Social Cognition Flashcards
Social Psychology
The scientific study of how people think and feel about, influence, and relate to one another
Cognitive Psychology
The scientific study of basic mental abilities such as perception, learning and memory
Social Cognition
Social cognition studies how people think about themselves and the social world - how they select, interpret, remember and use social information to make judgements and decisions
What is the purpose of Social Cognition
- It asks the how and/or why (how does X situation lead to an increase in stereotype use)
- It’s related to the process between the stimulus and the action and what is in our head and is also about people
- Focuses on our cognitive representations or schemas
What does social cognition examine
- How we take information from the outside world and encode it (select it)
- How this interpretation of the information is stored in memory (interpreteted)
- How this information is retrieved from memory and used (remembered and used)
- In general, social cognition is the use of cognitive methodologies (like a memory test) and theories to understand people and social situations
Schemas
- Schemas are mental structures that are meant to represent knowledge about a concept or type of stimuli (anything you can conceive, abstract and constructive); they are stored in memory and influenced by personal experience
- It includes attributes and the relationship among those attributes and associates in varying strength with other mental structures (schemas)
- If someone mentions ‘Police’, it activates a police schema stored in memory
Why are schemas important
- They reduce the amount of information to process and ambiguity (if you try to process everything about a chair it would be too much, a schema makes it easier and helps you KNOW what the concept is)
- They guide what we pay attention to and how we encode things (what we notice, how quickly and how we interpret it), guide memory, judgements and behaviour
How do schemas work
Environmental stimulus activates our associative network -> causes priming of a schema -> the salience of the schema is increased and makes the schema more accessible; More strongly associated attributes and concepts will be more accessible, salient and easier to prime
Associative Networks
Models for how pieces of information are linked together and stored in memory; these links result from semantic associations and experiential associations (learned via experience or associations) and can vary in strength
Accessibility
The ease with which people can bring an idea into consciousness and use it in thinking; schemas can be ranged in terms of accessibility
Salience
An aspect of a schema that is active in one’s mind and, consciously or not, colours perceptions and behaviour; influences accessibility consciously or unconsciously based on how active or inactive a schema/concept is
Priming
The process by which exposure to a stimulus in the environment increases the salience of a schema; can happen via exposure to stimuli, activating or increasing salience of schema
How is Novel Information processed by Schema
- Schemas are frequently at odds (competing) with new information, which is often unpleasant and a source of anxiety; to make this unpleasant feeling go away and make the information less new, we have to do something about it
- Two approaches were proposed: assimilate and accommodate although Jean Piaget suggested potentially 5 “A”s total
Assimilate
Use an existing schema to interpret the novel information; if we are watching the new Star Wars movies, they are different from the others, so we consider what we know about Star Wars give it time, as the directors must have a plan and it may change and add to the story
Accommodate
Change existing schema to incorporate the novel information
Where do Schemas come from?
