Social cognition// Heuristics Flashcards
Define social cognition
broad term that describes the way people encode, process, remember and use the information in social contexts in order to make sense of behaviours
Naive scientist (Heider)
3 things they look for
combine to look for?
rational and logical in making social inferences - look for:
consesus, consistensy and distinctiveness in info
they then combine these sources to arrive at an INTERNAL or EXTERNAL attribution
fundamental attribution error?
actor-observor bias
fundamental attribution error- shows how we are inclined towards making dispositional attributions when thinking about others behaviour
actor-observor bias- for our own behaviour make situational attributions
cognitive misers?
reluctant to expend cog. resources and they look for any oppurtunity to avoid engaging in the sort of effortful though attributional models
Heurisitcs?
time-saving mental shortcuts that reduce complex judgements to simple rules of thumb(can result in biased info processing) detecting these biases shows heuristics have been used
2 most commonly used heuristics?
1) representativeness = tendency to allocate a set of attributes to someone if they match prototype of group
- quick way of categorising people
- inferences can be made due to category prototype(prone to error)
- ‘base rate fallacy’ - tendency to ignore stats info in favour of representativeness info = can cause stereotype threat
2) availability heuristic = tendency to judge the freq. or probability of an event in terms of how easy it is to think of examples of that event(related to concept of accessibility - how readily concept brought to mind)– different because accessibility is more objective
Schwartz et al study demonstreating availability heuristic
p’s had to recall 12 or 6 examples of times they’d been assertive or unassertive, then rate own assertiveness.
found: 6assertive recalls = reported being more assertive than 12 group
6 unassertive recalls= reported being less assertive than 12
(would think it would be the other way round)
–>explained via availability heurisitc: more difficult to think of 12 than 6, so ps begin to doubt whether they really are assertive/un –> no more examples are ‘available’ to them
The False Consensus Effect (Gross and Miller)
=tendency to exaggrate how common one’s own opinion is in the general population
Ross, Greene and House- sandwich board study asked students to wear board, then asked if they thought other students would
found: individuals choice = they would predict majority would do the same
–>explained by availability: our own self-beliefs are easily recalled from out memory = most available when asked to judge whether others agree
The anchoring heurisitc
tendency to be biased towards the starting value(or anchor) in making quantitative judgements(Wyer)
Plous study: survey during cold war with 2 slightly different questions:
1) is there less than 90% chance of a nuclear war?
2) is there more than 1% chance of a nuclear war?
Condition 1 -estimated 25% chance of war
Condition 2 - estimated 10% chance of war
shows our judgements are influenced by point we start with
(availability heursitic explains: most available source of info relevant to issue)
The motivated tactician - Kruglanski
people are neither naive scientists or cognitive misers.
They are flexible,social thinkers whos choose between multiple cog. strategies based on their current goals,motives and needs
no. of factors determine whether they should be cog. miser or naive scientsit
Macrae, Hewstone and Griffiths outlined a no. of factors that affect whether an individual decides to be a naive scientist or a cognitive miser..
1) time - short of time = use cog. miser
2) cognitive load = heuristics don’t require much thought, can be made on ‘availability’ eg. too much on mibd = heuristics
3) importance - heuristics better for estimates, if decison is important become a naive scientist
4) information level - if have all necessary info = become naive scientist
