social cognition and biases Flashcards
What is social cognition?
-How we process and store social info
-How this affects our perceptions and behaviour
Define attribution
-Process of assigning a cause to own and others behaviour, understanding why someone behaves the way they do
Define social schemas
-Knowledge about concepts, where you make sense with limited info and facilitate top down processing (theory-driven)
Define category
-Organised hierarchically (associative network)
-Fuzzy sets of features organised around a prototype e.g. if asked to name a vehicle you are more likely to say car over horse
Define prototypes
-Cognitive representation of typical defining features of a category (average category member)
What is causal attribution?
-An inference process where perceivers attribute an effect to one or more causes
What is motivated tactician?
-Think carefully and scientifically around certain things (when important or necessary)
-Think quickly and use heuristics for others (when less important)
What is a cognitive miser?
-Characterises people as using least complex and demanding cognitions that produce adaptive behaviours
Describe the Naive Psychologist theory (Heider, 1958)
-Using rational and scientific cause and effect analyses to understand their world
-Abstract objects and shapes, ascribe human qualities despite them just being objects
-Look for causes in others behaviour to discover their motives
-Need to identify internal (personal/dispositional) and external (situational) factors
Describe the Attrubutional Theory (Weiner, 1979)
-Causality of success or failure
-Multi-dimensional approach
-Locus = internal/external (Rotter,1966)
-Stability = natural ability/mood (is the cause a stable or unstable one)
-Controllability = effort/luck (e.g. to what extent is the future task under the actors control)
What is attributional retraining?
-People encouraged to make more optimistic attributions
-Outcomes are controllable
-Successes attributed to internal causes
Describe the study by Parker et al (2018) on University Athletes
-Prone to difficult transition from school
-RCT used (training or waitlist)
-Better grades explained by increased perceived academic control
What is the Correspondent Inference Theory (Jones and Davis, 1965) ?
-Internally or externally caused
-Cues e.g. act was freely chosen, not socially desirable, personalism and hedonic relevance
-Correspondent inference e.g. act reflects a true personality trait of a person
-Overly focused on internal attribution
(R) Define Hedonic relevance
-Refers to behaviour that has important direct consequences for self
(R) Define personalism
-Behaviour that appears to be directly intended to benefit or ham oneself rather than others
What is the Covariation Model (Kelley, 1967)?
-Use multiple observations to identify factors that co-vary with behaviour
-Assign causal role to the factors
-Whether behaviour internal or external is a key thing
-Contains consistency, distinctiveness and consensus
Describe these 3 concepts as part of the Covariation model
-Consistency = does this behaviour always co-occur with the cause
-Low = look for different cause
-High = these are linked
-Distinctiveness = is the behaviour exclusively linked to this cause os is it a common reaction
-High = internal attribution
-Low = attribute to external cause
-Consensus = do others react in the same way to the situation
-High = strengthens attribution to external cause
-Low = internal attribution
(R) What did Kelley (1972) introduce to deal with us having incomplete information?
-Causal schemata - Experience-based beliefs about how certain types of causes interact to produce an effect
What are the applications from this study?
-Used in mental health research
-People with depression attribute negative events to internal, global and stable causes “i failed because i am stupid” (Abramson et al., 1989)
-Key aspect in psychotherapy
What are attributional biases?
-Systematic errors indicative of shortcuts, gut feeling and intuitions
-Use our opinions in representative of others
What is fundamental attribution error?
-Tendency to attribute behaviour to enduring dispositions (internal) rather than situational factors (external)
-Even if there are clear situational causes e.g. Ross et al (1977) Knowledgeable quiz master
-Found that the people who were assigned quiz masters were later labelled as more knowledgeable that the people who were assigned to answer the questions
How can saliency effect this?
-Target most salient = internal attribution most accessible
-More likely to forget situational causes = dispositional shift
What is actor-observer bias?
-Jones and Nisbett (1972)
-E.g. If you are rude to a shop assistant then you may say that that is due to your personal stresses (external attribution), whereas if a shop assistant is rude to you, you may say that they are simply just a rude individual (internal attribution)
Why does this occur?
-Perceptual focus - different perspectives on a situation
-Informational difference - you know more about yourself than you would other people
What is the false consensus effect?
-Seeing our own behaviour as being more typical than it actually is
What are the moderators in this scenario?
-Biases moderated by different factors
-Positive behaviour = disposition more likely
-Perspective taking reverses effect e.g. put yourself in someone else’s position
What is self-serving bias?
-Success = internal ‘i am smart’
-Failure = external ‘the exam was hard’
-Due to motivational factors such as maintenance of self esteem, split into self enhancing and self protecting bias
-Due to cognitive factors such as expecting to succeed, internal attributions (can also occur at group level)
What are the different heuristics?
-Cognitive shortcut
-Availability heuristic
-Representative heuristic
-Anchoring and adjustment heuristic
What is cognitive shortcut?
-Avoid effort
-Rule of thumb (not a complex mental judgment)
-Quick and easy
What is availability heuristic?
-Judge frequency or probability of events by how easy it is to think of examples (memory accessibility)
What is representative heuristic?
-Categorise based on similarity between instance and prototypical category members
What is anchoring and adjustment heuristic?
-Starting point influences subsequent judgements