The way you organize, categorize and process a schema may seem universal, but the content of the schema is shaped and varies by cultural experience
How Schemas originate from Cultural Sources of Knowledge
- Direct contact with people, events and ideas (acquiring different knowledge through primary/personal experiences/sources)
- Indirect contact with parents, teachers, peers, books, newspapers, magazines, television, the internet (different bits of knowledge through secondary sources)
How do Social Narratives Reinforce Schemas
- Information about people or events is often passed from one person to another, but will get altered by schema at each stage, as it will be simplified by social narratives and schemas to make it more accessible
- This is where schemas can be seen as sources of stereotypes, by biasing how we use, process and recall/retell information (stereotypes bias recall)
How do Mass Media Reinforce or create schemas
- Movies have a very set way of representing certain themes in movies, like romantic ideals
- News work with same procedure as stereotype bias recall, as people with schemas will take in what they see, have this information filtered by their schema and biases and report the altered (biased) information
What do Schemas influence
They influence each stage of info processing: our attention and encoding, our memory, our judgements, our behaviour and our interpretation of others’ behaviours, which can in turn change our social reality to fit our schemas
How Priming can Alter Judgements
- If primed with negative concepts like ‘aloof’ (unknowingly) before reading the story of David who rarely changes his mind, you will have a more negative David schema
- If primed with positive concepts like ‘independent’, before reading the same story, you will have a more positive David schema
The pros and cons of Schema Activation
- It very useful, as it is an efficient, learned perception and action, and helps us be prepared and know what to think and do, which reduces ambiguity and promotes action
- However it also makes you more insensitive to information that is inconsistent with your schema, by skipping or ignoring those parts; this promotes confirmation bias, self-fulfilling prophecy, and stereotypes and prejudice (the biggest interest of social cognition research for how biases work, where they com from and what they do)
Confirmation Bias
We tend to seek out and evaluate new information so that it confirms what we already believe or feel, by paying more attention to schema-consistent info and interpreting ambiguous info in a schema-confirming manner; when it comes to ourselves, in general, we will be biased towards positive aspects
Example of Confirmation Bias
- If we are thinking of our mom and she calls us, we may think “omg I’m psychic” and when this happens another four times, this idea will be reinforced (“omg this keeps happening, maybe I really m psychic”).
- But what about the 28 times your mom call without you thinking of her, she 50 times you thought of her but she didn’t call and the 282 times where you were not thinking of her and she did not call
- The truth is we only payed attention to these schema-confirming instances, and ignored the disconfirming evidence
Rosenhan and colleagues Study
- They faked auditory hallucinations and were admitted to 12 psychiatric hospitals, behaving ‘normally’ upon admission; the hospital staff interpreted their behaviour as symptomatic of illness regardless, they were diagnosed with bipolar or schizophrenia and were not allowed to leave until admitting to their illness and taking their meds
- Rosenhan published a report denouncing problems with labeling, confirmation biases, and attributions influencing the staff’s behaviour and interpretation, as well as an overall lack of contact and communication with the patients
- Very controversial, one of the hospitals even tried to challenge the claim, but they were proven wrong and this study raised questions about how we perceive others and their behaviours, through easily made judgements and attributions
Process of Self-fulfilling Prophecies
- You have an expectation (schema) about another person (David is a jerk)
- This expectation can influence how you act toward that person (Act cold toward David)
- These can cause this person to act in ways that are consistent with your expectation, a schema-elicited behaviour (David acts rude back), and reinforces our schema (“I was right, David is a jerk”)
Rosenthal & Jacobson Study on Pygmalion Effect
- Went to classrooms and on the premise of helping teachers better their teaching approach, gave an IQ test to help identify ‘skill levels’
- They randomly assigned children to results and told the teachers 3/4 were ready to show improvement (‘intellectual bloomers’) and 1/4 were not
- After awhile, they redid an IQ test and saw an actual IQ boost with students randomly assigned to intellectual bloomer condition
- Teachers had been influenced by these expectations and had treated these kids in a way that promoted schema-elicited behaviours (better performance) from these students
Madon et al. (2006 ) and Teenage Drinking Behaviour
- They asked mothers to rate the likelihood that their child would drink at 5 different times (gr.6, 7, 8, 10 and 12)
- They then measured the child’s alcohol use at these 5 different times with open-ended question and controlled for important predictors (potential third variables), like parents drinking, accessibility to alcohol, perceived norms about teen drinking and attitudes toward alcohol use
- They discovered that mothers who overestimated drinking likelihood had children who drank more and underestimating mothers had children who drank less
- More importantly, the difference between these two groups increased over time, with additive effects of drinking worsening
- In children with consistently over estimating mothers showed a process of accumulation of expectations over time
Dual Processes: The Automatic Processes
- Also known as experiential
- It is unintentional/spontaneous, efficient, fast, implicit (non-conscious) and uncontrollable
- It is more reliant on schemas
Automatic Action
- William James believed thinking about an action makes it more likely to happen (“Ideomotor action”)
