Social Perception Flashcards
How do we Make Sense of the Social World?
- social info continuously bombards our senses
- research focus on how we perceive, understand, store and remember info
Scheme Theory
- social info simplified and organised into cog structure called schemas
- knowledge structures containing general expectations and knowledge of the world
- help to select and process incoming info
- essential for wellbeing
- simplify reality and make it easier to cope with social situations
- maladaptive schemas can affect wellbeing (schema therapy - Young, 2003)
Schema Types
Person
Self
Role
Event
Role of Schemas
Mental representation
- mental structures organise knowledge, evaluation and expectations
Attention
- attention selective
- schemas and expectations guide what we attend to any situation
Categorisation
- understand what something is based on what it’s similar/ different to (McGarty, 1999)
- applied auto and impose order
- use flexible - not all category the same
- prototypes act as cog reference points, most typical example
Why do we Categorise?
- impose organisation on experience
- ultimate heuristic (mental shortcut)
- allow to be cog miser
- S provide info about groups in society (Gilbert and Hixon, 1991)
- clarifies perception of the world
- allows to predict social behaviour (Bargh, Chen and Burrows, 1996)
Effects of Stereotype
- some automatically activated (Casper, Rothermund and Ventura, 2010)
- race, age, gender
- consciously trying to suppress can increase unconscious use
Macrae et al (1994)
Study one - write about male skinhead - conditions: suppression and control - describe second male skin head - suppression result in higher later Study two - write about male skinhead - same conditions - taken to other room to meet - row of chairs with belongings on first - suppression resulted in sitting further away
Bargh, Chen and Burrows (1996)
Behavioural assimilation
- complete scrambled sentence task
- conditions: elderly and control
- directed to lift after task
- confederate times how long
- elderly condition took longer
Stereotype Threat
- risk of confirming neg S about own group (Steele and Aronson, 1995)
- due to worrying may underperform on tasks in the domain
- gender stereotype threat
- woman poor at maths
- threat can result in:
1) fear poor performance will support S - group reputation threat
2) fear poor performance will provide proof conforming to S - self reputation threat
Zhang, Schmander and Hall (2013)
- woman and men complete multiple choice maths test
- stereotype threat induced
- half used own name, half anon
- anon woman outperformed woman using own name
Social Identity Theory
Tajfel and Turner, 1986
- emphasis on group
- based on minimal group studies (Tajfel et al, 1971)
- person identity
- individual characteristics
- social identity
- characteristics related to social category
- competition over resources not only cause of conflict
Minimal Group Paradigm
- lack all characteristics normally associated with a group
- no shared history, interactions and group structure
- group allocation random
- participants chose strategies that favour their group creating intergroup differentiation
Categorisation
- process of identifying self and others as member of social category
- accentuation effect - intercatagory differences and intracategorg similarities accentuated
- reliably produces systematic effect on perception and behaviour
Identity
- us vs. them
- evaluate own social identity positively
- evaluate ingroups positively
Comparison
- positive social identity requires comparison of ingroup and relevant Outgroup
- based on Festinger (1954) social comparison theory
- self enhancement - tend to make favourable comparisons
- intergroup social comparison - compare and evaluate 2 or more groups
- motivated to evaluate ingroups positively to enhance social identity
