in-group positivity
- increased in-group positivity with development
○ w/ black youth: children show a pro-black preference in childhood, but increases by the time they get to young adults
implicit bias
you can control these biases less
- beliefs, attitudes that are activated in response to social cues
- may have less awareness
- may be more difficult to control
implicit association test (IAT)
- measures the strength of association between concept (i.e. race) and attribute (evaluation, good vs. bad)
IAT: response time
faster response suggests a stronger association (ie between white + good)
IAT: finding results
- How implicit bias may change across life spans: NO DIFFERENCE
- does not change across development
○ Same magnitude across 6 year olds, 10 year olds, and adults - Most people consistently see white as better
THUS: do things really change? Or do we just get better at controlling or verbalizing our biases as we get older?
intergroup bias: dominant and non-dominant preferences
Dominant racial groups: prefer in-group
Non-dominant racial groups: no in-group nor out-group biases
- No preference either way; equal preference for in-group and out-group
attitudes about race: inputs
1) ingroup bias: a sense of belongingness/safety (“I like people like me”)
2) social norms; social/cultural evaluation of dominance; messages we get from society about diff races (“these are the messages I am getting from society about people like me and how we rank compared to others”)
attitudes about races: differences in marginalized messaging
For white people: these two may things may align and go together
○ The messages we receive from society are pro-white
○ They match up; they both lead to a pro-white bias
Marginalized racial groups: while you may have a tendency for in-group positivity, we also get messages from society that “your group is less dominant”; “negative stereotypes”; “your group is less privileged”
○ The two factors may be competing against each other
○ Why IAT may result the way it does: no in-group nor out-group preference
American racial hierarchy
social hierarchy often regarded as White > Latinx/e > Black
IAT effect: White, Latinx/e, and Black finding
- Latinx > white: no difference between in-group and out-group preference
○ may be competing against norms of social hierarchy - Latinx > black: in-group preference/favorism increases
○ Now, the biases being evaluated conform to the social norm
IAT: results from bi-racial individuals
somewhere in between
- Some white preference, but less so than mono-racial white individuals
- “Reduced” bias; the factors go together, but the in-group bias may be reduced if it’s not “part” of your ethnicity
- You can prime one aspect of your racial ethnicity; can shift what your explicit attitudes are
○ Context can matter a lot
IAT: confounds
- side/order effects
- reliability
- meaningful
IAT: side/order effects
in proper use of IAT, should be counterbalanced! Also typically found to not have an impact
IAT: reliability?
your variability will vary from time to time
- If you gave people a test several time, I’d norm out to your average levels
- can be impacted by context, scores do vary from one test to the next. But other several tests, fairly reliable
IAT: meaningful?
does require you to attend to the target social categories - even if in real life you might not act on
- It’s making you think about white and black faces
- You have to attend to that
- Do these tests predict behavior?
IAT: not a diagnosis!
can be useful in research to assess intergroup preferences within a group
- Not particularly reliable @ one timepoint
- What it can be useful: in research, we’re looking across groups
explicit vs. implicit bias over time
Explicit bias: self-group preference declines in gage
Implicit bias: equally high levels of implicit preference for their own racial group
implicit intergroup bias
- Dominant racial groups: high in-group preference
Non-dominant racial groups: no preference for in-group bias
who’s missing from intergroup bias research
Who’s missing:
- Biracial/multiracial individuals
- Individuals from many non-dominant racial groups
Intersectionality!
ingroup bias + social norms: how they’re acquired
ingroup: rapidly, automatically acquired
social norms: overt messages, cultural stereotypes, learning from authority figures (parents, teachers, etc.), peers (siblings, classmates, etc.)
evidence: kids that go to more diverse schools can shape their preference for in-group vs out-group members
minimal group paradigm
- creating groups that are minimally different
- Critically: no difference between the groups other than their shirts
- Then: we can test them for their preference with IAT
- Now: we have a preference for our in-group
○ Both explicit and more so implicit
combating bias: stories with race experiment
-1) Tell them a story about this individual, either with a white indv, black indv, or flowers
2) Test them w/ an IAT
Younger kids: no proof of being swayed by the experimental condition
- All show a pro-white preference
- Are not shifted out of the in-group positivity bias
Older kids: when they’re getting the examples of black individuals linked with positive stories, their preference drops down to zero
- Not more likely to prefer white individuals to black ones
- THUS: they are a more influence-able group
○ Older children might have more cognitive flexibility
changing ingroup biases
adults:
- Contact w/ outgroup members is helpful
- Positive examples of outgroup members is helpful
- generally harder to move adults away from the biases we have
developmental: if children are still learning about some of the social messages, maybe children are more malleable
how diversity findings can be applied
- Start opening up counter-stereotypical examples
- Media
○ If we know it’s likely to be more shifted, we can include more diversity in the media they consume - Incorporating things into more books