- Actions and responses are part of a schema or are closely associated: If concepts are ‘primed’ they can drive behaviours outside of awareness (a perception to behaviour link)
Priming and Automatic Action
- You have a stimulus, which brings up a conceptual schema with perceptual and behavioural representations, leading to a concept-related behaviour
- For example, a study stimulated students’ stereotypes of older adults through questions, activating their conceptual “older adult” schema with perceptual and behavioural representations, and noticed that they tended to walk more slowly on their way out. Taken further in another, they noticed that there was an added factor: students with positive stereotypes walked slower (likely to adjust to an older person’s pace) and those with negative stereotypes, walked faster (likely to get away)
Bargh, Chen, & Burrows (1996) Scrambled Sentences and Priming
- Looked into whether scrambling sentences prime a concept
- Participants had to unscramble a sentence that was either rude, polite, or neutral then were faced with the experimenter in a discussion with a confederate and were observed on whether they would interrupt within a 10 minute period
- Ranging from low to high instances, those primed with a polite sentence were low, neutral were moderate and rude were high
Bargh, Chen, & Burrows (1996) Replication of Old Adults Priming and Walking Speed
- Study 2a involved replicating the elderly prime/walk slow study using infrared chronometry; however the outcome was a null effect
- In Study 2b, they added two more conditions (fast and slow), and there was a difference but only in the slow condition; the experimenter was aware of these two conditions and demonstrated a threat: experimenter effect
Automatic (implicit) goal pursuit
- It is not just priming a concept, but priming a goal
- The prime activates a goal construct, which in turn activates a motivational state, and eventually this operates outside of our awareness
- For example, if we have the stimulus of a food wrapper (we ate a bag of chips and now we are left with an empty bag), we have a conscious goal to get rid of it and put it in the trash is to put the wrapper in the trash and we will respond by looking for a trash and throwing it out.
- Eventually though, we do not need to put as much if any thought into it, saving energy and this conscious goal becomes an automatic goal
Bargh et al., 1999 Relationship vs Achievement Goal Priming
- Study 1 was focused on task (crossword) performance, comparing the numbers of word found between participants primed with achievement words and participants in the control group; results showed people primed with achievement (primed with performance related goal) did better
- In Study 2, they were focused on resource dilemma, priming one group with cooperation and not another, then having participants play a ‘fishing’ game with a partner (computer) and seeing how many fish they out back at the end of each round; the game required cooperation to continue the game, by giving back fish (restocking the pond) at the end of each round; participants primed with cooperation did this more
Bargh et al. (2001) Ovsiankina Effect
- This effect suggests when encountering a difficulty, we are more likely to come back and try to achieve the goal, as we are not ending up where we want to be
- Again, participants were either primed with achievement or not before trying scrabble letters on an overhead projector, of which the bulb would burnout, then seeing who continues the scrabble task and who chooses an alternative of rating funny comics; results showed those primed were more likely to continue the scrabble task
Replication of Bargh’s studies
- Replication of study 1 showed no results, or even the opposite with a decreased performance after achievement priming (failure to replicate)
- Replication of study 5 added a delay to the study, theorizing that the longer you delay goal pursuit, the stronger the implicit goal should be, but found no effect still (failure to replicate)
Personal Goals & Mystery Moods
Brings questions on whether automatic goals can be conflicted/frustrated like conscious goals and does this cause a problem and affect your mood, rather than your behaviour; Idea is that if you feel not good but don’t know why, it could be due to frustrated unconscious goals (mystery mood phenomenon)
Study on Mystery Mood Phenomenon
- Participants were randomly assigned to achievement goal priming (experiential group) or no priming (control group) and then randomly assigned to performing an easy or impossible anagram
- They found that primed participants solving the easy anagram had an increase in positive mood
- In contrast primed participants solving the difficult anagram had an increase in negative mood, moreso than participants from the control group
Nonverbal “leakage”
- The unintentional transmission of information through nonverbal channels of communication
- This may occur because we do not think to control nonverbals or because we are not able to control nonverbals
Chartrand & Bargh (1999) Social Mimicry: The Chameleon Effect
- Participants had to engage with a confederate and confederates followed a script designed to create an interaction
- Participants in a positive script condition wanted to connect more with the person and showed mimicry, by mirroring the confederate (if confederate rubbed face or shook foot during a good conversation, participant would do the same)
Priming, Nonconscious Goals, and Behaviours
- While results of prime-to-behaviour studies are largely inconclusive, the fact remains that primes DO activate mental concepts and impact our attention, memory and judgements
- However, it remains unclear whether they can affect behaviour, as replication studies’ results had smaller effects (if any) than in original studies
- Potential ideas are that priming affects behaviour under very short time frames, or that it is dependent on an individual’s personality, with some people being more affected by priming, while others are not or do the opposite of priming
- Others have made the questionable claim that mental is an epiphenomenon, insinuating cognition does not matter or affect behaviour
How do we measure the Automatic/Experiential Process?
