Social Cognition Flashcards
Social Cognition
Study of cognitive processes and structures that influence and are influenced by social behavior
Dominant perspective to explain social behavior
impression formation and person perception are important aspects of social cognition
Sometimes even criticized for being too cognitive, not relating cognitive processes to language, social interaction and social structure
Behaviorism (Skinner, Thorndike, Watson )
Shift in explaining behavior based on overt observations, responses to stimuli in the environment based on reinforcement schedules (rewards/punishments
Cognitive Consistency
People people try to remain consistency in their cognitions, find inconsistency disturbing and therefore avoid it
naive psychology/scientist
People want to understand the world and use therefore rational, scientific-like, cause-effect analyses
but these are often biased (having to few information or motivations of self-interest when drawing conclusions)
Supports attribution theories
cognitive miser
People try to produce generally adaptive behavior and therefore use their least complex and demanding cognitions, to think in an easy and time-saving way
Because we can only process a limited amount of information, we take cognitive shortcuts/heuristics and our conclusions tend to be biased
Motivated tactician
Emphasizes importance of motivation in our thinking: we want to achieve personal goals, motives and needs
People therefore have multiple cognitive strategies available, which they choose in a tactic way
Configural model (Solomon Asch 1946)
Gestalt based model of impression formation
Gestalt view: impressions are formed as a whole, based on central cues
Traits= person characteristics (habitual patterns of behavior, thought and emotion)
central traits= have a huge influence on our final impression, Influence meaning of other traits and our perceived relationship among traits
Peripheral traits= significant less of an impact on final impression
biases of social thinking
Primacy and recency (effect found by Asch 1946)
Positivity and negativity
Personal Constructs (George Kelly 1955)
Implicit personality theories
Physical appearance
Stereotypes
Social judgeability
Primacy and order of presentation effect
Primacy: earlier presented information has more of an influence on social cognition (people pay more attention/ primary information acts as central cues)
order of presentation effect
Primacy: earlier presented information has more of an influence on social cognition (people pay more attention/ primary information acts as central cues)
eg. Ash experiment where first presented traits had more influence on final impression on the character=positive traits first/negative traits last)
Recency: later presented information has more impact on final impression formation (can happen when people are tired, distracted
Positivity
Positivity: If we lack negative information we have the tendency to form positive impressions and assume the best of others
Negativity: attracts our attention more (we are biased)
Especially: negative information is unusual and distinctive
Could be a signal for potential danger
harder to change negative impression once it is formed
Personal Constructs (George Kelly 1955)
We can form different expressions of the same person and we have our own way to characterize people
EG. To me humor is the most important organizing principle to form my impression of a person (others: prefer intelligence)
Develop over time, hard to change
Implicit personality theories
Theories about what sort of characteristics go together from certain types of personality (eg. intelligent and not self-centered)
Widely shared in cultures but differ between cultures
Resistant to change and based on personal experience
Stereotype
Simplified and evaluative images of a social group and its members
Salient characteristic of people we first meet: what group/category they belong to
Link to topic prejudice and discrimination
We try to make information we receive about others consistent with our stereotype
Try to remain cognitive consistency (eg. Intelligence does not go along together with our stereotype of a working men)
Social judgeability
We consider: Is it socially acceptable to judge a person?
We are unlikely to judge others if social rules/laws forbid it „politically incorrect“
If target perceived as socially judgeable, we have a greater confidence (eg. German-Jews Second World War)
Link to topic prejudice and discrimination
Schemas
Schemas are sets of cognitions that are connected with each other (thoughts, beliefs, attitudes)
Schema help us to know, what to do=If we only have limited information, schema help us to quickly make sense of a person, situation or location
By Bartlett: cognitive structures that represent knowledge about a concept or a type of stimulus (including its attributes and the relations amongst those structure)
Types of schemas
Person schemas
Role schemas
Scripts
Content-free schemas
Self-schemas
Social group schema
Person schemas
Knowledge about specific individuals (eg. best friend, politician)
Role schemas
Knowledge of structures about role occupant (eg. doctor=stranger, allowed to ask you to undress)
Scripts
Schema about an event (eg. having a party, going to the restaurant
Lack of relevant schemas= feeling disorientated, frustrated (eg. feeling lost in foreign countries)
Content-free schemas
More number of rules for processing information or on how to attribute a cause to someone’s behavior eg. Kelley: causal schemata
Example: If you like john and john likes Tom, in order to maintain balance, you should also like Tom
Self-schemas
How we structure our knowledge about ourselves, later on forms our self-concept
We store information aboutourselves in a similar, but more complex way than about others
Attributes important in our self schema= also important in the schematic perception of others
Social group schema
A widely shared schema about a social group is a stereotype
Categories
We apply our schemas by forming categories about persons, events or situations
People represent categories as fuzzy (=ungeordnet) sets of attributes/characteristics called prototypes
Prototypes
typical/ideal member of a category
prototype uni lecturer, attributes=glasses, intelligent, self confident
When categories are in competition (eg. environmentalists vs capitalists, prototype can be extreme member (eg. most radical environmentalist)
Difference between schemas and categories/Prototypes
Quite similar and often interchangeable: we activate schemas once a person/event/situation is categorized
Schemas: systematic and specified organization
Prototype: unorganized/fuzzy representation of a category
How are Categories organized?
