Social Cognition Flashcards
Social Cognition
How human thought, feeling and behaviour is influenced and has influence on other people
–> Subconcious
Gestalt Psychology
Lewin 1951
Understanding and perceiving the whole sum of an object rather than its components
–> The whole influences the components and not vice versa
Configural Model (Solomon Asch 1946)
Impression formation based on central traits
e.g. warmth (good/bad)
Primacy effect
Earlier presented information has more influence on impression
Recency effect
Later presented infromation has more effect on impression
less common
Effect of positive and negative information on impression
Without info –> favourable impression
one negative info –> disproportionate significance
–> biased towards negativity
Why do we remember negative information more strongly?
- its unusual and distinctive
- signifies potential danger
–> sleeper effect
Stereotype
widely shared assumption of people in certain groups
Does attractiveness influence impression
yes! attractive people are seen as ‘good’, more likeable and more competent
–> first impression, primacy effect
Social Judgability
Perception of whether it is acceptable to judge a specific target
Personal (idiosyncratic) construct
Different people form different impressions of the same person
Cognitive consistency
People try to reduce inconsistency in their cognition
–> inconsistency is unpleasant
cognitive miser
The human mind is a cognitive miser because it tends to use the least demanding cognitive process to solve problems and produce behaviour
Motivated Tactician
We have multiple cognitive processes to choose from - motivated tacticians choose based on goals, motives and needs
Schema
A cognitive structure about a concept, in order to make sense if a person, situation, event or place
Self schema
Information of ourselves
–> a concept of who we are
Person schema
individualized schemas about specific people
Role schemas
schema about role accupants or social groups
Script
Schema about an event
Social category
A group of people, places and things that have commonalities and shared characteristics
Prototype
A representative for a category
–> usually the most extreme avarage
fuzzy set
the way categories are organized
–> no individual fits perfectly a prototype
examplar
a representative for a category
associative networks
affectively, causally or associatively linked attributes
- -> nodes of ideas are connected by associative links
e. g. bacon and eggs
–> priming
Ways to change cognitive schemas
Rothbart
- Bookkeeping - gradual change due to evidence
- Conversion - sudden change due to disconfirming evidence
- Subtyping - inconsistent info causes the formation of subcategories
Salience
Attention capturing/idiosyncratic information
Vividness
Intrinsic property of information that is:
- emotionally interesting
- encrete and image provoking
- close in time and place
Accessability
The ease of recall of categories / schemas that exist in our head
–> primed to be used to interprete behaviour
Behavioural decision theory
Einhorn / Hogart 1981
A set of normative models for making accurate influences
Base-Rate information
factual and statistical information of an entire group or an event
–> often underused
Illusory correlation
Cognitive exagggeration of co-occurrences of two stimuli or events caused by:
- association
- distinctiveness
- -> association networks, priming
- -> negative events are distinctive as are minority groups
- -> demonstrateed by Chapman - studends became a list of words and had to say how often words were paired together
- they overestimated meaninful pairs and distinctive pairs
- minority groups are distinctive and negative traits are distinctive so they go good together –> prejudice
Heuristics - types
cognitive short cuts
- Representative - similarity
- Availability - how fast they are available
- Anchoring and adjustment - tied to initian schemas
affect infusion model
social judgement reflects current mood (directly or indirectly)
Naive psychologist
Heider 1958
Theory about how people intuitively attribute behaviour of others internally or externally –> more often internally/dispositionally
- model of social cognition where we use a cause-effect analysis to understand peoples behaviours
Internal / External Attribution
Determining causality in people´s behaviour:
Assesing the cause of behaviour
- internally –> to dispositional factors
- exteernally –> to situational factors
Correspondent Inference Theory
Jones and Davis 1965
people make causal attributions of bahaviour to underlying dispositions (internally)
–> we like this because dispositions are stable and give a sense of control
- -> especially when actions are
1. freely chosen
2. have non-common effects
3. are not socially desirable
4. are high in personalism (are related to ourselfs)
Outcome bias
The error made in evaluating a behaviour when the outcome is already known