One way that has been used is the name letter task, asking participants to rate letters based on their like or dislike and if they had high-levels of self-esteem, they would rank letters associated with them highest (compare mean ratings of own first and last initials to overall liking across all subjects of those first and last initials)
Self-esteem
A person’s overall self-evaluation or sense of self-worth (value judgements that we hold against ourselves or show other people)
Implicit Attitudes
Automatic associations and value judgements built through learning, guided by the experiential system (a gut level sense of self worth); With Name Letter Task, testing implicit self-esteem, and leading to through process of “I like Me, Me = Rory, I like R” (schematic associations)
What criteria need to be matched to measure Implicit Processes (Implicit Self-Esteem)?
- Unintentional/spontaneous**
- Efficient
- Fast
- Implicit/non-conscious**
- Uncontrollable**
Implicit Association test (IAT)
- The idea is that it is an indirect measurement of bias via reaction times and that people will have slower reaction times when associating incongruent vs congruent stimuli
- With Implicit Self-Esteem, you would be testing the strength of association between the Self and Positive (congruent) or Negative (incongruent) stimuli
Pros of the IAT
It seems to align with more implicit characteristics (unconscious, fast, uncontrollable and efficiency)
Cons of IAT
- But is it actually controllable? (When given instructions to fake the IAT it changed and reduced its effect, showing that explicit instructions to control were able to be followed)
- Is it a good, valid measure? (meta-analyses showed IAT only explained variance of discriminatory behaviour in 1-5% of cases, which is quite low)
- Applications have moved well beyond the science, with implicit bias being demonstrated as not that effective and requiring more research on its concept, process and the IAT measure
- Both proponents and critiques of the IAT have called for research into mechanisms of the IAT effect (the between/process)
Controlled Processing
- Also knowing as cognitive process
- Intentional/deliberative
- Capacity consuming/inefficient (is more effortful)
- Generally slower
- Explicit/conscious
- Controllable
How to Measure Controlled Processing
- Self-Report Measures (using surveys, questionnaires, and interviews for standard personality measures, attitude measures, etc.)
- Explicit Behaviours (overt behaviours, like what we say, how we act, who we choose, etc., when we can engage in deliberate/controlled ways of thinking)
Explicit Attitudes
Conscious value judgements guided by the cognitive system
Examples of Explicit Measures of Self-Esteem
- Rosenberg (1965) Trait Self-Esteem Scale
- Pennebaker (1997) Writing Task
Why is this distinction between automatic and controlled processes important in social psychology?
