Social Cognition Flashcards
What is social cognition?
Social cognition regroups all cognitive processes that influence and are influenced by social behaviour
What is behaviourism?
Study of social cognition which focuses on overt (observable) behaviour
What is gestalt psychology?
The whole influences constituent parts rather than vice versa
What is cognitive consistency?
People try to reduce inconsistencies amongst their cognitions because inconsistency is unpleasant
Naïve psychologist
People need to attribute causes to behavior and events to render the world a meaningful place
Cognitive misers
Cognitive ‘short-cuts’, people use less demanding cognitive processes to produce behaviour - Intrinsic to social thinking
Motivated tactician
People have multiple cognitive processes to choose from, and they pick based on goals, motives, and needs
Social neuroscience
Study of social cognition through exploration of the brain
Forming impressions - Asch’s Configural model
When forming first impressions, we focus on certain central traits (like generous, happy, reliable…) which have a disproportionate influence on our judgements compared to peripheral traits (like skillful, practical, cautious…).
Forming impressions - Primacy effect
Earlier presented information has a greater influence on social cognition
Forming impressions - Recency effect
Later presented information has a greater influence on social cognition
Forming impressions - Positive and negative informations
In the absence of information, people usually assume the best of others. However, if we have a piece of negative information, we assume the worst (that information is salient because unusual and because it signifies potential danger)
Forming impressions - Personal constructs
People develop their own personal ways of characterizing others
Forming impressions - Implicit personality theories
General principles concerning what sorts of characteristics go together to form certain personalities - These are personal
Forming impressions - Does physical appearance matter?
Yes! Because it is also the 1st information you have about someone (see week 14)
Forming impressions - Stereotype definition
Widely shared and simplified evaluative image of a social group and its members
Forming impressions - Social judgeability
Whether of not it is acceptable to judge someone
Forming impressions - Cognitive algebra
The study of how people assign positive and negative values to attributes and calculate these attributes to form a general evaluation in different ways:
- Summation
- Averaging
- Weighted averaging (we first assess the value of each trait and then we average those)
Social schemas and categories - Schemas (definition and different kinds)
Cognitive structure which represents knowledge about a concept and links it to similar/relatable concepts, to help to interpret events and guide choices:
- Script - Schemas about events
- Person schemas - Individualised knowledge about specific people
- Role schemas - Knowledge structure about role occupants
- Content-free schemas - Limited number of rules for processing information
- Self-schemas - Schemas about yourself
- Gender-schemas
- Political-schemas
Social schemas and categories - How?
- By family resemblance - The defining property for a concept to belong within that schema
- By prototyping - Ideal/typical concept defining a category (fuzzy sets, categories can differ from the prototype)
- Examplars - Using examples of that category
- Associative networks - Nodes are connected together by associative links
Social schemas and categories - How do we acquire stereotypes?
Stereotypes are:
- Easy to form
- Slow to change (usually as a result of social, political or economic changes)
- Acquired at early age
- More pronounced when there’s social tension
- Not necessarily inaccurate or wrong, they just help to categorize.
Social schemas and categories - Accentuation principle
Categorisation accentuates intra-category similarity and inter-category differences when people believe that it is linked to the category.
Social schemas and categories - Social identity theory
Theory of group membership based on self-categorization, social comparison and the construction of a shared self-definition in terms of in-group defining properties.
Self-categorisation - People categorise themselves as a group member and adapt their behaviour as such.
Social schemas and categories - How do we use schemas?
- We access social stereotypes and role schemas easier than trait-schemas
- We access schemas based on looks more easily
- Schemas are more accessible if they are more salient in memory (habitually used) or if these features are important to oneself
- More or less accurate
Social schemas and categories - What if you’re not sure?
- If there are costs of being wrong, people are more attentive and less reliant on schemas
- If there are costs of being indecisive, people are more reliant on schemas
Some individual differences may influence the degree to which we use schemas:
- Attributional complexity - People differ in the complexity and number of explanations they have
- Uncertainty orientation - Gaining information v. remaining uninformed but certain
- Need for cognition - People differ in how much they like to think deeply about things
- Need for cognitive closure - People differ in how qui they want to make a decision/judgement
- Cognitive complexity - People differ in the complexity of cognitive processes they use
Social schemas and categories - How do we acquire them?
- As we meet more instances of a schema, it becomes more abstract, richer and more complex
- As their complexity increases, they become more tightly organised
- Increased organization produces a more compact schema
- They become more resilient, it is easier to incorporate exceptions
Social schemas and categories - How do we change them?
- Bookkeeping - Change with accumulating evidence
- Conversion - Sudden change due to a critical mass of inconsistent evidence which has accumulated
- Subtyping - Form a sub-type to assimilate this inconsistent evidence
Social encoding - Intro
4 stages:
- Pre-attentive analysis - Automatic and unconscious scanning of our environment
- Focal attention - Then stimuli are consciously identified and categorised
- Comprehension - Stimuli are given meaning
- Elaborative reasoning - Stimuli are linked to other knowledge to allow for complex inferences
Social encoding - Salience
Because:
- Novel
- Unusual
- The behavior does not fit prior expectations
- They are important to us
- Of vividness (they are emotionally interesting, concrete and image provoking, close to us)
- Of accessibility (in memory)
Social encoding - Memory for people
Because:
- Associative network - Some links are stronger than others
- Due to cognitive rehearsal
- Because the information is inconsistent with our impression
How? By person or by group, usually ‘on-lin’ (at the moment) rather than memory based
Social inference - Behavioral decision theory
We use a set of normative models (ideal processes) to make accurate social inferences.