HIERARCHICALLY
More inclusive categories (more members and attributes eg. European)
Less inclusive categories (few members and attributes eg. Italian, British) are included in more exclusive categories
People prefer to rely on intermediate-level categories (middle) than on very inclusive/exclusive ones =Not too broad/not too specific
How we organize categories depends on SITUATIONAL and MOTIVATIONAL factors
Family resemblance
= Some categories belong to a family of categories, even though they vary from the prototype
EG. Concerts (heavy mental, classical music..)
Exemplars
= specific example of a member of a category
often we prefer to use exemplars from using prototypes as a standard of a category (eg. Represent Category American in terms of Barack Obama/Trump)
Especially to represent outgroups they belong to
What are Associative networks?
We can represent our categories as associative networks: our traits/beliefs/behavior is linked to emotional or causal association
Model of memory: we form associative links by connecting nodes (Knoten) and ideas = spread cognitive activation
Priming
categories that we often use and that are consistent with our current goals and needs come to mind quicker (woman who wants a baby sees babies everywhere)
Stereotypes
They are simplifies and generalized images about members of social groups
Link to prejudice and discrimination
Not necessarily „wrong“-they serve as a source of information
People easily stereotype, but stereotypes are slow to change
Perceptual accentuation (Henri Tajfel)
The process of categorization highlights similarities/differences we perceive between groups (link=categorization produces stereotypes)
Accentuation principle (Hervorhebung):
A stimuli evokes perceptual accentuation of intra/inter-category similarities on dimensions with the categorization
Effect can be even stronger when the categorization is personally relevant to us
Or when we are uncertain about making judgements
Criticism on Tajfels Theory: categorization can‘t explain how stereotypes about specific groups are formed
Using Schemas
People orientate more on subtypes than on superordinate/subordinate categories
EG. Career women, NOT women or lawyer
Prefer to access stereotype and role schemas from trait schemas
EG. Politician, NOT intelligent
We use schemas automatically and habitually or when they are accessible and salient in our memory
We especially use schemas when they are relevant to our self and congruent to our mood
When they are based on earlier rather than on later information (=primacy effect)
The cost of being wrong
if high, we rather use less schemas and complex cognitions
Often high when we depend on actions/attitudes of others (get rewards/fear punishments)
We pay more attention, try to get more information and notice schema-inconsistent information
The cost of being indecisive
if high, we rather use more schemas (any decision might be better than no decision)
If we have performance pressure and less time , feel distracted and anxious
Individual differences
Attributional complexity= people have more/less complex explanations of other people
Uncertainty orientation= some people have interest in gaining information, some prefer to stay certain
Need for cognition=some people prefer to think more/less deeply about things
Need for cognitive disclosure= some are more/less quickly to make decisons and judgements
Cognitive complexity= people differ in the complexity of their cognitive processes and representations
Accessibility: It is easier to recall schemas that we already have in mind
We differ on self-schemas, political, gender and sex-role schemas
Acquiring schemas
The more processes/instance a schema includes, the more abstract and less concrete it becomes
More experience with person/instance, the more complex the schema
Schemas become more resilient=rather include expectations to remain validity of the schema
Changing schemas
Schemas do not easily change as we tend to avoid cognitive inconsistency (rather reinterpretate information)
Only if they are really inaccurate, they change: (3 ways Rothbart 1981)
Bookkeeping
Conversion
Sub-typing
depends also on how easy it is to change schemas (which extend it is logical/practical disconfirmable)
EG. Honest person cheats, likely that schema changes (honest person don’t cheat)
Bookkeeping
slow change of schema (if there appears only some schema inconstistent information)
Conversion
sudden and massive change of a schema (if the inconsistent information accumulates)
Sub-typing
= schema turns into a sub category (to store/process disconfirming evidence)
EG women believes that men are violent and encounters many who are not: form subtype of non-violent men to contrast with violent men
Four stages of social encoding (way in which we process/store external stimuli in the mind)-Bargh 1984
- Pre-attentive analysis = We scan our environment automatically
- Focal attention= we define stimuli and categorize them consciously
- Comprehension= We start to comprehend the stimuli by giving them a meaning (verstanden)
- Elaborative reasoning (by linking stimulus to other knowledge, we allow more complex inferences
What attracts our ATTENTION first?
Salience
Vividness
Accessibility
Salience
stimuli that catch our attention are salient
people can also be salient, attract our attention, be more influential in groups
they often stand out from other stimuli (eg. single male in a female group)