Weeks 3-4 Flashcards
What is social cognition?
The cognitive processes and structure that affect and are affected by social context and behaviour.
Focuses on how our thinking processes and thoughts are affectd by wider and more immediate social contexts, andhow thinking and thoughts affect our social behaviour.
How is thought different to cognition?
Thought is a conscious process, or at least something we can be aware of.
Cognition also refers to mental processing that can be largely automatic.
Cognition can’t be observed directly. How do we study it?
We infer from people’s expressions, actions, writings, and sayings.
What is cognitive consistency?
The theory that people feel uncomfortable when their thoughts are contradictory, and engage in all manner of behaviours and rationalisations, including changing their minds, to resolve the inconsistency.
Lost popularity in the 60s as it became clear that people are broadly tolerant of cognitive inconsistency.
Which model of social cognition is characteristed by people using rational scientific-like, cause-effect analyses to understand their world?
Naive scientist model
What type of theory is the naive scientist model?
Attribution theory
Attribution is the process of assigning a cause to our own behaviour and that of others.
What term was used to describe how people are often economical rather than accurate when jumping to a conclusion?
Cognitive miser
What term would Showers and Cantor use to describe fully engaged thinkers who had multiple cognitive strategies available and chose among them based on goals, motives and needs
Motivated tactician
“Sometimes the motivated tactician would choose wisely, in the interests of adaptability and accuracy and somtimes…defensively, in the interests of speed or self-esteem”
What branch of psychology does social cognition borrow research methods from?
Cognitive psychology
How has social neuroscience led to developments in social cognition?
Cognitive activity is monitored by fMRI, which detects and localises electrical activity in the brain associated with cognitive activities or functions.
Different parts of the brain light up when people are thinking positively or negatively about friends or strangers or social categories, and in general about interpersonal processes.
What is the ‘God spot’?
Idea that the human brain has developed to believe in a God in order to improve our survival somehow.
What is a criticism of social cognition?
Some aspects of social cognition focus too much on cognitive activity and brain functioning of an isolated individual and too little on social interaction among individuals and processes within and between groups.
What are Smith and Lazarus’ Seven Appraisals?
Primary
- How relevant is this to my needs and goals?
- Is this good or bad for my needs or goals?
Secondary
- How responsible am I for what is happening?
- How responsible is someone or something else?
- Can I act on this situation to make or keep it more like what I want?
- Can I handle and adjust to this situation however it might turn out?
- Do I expect this situatino to improve or to get worse?
What are Asch’s central traits?
Traits that have a disproportionate influence on the configuration of final impressions, in Asch’s configural model of impression formation. E.g. Warm / cold descriptors will have more of an effect on our impression of someone than polite / blunt.
What are peripheral traits?
Traits that have an insignificant influence on the configuration of final impressions, in Asch’s configural model of impression formation.
How did Asch test his theory trait theory?
He presented students with a 7-trait description of a hypothetical person in which either the word warm or cold, or polite or blunt appeared. The percentage of students assigning other traits to the target was markedly affected when warm was replaced by cold, but not when polite was replaced by blunt.
How do personal constructs challenge the idea of central traits?
Personal constructs are the idea that people have their own idiosyncratic and enduring beliefs about which attributes are most important in making judgements of people.
E.g. One person may value humour, while another values intelligence.
What model of person perception is characterised by enduring general principles about what sorts of characteristics go together to form certain types of personality?
How do these models manifest within and across cultures?
Implicit personality theories
Widely shared within cultures but differ between cultures
Are you more likely to make an impression based on the first things you learn about someone, or based on new information?
How was this studied?
First impressions disproportionately affect your overall impression
Asch found that people had a better impression of a hypothetical person when positive traits were listed first and negative last than vice versa.
How do appearances influence our impressions of people?
Tall men earn more money
Good looking men are perceived as more capable
But the effect is reversed for women! People suspected that women had been promoted for their looks, not their ability.
What are some other issues with appearance-based first impressions?
Racial, ethnic, and gender cues are highly visible, causing people to generate impressions from these cues that may be based on stereotypes.
Are we more likely to give weight to positive or negative attributes when forming impressions?
Why?
Negative
Negative information may have survival value because it signals potential danger.
What is a schema?
Circumscribed and coherent set of interrelated cognitions (e.g. thoughts, beliefs, attitudes) that allows us to quickly make sense of something on the basis of limited information.
Certain cues activate a schema, and then the schema ‘fills in’ missing details to provide a rich set of perceptions, interpretations, and expectations.
Do schemas facilitate top-down (concept- or theory-driven processing) or bottom-up (stimuli- or environment-influenced) processing?
Top-down, concept-driven, theory-driven processing
What is a person schema?
Idiosyncratic schemas we have about specific people
You have a schema for airline pilots (they fly the plane and should not drink on the job). What kind of schema is this?
Role schema
You have a schema for going to a restaurant (you are greeted when you enter, order form the menu, receive your food, etc). What kind of schema is this?
Script schema - schemas about events
What is a self-schema?
Schemas about your self
Often more complex and varied than schemas about other people.
What kinds of schemas do not describe people or categories, but are ‘rules’ about how to process information?
What is an example?
Content-free schemas
E.g. Specifying how to attribute causes to people’s behaviour.
If you like John and John likes Tom, you should also like Tom to maintain balance.
What is meant by ‘family resemblance’?
Defining property of a category of membership.
Considered to be ‘fuzzy sets’ of features organised around a prototype.
What is a prototype?
Cognitive representation of the typical / ideal defining features of a category.
