Week 3 - Social cognition Flashcards
Social cognition
How we interpret, remember, and understand information that we receive about the people and situations that surround us every day
Social information
- Social information are bases of our attitudes, judgments, and behavior (Schemas!)
- Social information are interpreted (Construal!)
- We are really highly susceptible to erroneous judgments!
Types of social information
- (Misleading) Firsthand Information
- (Misleading) Secondhand Information
- Minimal Information
Firsthand Information
Information about the world that we get from direct experience
(Misleading) Firsthand Information: Pluralistic Ignorance
Misperceptions about group norms due to individual motivations not to deviate from those norms
- Occurs whenever people act in ways that conflict with their private beliefs because of a concern for the social consequences
Pluralistic Ignorance - Illusory group consensus
Behavior is easier to read than the mind but behavior does not necessarily reflect the mind so people make faulty inferences of the norm and because people have strong motivations to follow the norm -> People believe in and rely on these “false” norms as information which are misleading!
(Misleading) Firsthand Information: Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
The tendency to act in ways that bring about the very outcome that was expected
Secondhand Information
Information that comes from other sources (like newspapers, books, magazines, internet, gossip, etc.)
(Misleading) Secondhand Information: Biases in Secondhand Information
1) Ideological Distortions
- Distorting or suppressing some elements of a story to foster certain beliefs or behaviours and fulfill an ideological agenda
2) Desire to Entertain (“If it bleeds, it leads”)
- News and headlines: the more dramatic, the better
(Misleading) Secondhand Information: The “Bad-News Bias”
Violence depicted on TV can make the world appear more dangerous than it really is, especially when the TV images are similar to your actual environment.
Minimal information
Snap judgement - Thin slicing: the ability to infer a person’s personality, character, or other traits after brief exposure - Two dimensions stand out: Trustworthiness Dominance
Accuracy of Snap Judgments
Consistency between brief impression and thoughtful judgments
How do we seek social information
Confirmation bias: The tendency to test a proposition by searching for evidence that would support it
This is not necessarily intentional—people often simply fail to realize that counter-evidence are important too!
Confirmation bias (Personal perception)
People asked to determine a particular trait of another individual asked questions that focused on that particular trait.
How do we process and interpret social information
1) Top-down processing
2) Heuristics