or the belief that the outcomes of a behaviour were intendet by the actor
Covariation Model/Attribution Theory
Kelley 1967
People make causal inferences to why people behave the way they do based on: - Consistency - Distinctiveness - Consensus --> internally or externally attributed
Self-Perception Theory
Bem
We develope attitudes by observing our own behaviour and making self-attributions
Task performance attributions (Weiner)
Peoples success or failure is attributed causally to internal or external factors
- Locus
- Stability
- Controllability
–> determines the emotion felt towards someones success or failure
False consensus effect
We see our own behaviour as more typical than it is and expect other people to think in the same way
Actor-observer effect/bias
The tendency to attribute our own bahaviour externally and others internally
–> their behaviour is more stable and predictable than our own
Self enhancing bias
we take credit for our own success (internal attribution)
self protecting bias
we explain away our own negative behaviour (external attribution)
self handicapping
Publicly making advance external attributions for our anticipated faliure
Belief in a just world
good things happen to good people
bad things happen to bad people
–> people get what they deserve
Illusion of control
Belief that we have more control over our world than we actually do
Correspondence bias /
Fundamental Attribution error
The general tendency to overly attribute behaviour to stable underlying dispositions and to under-emphasize situational factors
–> correspondent inference thory (Jones and Davis)
because of:
- selective perception
- wrong expectations
Ultimate Attribution error (Pettigrew)
Fundamental attribution error on group basis
positive things for ingroup internally for out group externally and vice versa for negative things
- -> caused by Ethnocentrism- the preference for all aspects of our ingroup
- group enhancing bias
- -social identity theory–self-esteem
Essentialism
> Behaviour is considered to reflect underlying, immutable and innate properties of people or the groups they belong to
Social encoding
1) Pre-attentive analysis – non-conscious scanning of environment
2) Focal attention – conscious identification and categorization of the stimuli
3) Comprehension – meaning is given
4) Elaborative reasoning– stimulus linked to knowledge
Implicit Personality Theory
General principle what sorts of characteristics go together to form certain types of personalities
Example experiment
Thought surpression
–> do not think of the White Bear
Rebound effect - When we suppress thoughts but then they come back stronger
- -> thought surpression can lead to obsession
- -> creates availablitiy heuristic
- -> emotional catharisis helps (no bottled up feelings)
- -> surpression can backfire
- -> can lead to addiction- not being able to stop to smoke because of thought surpression
Asch´s experiment - Configural Model
People read one of two lists of seven adjectives describing a person
- one including the word warm and one including the word cold
- -> people evaluated the person whose list incluede warm more favourably
–> central traits have more influence - warmth
–> replicated by Kelley
Changing schemans example
Trial Lawyers US
They introduce inadmissible evidence wich is immediatle instructed to be disregarded by the jury –> but the first impression lingers even if it was false
- -> especially if it was negative –> very distinctive
- primacy effect
Heider and Simmel experiment
–> looking for causes of peoples behaviour to discover their motives
people were asked to describe the movement of abstract geometric figures
- -> they described them like humans with intentions to act in certain ways
- -> pervasive need for causal explanations
Experiment - fundamental attribution error
–> freedom of choice in writing a speech
Students who freely chose to write a pro- or an anti-Castro speech were attributed with a pro- or anti-Castro attitude respectively.
–> Although less strong, this same tendency to attribute the speech to an underlying disposition (the fundamental attribution error) prevailed when the writers had no choice and were simply instructed to write the speech.
Example self handycapping
Berglas and Jones
Students had problems that were solvable or unsolvable and then could choos a performance enhancing or inhibiting drug
- ->Students who had done well on a solvable puzzle could attribute their performance internally (e.g. to ability): anticipating an equally good performance on a second similar task, they chose a performance-enhancing drug, Actavil, rather than a performance-impairing drug, Pandocrin
- ->Students who had done well on a not-solvable puzzle could only attribute their performance externally (e.g. to luck): with the prospect of an equivalent performance on the second task they chose the performance-impairing drug, as the self-handicapping option.
