social cognition and bias Flashcards
what is social cognition?
How we process and store social information
How this affects our perceptions and behaviour
What is attribution?
The process of assigning a cause to our own and others behaviour
What is social schemas?
Knowledge about concepts and make sense with limited information to facilitate top down processing
What is a category?
Organised hierarchically which is a fuzzy set of features organised around a prototype
What is prototypes?
Cognitive representation of typical defining features of a category
what is causal attribution?
An inference process through which perceivers attribute an effect to one or more causes
what does a naive scientist do?
People are rational and scientific like in making cause effect attributions
what is biased/intuitionist?
information is limited and driven by motivations –> leads to errors and biases
what is a cognitive miser?
People use least complex and demanding info -> processing –> cognitive short cuts
Who came up with naive psychologist?
heider 1958
what did Weiner 1979 come up with?
attributional theory
who came up with correspondent inference theory?
Jones and Davis (1965)
who did Kelley 1967 come up with?
Covariation model
What is homo rationalis? fritz header 1958
analytical, cogent, balanced and logical
hypothesis testing
attribute causes to effects to create a stable
world that makes sense
What are the 3 principles of the naive scientist?
- need to form a coherent view of the world
- need to gain control over the environment
- need to identify internal (personal) vs external (situational) factors
what is the attributional theory?
Causality of success or failure
Internal or external locus
Stability eg natural ability / mood
Controllability eg effort / luck
what is attributional retraining?
people are encouraged to make more optimistic attributions where the outcomes are controllable and successes attributed to internal causes
what is the study to support attributional retraining?
University athletes
Parker et al
Prone to difficult transition from school
Randomised control trial
Attributional training or waitlist control
Attributional training - better grades explained by perceived academic control
what is correspondent inference theory? John and Davis (1965)
Cues
- Act was freely chosen
- Act produced a non common effect
- Not socially desirable
- Hedonic relevance
- Personalism
what is the co variation model?
Use multiple observations to try to identify factors that co vary with behaviour
Assign causal role to the factors
Whether behaviour is internal or external is key
What is consistency in co variation model?
Does this behaviour always co occur with the cause
What is distinctiveness in the co variation model?
is the behaviour exclusively linked to this cause or is it a common reaction
high - I never failed other exams –> attribute to external cause
low - I generally fail exams –> internal attribution
what is consensus in the co variation model?
do other ppl react in the same way to the cause?
high - strengthens attribution to external cause
low - internal attribution
how does mental health link to the co variation model?
people with depression attribute negative events to global, internal and stable causes (abramson et al)
key aspect is psychotherapy where you stop explaining events in an overly pessimistic, self defeating way
What is ross et al false consensus?
would you walk around campus to advertise cafeteria?
Yes (62% also yes)
No (67% also no)
Why ?
Seek out similar others
Salience of own opinion
Self esteem maintenance
what is fundamental attribution error?
- tendency to attribute behaviour to enduring dispositions even when clear situational causes
- why : focus of attention
- target is most salient –> internal attribution most accessible
- more likely to forget situational causes –> dispositional shift
what is self serving bias? (Olson and Ross, 1988)
- success : internal
- failure : external
why does self serving bias occur?
expectations and self esteem
and the intention to succeed
what is heuristics (tversky and kahneman 1974)
- cognitive shortcut
- avoid effort
- rule of thumb, not complex mental judgement
- quick and easy
what are the types of heuristics?
- Availability heuristics
- 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
what is representative heuristic ?
categorise based on similarity between instance and protypical category members and allocate a set of attributes
what is anchoring and adjustment heuristic ?
starting point influences subsequent judgments