It can help understand why some people say one thing but do another (explicitly report one thing that does not align with following actions) or understand how a phenomenon can be positive and negative (like high levels of self esteem)
The positives of high Self-esteem
- It protects us from depression, drug abuse, pr other types of delinquency
- Protects us from negative decisions and outcomes
- The self-esteem movement wanted to promote self-esteem in students through education and schools
The negatives of High Self-Esteem
- Terrorists, gang leaders, extreme ethnocentrists, etc. tend to have high self-esteem
- If we reject people with high self-esteem they can become ugly and abusive (narcisissists)
Jordan, Spencer, Zanna, Hoshino-Browne, & Correll (2003) Relationship of Implicit and Explicit Self-Esteem with Narcissism: Procedure
- Measuring explicit self-esteem, using Rosenberg scale for conscious and deliberately reasoned evaluations of self
- Measuring implicit self-esteem, using the IAT for automatic evaluations of self that occur unintentionally and outside of awareness (gut level way of thinking about yourself positively or negatively)
- Measuring Narcissism, based on traits of grandiose self-views (potentially concealing unacknowledged self-doubt), excessive preoccupation with personal adequacy, power and prestige and a lack of empathy for others
Jordan, Spencer, Zanna, Hoshino-Browne, & Correll (2003) Relationship of Implicit and Explicit Self-Esteem with Narcissism: Study
- Expected to see different people when crossing high & low explicit & implicit self-esteem:
- Low Explicit and Implicit scores showed real low self-esteem
- Low Explicit and High Implicit scores (say low but feel high) showed modesty or was cultural learning
- High Explicit and Implicit scores showed real high or secure self-esteem
- High Explicit and Low Implicit scores (say high but feel low) showed defensive self-esteem
Jordan, Spencer, Zanna, Hoshino-Browne, & Correll (2003) Relationship of Implicit and Explicit Self-Esteem with Narcissism: Results
- People with real low self-esteem were (more) likely to be depressed
- People with defensive self-esteem correlated (most) with high levels of narcissism, unlike people with secure self-esteem who correlated (most) with low levels of narcissism
McGregory et al. (2005)
Added onto Jordan et al. (2003) study showing that insecure self-esteem and defensive pride often go together, where one will argue that everyone agrees with them
Five ways the Unconscious is Smart
- The motives that guide thinking often operate unconsciously
- Memory consolidation occurs during sleep
- Unconscious mind wandering can help generate creative ideas
- Intuition can facilitate sound decisions
- Unconscious emotional associations can promote beneficial decisions
Wilson (1989) dating
- If asked how happy one is in a relationship and they answered quickly, this was often predictive of whether a couple would be dating a few months later
- However, if asked to list all the reasons why one’s relationship is good or bad then asked how happy one is in a relationship, the responses no longer predicted whether a couple would be dating a few months later
- Raised the question of whether gut level reactions are better indicators of attitudes
Dijksterhuis (2006) Car Study
- Participants received information about 4 cars, either with 4 simple or 12 complex different attributes
- One car was more desirable (had more positive aspects) and another was less desirable (fewer positive aspects)
- All participants were then asked to evaluate each car but one half were given 3 minutes to think about it consciously and the other half were told they would have to choose later and were distracted for 3 minutes to prevent them from conscious thought
- People not given a chance to think about it seemed to make the better choice especially with complex decision (unconscious thought outperformed conscious thought on complex decision)
- However saying needing to stop thinking in case of a tough decision would be a bit bold so a better explanation is that being distracted lessened anxiety
Suppression/Repression
- Suppressing the unconscious is based on Freudian psychodynamics, where unconscious process often generate things you don’t want to reaching the surface; Freud’s work was very ambiguous, with 32 different meanings ranging from master defence to not a defense at all
- “Keeping unacceptable information or impulses out of consciousness”
- Ex. Simple thought repression, ie. avoid thinking of shock photo
Daniel Wegner et al. (1987)
- Thought suppression = rebound effect
- Ex. Don’t think of a white bear”
Wenzlaf and Bates (1998)
- Found the same rebound effect except when participants concentrated on desirable thought
- Brings up rumination, it is hard to let go, avoid negative thoughts & works maybe a little, but rebounds eventually & circles around over and over
- Don’t just engage in thought repression, you have to think of positive things which makes it easier to not rebound
