Week Seven Flashcards
thought
the internal symbols and language that we use which is conscious.
cognition
‘conscious’ thinking plus underlying nonconscious processes that are automatic (e.g. memory, executive functions).
social cognition
focuses on how cognition is affected by wider and more immediate social contexts and on how cognition affects our social behaviour.
impression formation: physical features
○ Individuals and cultural associations are made between physical features and psychological, personality and social characteristics.
○ Psychical beauty is often connected to good or moral personality traits.
○ Consequences
§ More likely to meet attractive strangers than intelligent strangers.
§ More likely to help attractive strangers.
○ Physical features can also have competing ideas.
§ I.e. that baby faced people are innocent but also not powerful.
○ Clothing
§ Can signal authority, and enhance factors like attractiveness.
impression formation: non-verbals
○ Eye contact
§ Provides a lot of useful social information’s (e.g. gaze, direction and duration etc.).
§ Facial expressions (smiling or frowning can indicate certain things).
§ Body language (body angle, body movements, personal space etc.)
§ Non-verbal behaviours are largely culturally based.
○ Deficiencies in ‘theory of mind’ (metalizing) - they are mind blind.
§ Issues with autistic people and eye contact
observation of behaviours
○ Direct observation
§ Someone sitting quietly in the corner at a loud party=shy
§ Someone pushing in could be rude
§ Information from others behaviour can be given by other people.
§ First impressions are generally automatic and intuitive
§ Generally accurate, but depends on a range of factors.
§ Forming more considered impressions requires great efforts and greater motivation
□ Seek out more detailed information about the person.
cognitive algebra
§ We mathematically combine all impressions to form an overall impression.
○ This doesn’t take any context into account.
§ Can take context/situation into account by assigning weights.
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salience
§ Salient information is information that ‘stands out’.
§ Often behaving in ways that do not fit (their social group, people in general).
§ Top down factors (if someone can help with goals or if someone has told you to watch them etc.)
§ Bottom up factors (things about the stimulus)
valence
§ Refers to the positivity or negativity of the information
Positivity is default, however, we rarely expect negative answers.
order effects
§ Primacy is information that arrives first, we remember more at the state.
§ Recency is information that comes last, we remember the last information received.
§ Primacy information disproportionately influences final overall impression, influences how we interpret late information and is resistant to change and perseveres even when we know it to be false.
social encoding
pre-attentive analysis –> focal attention –> comprehension –> elaborate reasoning
node
A node is a piece of information
connecting nodes
○ When we perceive 2 things together, the stronger the connection between them in our brains
○ Nodes get connected into networks that can, over time, develop into ‘schemas;
schema
§ Schema is a cognitive construct that represents knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus, including its attributes and relations among those attributes.
A network of social information
types of schemas
§ Person: specific individuals
§ Trait: characteristics, internal dispositions, personality factors
§ Behaviour: types of behaviour (running etc.)
§ Group/role: types of groups or prescribed occupants in a group (politicians; prime minister etc.)
§ Event (scripts): situations or contexts
Self: personal schemas
- social schemas (organise impressions and perceptions of people, allow us to quickly categorise a person).
content dimensions
- Two basic dimensions
○ Warmth (intentions to help or harm)
§ First judgement made about a person
§ May most attention towards ‘negative warmth’
○ Competence (ability to enact intentions)
§ People are biased towards seeing competence
§ ‘positive’ competence is more informative.
impressions
- Our impressions form a basis for how we interact with people
- How we behave towards a person influences how they behave towards us
○ If we think someone is aggressive, and behave as though they are aware of this, they are more likely to be aggressive and such a self fulfilling prophesy emerges.
- How we behave towards a person influences how they behave towards us
altering impressions: modify the schema
□ Bookkeeping: schema gradually changes as more evidence accumulates, overcoming initial impressions.
□ Conversion: people hold on to the initial schema until the evidence against it is overwhelming, then abandon it for a new one.
□ Subtyping: place contextual boundaries around a schema, and build a difference schema for other contexts.
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attack the schema
provide disconfirming or more nuanced information to change the schema.
modifying impressions: enhance the schema holder
§ Induce a positive mood in them, as positive emotions can lead to more positive impressions
§ However, this can backfire if overdone.
attribution
- Cognitions about the cause and effect of behaviours
○ How we make inferences from behaviour to what a person is like
§ Personal vs situational
§ Global vs specific
§ Stable vs unstable
§ Controllable vs uncontrollable
○ How we attribute the causes to behaviour.
information that contributes to attribution
§ Consistency: how often does a particular behaviour accompany a particular stimulus.
§ Distinctiveness: how much does a particular behaviour ‘bling’ to a particular stimulus or many stimuli.
§ Consensus: how idiosyncratic is the behaviour?
○ Attribution is made based on the combination of these factors.
correspondent inferences
- When we make an attribution from a behaviour to a characteristics this is called correspondent inference
- Dispositional causes are stable, so they make others predictable and therefore increase the sense of control we have over our world.
§ Thus these inferences are popular, we tend to like making internal attributions.
cues used to make correspondent inferences
- freely chosen behaviour
- unique or specified effects
was not socially desireable behaviour - personally impactful (hedonic relevance)
- directed to or at us (personalism)
attribution applications
self attributions (how we understand ourselves)
§ Understanding our self concept
- Attributions styles (how we attain goals)
§ Goal attainment and mental health implications
- Interpersonal relationships
§ Relationship satisfaction and divorce.
self perception theory
self-attribution
- The thoughts and feelings we have about the world are only weak cues about what we are really like. - We know our selves based on what we see ourselves doing
attribution styles
- How much control do you have?
- Individual difference in application of attribution
- Internals: believe they have significant control over their destiny and that they can make things happen.
- Externals: believe they have little control over what happens to them
- Implications for mental health, self-efficacy, motivation, perseverance and goal attainment.
- Individual difference in application of attribution
interpersonal relations
- Attributional conflict
- Partners have divergent explanation for the behaviour of the other partner.
- If one is internal and another is external there can be an issue.- Increased marriage satisfaction where partners (heterosexual).
- Use attributions of internal stable and controllability to explain positive spousal behaviours.
- Attributions of external, unstable, specific, uncontrollable to explain negative behaviours.
- Increased marriage satisfaction where partners (heterosexual).
attributional biases
- Biases in attribution of others and our own behaviours.
- We tend to attribute behaviours of others more to personal factors than to situational factors.
- We tend to attribute our own negative behaviours more to situational factors.
- Known as actor-observer bias
self-enhancing bias
We tend to attribute positive outcomes more to personal factors but negative outcomes to situational factors.
internal attribution
the process of assigning the cause of our own or others’ behaviour to internal or dispositional factors.
external attribution
Assigning the cause of our own or others’ behaviour to external or environmental factors.
dispositional cause
A dispositional cause is a stable cause that renders people’s behaviours predictable and thus increases our own sense of control over the world. As such, people like to make correspondent inferences.
kelly’s covariation model
People assign the cause of behaviour to the factor that covaries most closely with the behaviour.
- We use the covariation model to decide whether to attribute a behaviour to internal dispositions (personality) or external environmental factors (social pressure).
to do this, people look at:
- consistency- whether the behaviour occurs consistently
- distinctiveness- whether the behaviour is distinctive to a particular situation or person.
consensus- whether everyone behaves the same in the situation.