Social inferences - Wrongful schemas
Many schemas are based on unrepresentative information, therefore we meet incoherencies within these schemas.
- Regression - Initial observation is usually more extreme than later instances
- People fail to see the relevance of base-rate information (factual, statistical info.)
- Illusory correlation
- Associative meaning - Things ‘belong’ together just because
- Paired distinctiveness - Things belong together because they share an unusual feature
Social inferences - Heuristics
Representativeness heuristic - Cognitive short-cut by which instances are assigned to categories on the basis of overall similarity or resemblance to that category.
Availability heuristic - Cognitive short-cute where we overestimate the frequency or likelihood of an event because certain instances or associations come to mind faster/easier
Anchoring and adjustment - Inferences are tied to initial standards or schemas
Social inferences - How can we improve?
Through formal education rational thinking and using statistical techniques
What about emotions? How do they affect social cognition?
Primary appraisals generate emotions very quickly, even before conscious recognition of the target of the appraisal.
Affect-infusion model (social judgement reflects your current mood):
- Direct access (schemas are stored in memory and can be accessed directly)
- Motivated processing (formation of judgement on the basis of a specific motivation or goal)
- Heuristic processing (reliance on various cognitive short-cuts)
- Substantive processing (construction of a judgement based on various informational sources)
How people attribute causality - Why?
- Because we need causal explanation for the origin and meaning of life
- Because we need to be able to predict and control our environment
- Because be distinguish between personal factors (internal attribution) and environmental or situational factors (external attribution)
How people attribute causality - Correspondent inferences
Someone’s behaviour is attributed to internal characteristics because:
- Behaviour is freely chosen
- This specific behavior have these specific consequences which are peculiar to it
- Outcome bias - We assume that the person intended the consequences of his behaviour (since he chose it)
- Socially undesirable behaviour tells us more because it is not controlled by societal norms
- We make more correspondent inferences if the consequences of the behavior touched us personally (hedonic relevance)
- We make more correspondent inferences if the consequences of the behavior had direct intent (personalism)
They are automatic! We may choose to redirect our attention to situational factors but that is a deliberate process where as correspondent inferences are drawn unconsciously.
How people attribute causality - Everyday scientists
We identify a factor which covaries with the behavior and assign that factor to have a causal role (= covariation model). We use this process to choose between external or internal causes based on:
- Consistency information (does this happen all the time or just this once?), if low, people attribute the behavior to external causes
- Distinctiveness information (does this happen to everything or just this thing?)
- Consensus information (does everyone react the same to this thing or only this individual?)
People suck at this though…
Extensions or attribution theory - Explaining our emotions
Two dimensions:
- An undifferentiated state of physiological arousal
- Cognitions that label the arousal and determine which emotion is being experienced
- Context is determinant in this matter! We attribute emotions based on it
We make more general attributions for our own behavior (self-perception theory).
Extensions or attribution theory - Task performance attributions
To attribute achievement, we use 3 dimensions:
- Locus - Is the performance internal or external?
- Stability - Is the internal or external cause stable? (usual)
- Controllability - To what extent is future task performance under the actor’s control?
Check figure 3.4 p. 89!
Applications of attribution theory to personal relationships
- People differ in the amount of control they feel they have over the punishments and reinforcements they receive
- In personal relationships, if the relationship is good we will attribute mistakes to external factors and the opposite if the relationship is bad.
Attributional biases
- Cognitive misers
- Motivated tactician
- Correspondence bias - People think behavior reflects stable underlying personality attributes
- Fundamental attribution error - Bias in attributing behavior to internal rather than external causes
- Groups make attributions about in-group and out-group behaviour (= ultimate attribution error)
- Outcome bias
- Focus of attention - We focus more on the behaviour than on the situation
- Differential forgetting - People forget the situation more easily than the behaviour
- There are cultural differences too
Actor-observer effect
Tendency to attribute our own behavior externally and others’ behavior internally. Because of:
- Perceptual focus - We have a different perspective
- Informational differences - We have access to different informations
False consensus effect
We see our own behavior as being more typical than it is:
- Because we seek out similar others
- Because are own opinions are more salient to ourselves
- Because we are striving for a stable world
Self-serving biases
Attribution is influenced by our desire for a favorable image or ourselves;
- Self-enhancing bias - Positive behavior and successes reflects who we really are
- Self-protecting bias - Negative behavior and failure does not
- Self-handicapping bias - We publicly make attributions to external factors prior to anticipated failure
- If the consequences of the behavior are greater, we tend to attribute it more internally
- Why? Because we need the illusion of control and to believe in a just world
Intergroup attribution
We attribute the act of an individual to his membership to a group
- Cognitive process - Social categorization generates certain expectancies, because of schemas or group stereotypes. If the behavior matches our expectations, we attribute it to the group. If it doesn’t, we attribute it to the individual
- Self-esteem process - People need to secure their self-esteem because they derive their identity from the group to which they belong.
Internal attributions for negative out-group behavior - We make use of scapegoats to explain and justify the economic and social exploitation of that group
