Social cognition

Question 1

Asch’s (1946) configural model

Answer 1

· Use personality traits to describe people, form impressions 
	· Asked participants to read a list of adjectives to describe a pretend person
	· One word included the word warm or cold, then shown a second list
	· Exposed to the word warm – more likely to rate them more favourably 
	· Intelligent 
	· Skilful 
	· Industrious 
	· Warm or Cold 
	· Determined 
	· Practical 
	· Cautious 
New words:
· Generous/ungenerous 
· Happy/unhappy
· Reliable/unreliable
Wise/unwise

Question 2

Replication of Asch – Kelley (1950)

Answer 2

· Replication of Asch’s study
· Introduced a guest lecturer to a class
· ‘People who know him consider him to be a rather cold (or warm)
· person, industrious, critical, practical and determined’
· After the lecture they were ask to rate the lecturer on a number of dimensions, more likely to rate negatively when the word ‘cold’ was used and less likely to ask questions
· Unsociable
· Self-centred
· Unpopular
· Ruthless
Formal

Question 3

Primacy and recency effects ?

Answer 3

· Asch (1946)
· Used 6 traits to describe a hypothetical person
· Positive words used first followed by negative, then this was reversed for other participants
· Intelligent
· Industrious
· Impulsive
· Critical
· Stubborn
· Envious
· Primacy effects – more favourable when the positive traits were described first
Recency effects – more concentration on the last traits when you don’t pay attention to the first ones

Question 4

Positivity and negativity ?

Answer 4

· Generally we assume the best of others (Sears, 1983)
· Negative information -> bias towards negativity (Fiske, 1980) Very biased towards negativity
· Negative impression more resistant to change (Hamilton & Zanna, 1974), easier to stick to negative bias
· Why?
· Negative bias tends to be more unusual & distinctive – attracts attention (Skowronski & Carlston, 1989)
Detection of potential danger has survival value – evolutionary, detection value

Question 5

Physical appearance ?

Answer 5

· Appearance is the first information we see, primacy effects
· Appearance-based impressions can be surprisingly accurate! (Zebrowitz, & Collins, 1997) Can influence workplace e.g. likeliness to get a job
· Physical attractiveness – warm, good, interesting, socially skilled (Dion et al., 1972)
· Tall men ( > 1.88 m) – higher starting salary (Knapp, 1978)
· Attractive male executives -> more able
· BUT
· Attractive female executives -> appearance > ability (Heilman, & Stopeck,
· 1985)
· Observers’ ratings of people based purely on pictures of their offices and
bedrooms demonstrated accuracy (Gosling, Ko, Mannarelli & Morris, 2002)

Question 6

Stereotypes?

Answer 6

· Using inconsistent stereotypes of people
· Widely shared and simplified images of a social group and its members
Difficulty incorporating stereotype-inconsistent information (Haire, & Grunes, 1950)

Question 7

Stereotypes – Gilbert & Hixon (1991)

Answer 7

· Fragmentation completion task, half were busy and the other half were not
· Investigated cognitive business
· Activation Phase
· Exposed to either Caucasian or Asian assistant turning over 19 cards
· 14 neutral and 5 target words: e.g. S_Y, S_ORT, RI_E, POLI_E – (consistent or inconsistent information)
· Half of the participants are cognitively busy (rehearse 8-digit number), other half were not
· DV: Number of stereotypically completed word fragments (SHY not SPY)
· Application Phase
· Similar to previous task
· Video of the assistant describing a typical day in her life
· Half of the participants were again cognitively busy (visual search task)
· DV: Ratings of assistant on stereotypical Asian traits (e.g., timid, intelligent, calm, etc.)
· Had to rate the assistant
· Participants who were not busy
Business of the application phase increased the subjects to view the Asians in a stereotypical term, only if it had been activated previously in the first phase

Question 8

Cognitive algebra?

Answer 8

· Evaluation, not description
· How we assign positive and negative valance to attributes & how we combine the pluses and minuses into a general evaluation
Three principal models: summation, averaging, weighted averaging

Question 9

Schema?

Answer 9

· ‘Cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among those attributes’ (Fiske & Taylor, 1991, p. 98)
· Set of interrelated cognitions (thoughts, beliefs and attitudes) -> make sense of a person, situation etc.
· Widely shared schema about a social group -> stereotype (fill in gaps with preconceptions)
Top-down, theory-driven processing (Rumelhart & Ortony, 1977)

Question 10

Types of schema

Answer 10

· Person schema–individualised knowledge structures (schema of your friend)
· Role schemas–knowledge structures about role occupants (doctors, lecturers, etc)
· Scripts–schemas about events
· Content-free schemas–rules for processing information (limited number of rules, if your friend likes someone you must like them)
Self-schemas–stored information about the self

Question 11

Categories and prototypes

Answer 11

· Categories–collections of instances with a family resemblance (Cantor & Mischel, 1977, 1979; Rosch, 1978) e.g. breeds of bird, same type of animal but different kinds
· Prototypes–cognitive representations of the typical/ideal defining features of a category
· Categories are considered to be fuzzy sets of features organised around a prototype, similar but different
Relationship of categories are hierarchical, people rely on intermediate levels rather than inclusive or exclusive (e.g. we say a car is a car, not a BMW sports car)

