social cognition Flashcards
what is social psychology
perceptions and behaviour and how influenced by others
what is social cognition
- how we process and store social information
- how this affects our perceptions and behaviour
what is attribution
process of assigning a cause to our own and other’s behaviour
what is social schemas
knowledge about concepts
- make sense with limited information
- facilitate top-down processing
what is category
organise hierarchically (associative network) - stimuli connected - patterns of connections can become activated
what are prototypes
-cognitive representation of typical defining features of a category (average category member)
what is causal attribution
- an inference process through which perceivers attribute an effect to one or more causes
- in trying to answer ‘why’ you are engaging in the process of causal attribution
what is a native scientist
people are rational and scientific-like in making cause-effect attributions
what is biased/intuitionist
but - information is limited and driven by motivations which leads to errors and biases
what is a cognitive miser
people use least complex and demanding info processing - cognitive shortcuts
what is a motivated tactician
- think carefully and scientifically about certain things - when personally important or necessary
- think quickly and use heuristics for others - when less important so that can do things quickly and get more done
what are the 4 theories of attribution
- Naive psychologist
- attributional theory
- correspondent inference theory
- covariation model
who came up with the Naive scientist theory
fritz Heider 1958
what does the naive scientist theory suggest
- homo rationalis
- analytical, cogent, balanced, logical
- hypothesis testing
- attribute causes to effects to create a stable world that makes sense
- ascribe human behaviours to abstract objects
what did Heider and Simmel 1944 find
- they presented a stimulus which was abstract geometrical figures - and asked to write down what they say - pps reported shapes e.g. big triangle
what are the three principles of The Naive scientist theory
- need to form a coherent view of the world - search for motives in others behaviours
- need to gain control over the environment - search for enduring properties that cause behaviour
- need to identify internal vs external factors - did they intend to do it
who came up with the attributional theory
- Weiner 1979
what is the attributional theory
- causality of success or failure
- locus (internal/external)
- stability (e.g. natural ability/mood)
- controllability (e.g. effort/luck)
- multi-dimensional approach
what is attributional retraining
people encourage to make more optimist attributions
- outcomes uncontrollable
- successes attributed to internal causes
who studied university athletes
Parker et al 2018
what is the university athletes study
- randomised control trial
- attributional training or waitlist control
- attributional training - better grades explained by increased perceived academic control
- when people encouraged to contribute successes to internal causes they gained motivation to succeed
who came up with the correspondent inference
jones and davis 1965
what are the 5 cues in the correspondent inference theory
- act was freely chosen
- act produced by a non-common effect
- not socially desirable
- hedonic relevance
- personalism
what does non-common effect mean
not a lot of other behaviours would lead to it
what is hedonic relevance
- whether it has important consequences for you
what is personalism
- whether it’s directly intended to effect you
who came up with the co-variation model
kelley 1967
what is the co-variation model suggest
- use multiple observations to identify factors that co-vary with behaviour
- assign causal role to the factors
- whether behaviour internal or external is key
what are the 3 key components of the co-variation model
- consistency
- distinctiveness
- consensus
what is consistency in the covariation model
- does this behaviour always co-occur with the cause
- if low - look for different cause
- if high - they are linked
what is distinctiveness in the co-variation model
is the behaviour exclusively linked to this or is it a common reaction
- high - external cause
- low - internal attribution
what is consensus in the co-variation model
do other people react in the same way to the cause
- high - external cause
- low - internal cause
how is attribution linked to mental health
- people with depression attribute negative events to internal, global and stable causes
how can the co-variation model be criticised
- it could be salience of prior info
- quite poor at assessing covariance
- correlation doesn’t = causation
what is false consensus
- we think that other’s feel the same as us
- attributional biases - systematic errors indicative of shortcuts, gut feeling, intuition
what did Ross et al find about false consensus
- if people said yes to a question they were also more likely to answer yes to the question ‘would someone else say the same’
why do we have false consensus
-we seek out similar others - bias view of the world
- salience of our own opinion - our opinions stand out - they are obvious
- self-esteem maintenance - validate our own behaviour
what is fundamental attribution error
- tendency to attribute behaviour to enduring dispositions even when clear situational causes
what is the knowledgeable quiz master study
- thought quiz master was more knowledgeable just because the pp got questions wrong even though all quiz masters were randomly assigned
what is fundamental attribution error also known as
correspondence bias
who came up with the actor-observer bias
jones and nisbett 1972
what is actor-observer bias
internal causes for others, external causes for ourselves
- perceptual focus
- informational difference - we don’t have all the information like we do with ourselves
- positive behaviour - dispositional more likely
- perspective taking reverses effects
what is self-serving bias
we blame success on internal and failure on external
- maintenance of self-esteem
- split into self-enhancing and self-protecting bias
- expect to succeed - internal causes
- operates at a group level too
who came up with heuristics
tverksy and kahneman 1974
what is heuristics
- cognitive shortcut
- avoid effort, resources expenditure
- rule of thumb, not complex mental judgment
- quick and easy
what are the 3 types of heuristic
- availability heuristic
- representative heuristic
- anchoring and adjustment heuristic
what is availability heuristic
- judge frequency or probability of events by how easy it is to think of examples - memory accessability
what is representative heuristic
- judgment based on how relevant it is to other things in that category
- category based on similarity between instance and prototypical members allocate a set of attributes
what is anchoring and adjustment heuristic
- starting point influences subsequent judgments
- judgments based on some starting point e.g. salesman more likely to start with showing expensive