However they may also represent the most extreme version of something.
E.g. Environmentalists vs developers - we may perceive the prototype of an environmentalist as an extreme version rather than a moderate.
What are exemplars?
Specific concrete instances of category that you have encountered
E.g. Americans may represent the category of ‘Australians’ using Steve Irwin as an exemplar.
What determines whether we represent a category as a prototype or an exemplar?
As people become more familiar with a category, they shift from using prototypes to exemplars.
What’s the difference between schemas and prototypes?
In some circles they are interchangeable, but generally prototypes are fuzzier and schemas are more organised.
What is a schema of a social group called?
A stereotype
What is an out-group?
A social group with which an individual does not identify
What associations are often made for out-groups?
Ethnocentric stereotypes often associated with prejudice, discrimination, and conflict between groups.
How do stereotypes persist or change?
The persist if we can readily access them in memory, the more we use them.
The change slowly, usually in response to broader social, political, or economic changes.
When are stereotypes acquired?
Some stereotypes are acquired in childhood before the child has any knowledge of the target group, while others crystallise as the child ages.
What is Tajfel’s accentuation principle? There are three parts.
We accentuate:
- Similarities among instances within the same category
- Differences between instances from different categories
- Differences between different categories as a whole.
What are basic-level categories?
Middle range categories that have cognitive priority because they are the most useful
E.g. ‘Chair’ rather than ‘furniture’ or ‘rocking chair’
Career woman instead of woman
What is optimal distinctiveness theory?
People strive to achieve a balance between conflicting motives for inclusiveness and separateness expressed in groups as a balance between intragroup differentiation and intragroup homogenisation.
What sorts of schemas are especially liked to be used or invoked?
Schemas that are accurate enough for day-to-day interaction, that we use automatically (???)
What happens when people need to use more accurate schemas?
What happens if the costs of indecision are high?
We are more attentive to data and use more accurate schemas.
People make quick decisions and form quick impressions; any decision or impression, however inaccurate, may be preferable to no decision or impression. This becomes important when people perform a task under time pressure, or when they are anxious or distracted.
Explain the role of experience when it comes to schema acquisition.
Experience allows a schema to become more characteristic and less descriptive. E.g. Evolving from “Roberta dyes her hair pink” to “Roberta is extroverted”
Experience also allows a schema to become more complex and informative. E.g. An experience uni student is more likely than a first year to have a detailed schema of someone who would make a good roommate.
Schema also become able to incorporate exceptions rather than disregarding them because they might threaten the validity of the schema.
Briefly describe the process of schema change as suggested by Rothbart (1981).
Schemas do not easily change because they suggest a sense of order, structure, and coherence to a social world that would otherwise be highly complex and unpredictable. Schemas may persist even when faced with contradictory evidence (Ross, Lepper and Hubbard, 1975).
However they can change in the following ways:
- Bookkeeping - slow change in the face of accumulating evidence
- Conversion - sudden change once a critical mass of disconfirming evidence has accumulated
- Subtyping - they can form a subcategory to accommodate disconfirming evidence.
Subtyping is probably the most common.
What is social encoding?
The process of representing externals social stimuli in our minds. There are four key stages.
- Pre-attentive analysis - automatic, non-conscious scanning of the enviironment
- Focal attention - once noticed, stimuli are consciously identified and categorised
- Comprehension - stimuli are given meaning
- Elaborative reasoning - stimulus is linked to other knowledge to allow complex references.
What is the property of a stimulus that makes it stand out in relation to other stimuli and attract attention?
Salience
What makes a stimulus salient?
Stands out against its context
Does not fit expectations of behaviour or appearance
Important to you
Salient people attract more attention and are considered more influential in a group, more personally responsible for their behaviour (choosing to dress differently from others), and less influenced by the situation. We usually attend closely to them and form coherent impressions of them.
Encoding can also be affected by the accessibility of categories or schemas. What is meant by accessibility?
Accessible categories are ones we often use and are consistent with our goals, needs, and expectations. They are very easily activated or primed by things we see or hear.
E.g. People who are concerned about racial discrimination may see racism everywhere: it is readily primed and used to interpret the social world.
‘Priming’ is a term that refers to the activation of a cognitive representation to incrase its accessibility to make it more likely to be used. What happens once a category is primed?
Once primed, a category interprets stimuli, particularly ambiguous stimuli, in a category-consistent manner.
What is an associative network model of memory?
Nodes or ideas are connected by associative links along which cognitive activation can spread.
What is valence?
The affective quality referring to the intrinsic attractiveness / “goodness” or averseness / “badness” of something.
Why are we less accurate at remembering outgroup faces?
How can this be fixed?
We pay less attention to them.
Just pay more attention!
What conditions make an eyewitness testimony more accurate?
The witness:
Mentally reviews the scene of the crime to reinstate additional cues
Has associated the face with other symbolic info
Was exposed to the person’s face for a long time
Gave testimony shortly after the crime
The person:
Was not disguised
Was younger than 30
Looked dishonest
How are trait memories stored?
Based on causal inferences drawn from behaviour and situations, and coded in terms of desirability (E.g. Warm, pleasant, friendly) and competence (E.g. intelligent, industrious, efficient)
E.g. We would remember running differently if it was for exercise rather than fear.
In what two ways do we organise information about people?
Person
A cluster of information about their traits, behaviour and appearance
Produces accurate person memories that are easily recalled
Most common with people we are close to
Group
More likely in first encounters; person is assessed in terms of stereotypical attributes of a salient social category