Question 12

Categorisation and stereotyping

Answer 12

· Shown a picture of lines labelled with A or B, first condition lines were labelled randomly, second condition longer lines were labelled A and the final condition there were no labels
· Asked to estimate the length of lines, second condition participants tended to underestimate the shorter lines and overestimate longer lines
· Shared generalisations about members of a social group
· Schemas of social groups
· Simplified images based on visible differences
· Often derogatory when applied to outgroups
· Slow to change, acquired at an early age (childhood)
· Central aspects of prejudice & discrimination
Categorisation responsible for stereotyping (Tajfel, & Wilkes, 1963) -> accentuation principle

Question 13

Social encoding

Answer 13

· External social stimuli are represented in the mind
· 1) Pre-attentive analysis – tend to be automatic and non-conscious
· 2) Focal attention – once stimuli is noticed, they are categorised
· 3) Comprehension – give different stimuli different meaning
· 4) Elaborative reasoning – linked to other knowledge
Depends on what captures our attention

Question 14

Salience

Answer 14

· Quick to capture our attention, e.g. bright t-shirt at a funeral
· Property of a stimulus that makes it stand out relative to other stimuli Why?
· Novel, figural (stands out in some situations) (McArthur, & Post, 1977)
· Behaviour that doesn’t fit prior expectations (Jones, & McGillis, 1976)
Personal importance, domination of visual field or be asked to pay attention (Erber, & Fiske, 1984; Taylor, & Fiske, 1975)

· Attract attention, more influential in a group
· Personally responsible for their behaviour, less influenced by situation & evaluated more extremely (McArthur, 1981; Taylor, & Fiske, 1978)
Dominate thoughts, increase coherence of impressions

Question 15

Vividness

Answer 15

· Intrinsic property of the stimulus, on its own
o Emotionally interesting
o Concrete & image provoking, e.g. gory description of crime
o Close in time and place
· Attract attention = salient stimuli -> similar cognitive effects
· May be more entertaining, not more persuasive
Effects can be attributed to other factors

Question 16

Accessibility

Answer 16

· Attention is often directed by the accessibility of categories or schemas that we already have (Higgins, 1996)
· Accessible categories are readily and automatically primed by features of the stimulus domain to make sense of the intrinsically ambiguous nature of social information
-> activation of accessible categories or schemas in memory that influence how we process new information

Question 17

Priming – Williams and Bargh (2008)

Answer 17

· 41 participants assigned to temperature condition, primed by holding a hot or iced coffee (‘unrelated’ to the study)
· Had to evaluate a person on the given traits (same as Asch’s study), those who held the warm coffee felt more interpersonal warmth. No awareness of the physical experience
Experiences of physical warmth (or coldness) increase feelings of interpersonal warmth (or coldness) – without the person’s awareness of this influence

Question 18

Heuristics

Answer 18

· Cognitive short-cuts – reduce complex problems
· Reduce complex problem solving to simpler judgmental operations
Accurate inferences most of the time

Question 19

Representative heuristic

Answer 19

· How similar an example is to someone else
· Participants were given a short story about Linda, asked about statements about Linda afterwards and asked what they thought would be true
· Use stereotypes, ignore statistics that Linda is a bank teller, not a bank teller and a feminist
· We assign instances to categories based on overall similarity or resemblance to the category
-> The more instance X looks like category Y, the more we think X belongs to Y

Question 20

Availability heuristics

Answer 20

· We estimate the frequency or likelihood of an event based on how quickly/easily it comes to mind
· Tend to rely on immediate examples
· What is more likely to be true, more likely words start with K or third letter is a K
Participants underestimated and said first letter, easier to think of words starting with K

Question 21

Anchoring and adjustment

Answer 21

· Inferences are tied to initial standards/or schemas
· -> We base or judgments on first suggestions, ourselves or contextual anchors
Is the population of Turkey more or less than 30,000,000? Asked what their estimate? (actual is 82,000,000), participants used 30,000,000 to sway their decision

Question 22

Antecedents of affect

Answer 22

· Cognition focused on thinking rather than feeling
· Before the emotional response
· Appraisals produce a variety of emotions (Smith & Lazarus, 1990)
· Primary: quick & automatic
· e.g. How relevant / important is what is happening right now? Is this good or bad/safe or dangerous?
· Secondary: more complex, relate to accountability and coping e.g. How responsible am I for what is happening?
Can I handle and adjust to this situation? Do I expect this situation to improve?

Question 23

Consequences of affect

Answer 23

· After the emotional response
· Emotions & mood influence thought, judgment and behaviour
· Affect–infusion model (Forgas, 1994, 1995, 2002)
· - Direct access: directly access schemas or judgment stored in memory
· - Motivated processing: judgments based on specific motivation (goal, repair mood)
· - Heuristic processing: rely on cognitive short-cuts or heuristics
- Substantive processing: deliberate and carefully construct judgment from variety of sources