W3: Social Cognition Flashcards
What is social cognition?
How we interpret, remember and understand information that we receive about people and situations that surround us every day.
What is the role of construals and schemas in social cognition?
- Construals: social information is interpreted (very subjective)
- Schemas: social information are the basis of our attitude, judgements and behaviour
What are the different types of social information?
- Firsthand information
- Secondhand information
- Minimal information
What is firsthand information?
Information about the world that we get from direct experience, which can be misleading.
- Pluralistic Ignorance: misconceptions about group norms due to individual motivations not to deviate from the norms.
a. illusory group consensus (behaviour is easier to read than the mind, no questions asked about what is going on)
b. faulty inferences
c. strong motivations to follow norms
d. rely on false norms - misleading. (e.g. college drinking) - Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: the tendency to act in ways that would bring about an expected outcome (teacher and student)
What is second-hand information?
Information that comes from other sources (like newspapers, magazines, the internet, gossip etc.) might be misleading.
- Ideological Distortions: distorting or suppressing some elements of a story to foster certain beliefs/behaviours and fulfil an ideological agenda
- Desire to Entertain: news & headlines: the more dramatic, the better (in the world as seen through the media, 80% of crime is violent. But in actual fact, only 20% is violent)
- Bad-News Bias: positive relationship between how much time people spend watching the news and their fear of victimization.
(exacerbated by, e.g. safety of neighbourhood) - Fake News: to sway people’s opinions, esp those who do not have an educational background
What is minimal information?
Inferring personality from physical experiences (thin-slicing)
- trustworthiness
- dominance
How do we seek information?
CONFIRMATION BIAS: the tendency to test a proposition by searching for evidence that would support it
- not intentional (counter-evidence is important too)
- e.g. tennis win or lose (Crocker, 1982)
- person perception (e.g. introvert vs extrovert)
How is information processed?
- Top-Down Processing
- theory driven
- filter and interpret data based on what you already know
- judgements and decisions based on pre-existing knowledge and expectations - Bottom-Up Processing
- data-driven
- putting pieces of ‘objective’ information and seeing what you get
- judgements and decisions made based on stimuli encountered - Heuristics
What is a schema’s role in top-down processing?
When you need to do something, you rely on the most readily accessible schema.
SCHEMAS GUIDE:
1. attention: the knowledge we bring to a given situation enables us to direct our attention to what’s most important and largely ignore everything else (you see what you expect to see)
- memory
- schema-consistent information is remembered well! (but also heavily schema-inconsistent)
- confirmation bias: you’re on the lookout for behavior that confirms your schema, so you’ve usually paid enough attention to it to successfully encode, store, and retrieve it
- case: Participants had better recall of information that was consistent with what they believed was the wife’s occupation. - inferences/construals
- new information is almost always processed with some top-down influence
- Donald research - behaviour
- priming: the temporary unconscious activation of a schema (people automatically behave in line with activated schema)
- subliminal vs supraliminal priming
Which schema is the most strongly activated?
- recent activation (e.g. donald)
- frequent activation (relies a lot on of everyday life, e.g. gamblers consistently thinking of money)
- expectations (you pre-empt that something will happen; you activate a bargaining schema when making decisions with life partner)
What is a heuristic?
A variety of mental operations or rules are commonly used to make quick and efficient judgements/decisions.
Types:
- Representativeness
- Availability
What is the representativeness heuristic?
A phenomenon where people judge the probability of an event by finding a similar or comparable known event and assuming that the probabilities would be similar.
- due to base rate neglect: The tendency to underuse information about the relative frequency of events or members of categories within the population.
- e.g. feminist bank teller, sports illustrated jinx
What is the availability heuristic?
A phenomenon where people predict the likelihood of an event based on how easily an example can be recalled.
- Assumption: more common = more probable
- Fluency
- Biased Risk Heuristic (e.g. likelihood of dramatic attacks over commonplace attacks)
e.g. marriage and chores
What is illusory correlation?
The belief that two variables are correlated when in fact they are not
- Representativeness: leads to expectations of associations between two variables (e.g. the past experiences that made you expect that it might rain after you wash your car)
- Availability: when it is seen, it becomes unusually memorable (when it doesn’t occur, you don’t think much. when it does, you get upset and remember it)
(e. g. it always rains right after i wash my car)
