Social Cognition

1
Lecture 3

• Social Cognition

2
Social Cognition Outline

• Introduction
• Controlled and Automatic Processing
• Ironic Processing
• Schemas
• Advantages and disadvantages
• Perseverance
• Self-fulfilling prophecy
• Mental Shortcuts Heuristics
• Representativeness
• Availability
• Anchoring and adjustment
• Simulation

3
Controlled and Automatic Processing

• Automatic processing
• Thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional,
  involuntary, and effortless
• Controlled processing
• Thinking that is conscious, intentional,
  voluntary and effortful
• Beware of the Overconfidence Barrier!

4
Ironic processing

• Attempts to suppress thoughts may lead to
  hyper-accessibility of those thoughts
• For the next minute, do not think of a white bear.

5
Schemas

• What is a schema?
• A schema is an organized configuration of
  knowledge, based on past experience, that we use
  to interpret our current experience.
• Related concepts include prototypes, stereotypes,
  and scripts

6
Schemas (Continued) Advantages and
Disadvantages of Schematic Processing

• Advantages
• Helps us to remember and organize information
• Helps to interpret and evaluate new and/or
  ambiguous information
• Speeds up processing time
• Disadvantages
• May be overly accepting of information that fits
  a schema but it is not correct
• May lead to inaccurate expectancies

7
Schemas (Continued)

• Perseverance effect
• Social beliefs persist even when contrary
  evidence is presented
• See Ross, Lepper, Hubbard, 1975

8
Schemas (Continued)

• Self-fulfilling prophecy
• A person has an expectation about what another
  person is like
• Influences how the first person acts towards the
  second person
• The second person behaves consistently with the
  first persons expectation

9
Schemas (Continued)

• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (Rosenthal Jacobson,
  1968)
• Random assignment to groups
• Experimental group was designated spurters or
  bloomers
• At the end of the school year, bloomers
  outperformed peers in the control group.

10
Mental Shortcuts Cognitive Heuristics (Tversky
Kahneman, 1973 1974 1982)

• The Representativeness Heuristic
• -- the tendency to judge membership in a group
  by how well a particular instance matches a
  prototype or representative example of the group
• Related phenomena
• 1. Base-rate fallacy
• tendency to ignore relevant statistical
  information about the average frequency, and
  instead be influenced by distinctive features of
  the case at hand.
• 2. Gamblers fallacy
• The failure to recognize the independence of
  unconnected chance events.

11
Mental Shortcuts (Continued)

• The Availability Heuristic- using the ease of
  remembering examples or the amount of information
  you can quickly remember as a guide to making an
  inference.
• Related phenomena
• 1. False consensus bias
• The tendency to overestimate the number of other
  people who are similar to us
• 2. Priming effect
• The influence of earlier experience on
  subsequent impressions or thought

12
Mental Shortcuts (Continued)

• The Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic
• - the process of estimating some value by
  starting with some initial value and then
  adjusting it to the new instance.
• Related phenomena
• 1. Framing effect
• The tendency to let the way in which information
  is presented affect the judgment we make.
• 2. Contrast effect
• If given a contrast, tend to exaggerate
  characteristics of the object in the opposite
  direction.

13
Mental Shortcuts (Continued)

• The Simulation Heuristic
• - the ease with which you can imagine a
  particular scenario with a particular ending.
• Related phenomena
• 1. Counterfactual Thinking
• The creation of alternatives realities to what
  actually occurred.

14
Counterfactual Thinking What might have been

• Upward counterfactuals
• Imagined outcomes that are better than reality
• Downward counterfactuals
• Imagined outcomes that are worse than reality

15
Causal Attributions

• Causal attribution theories are a group of
  theories that describe how people explain why a
  given behaviour occurred.

16
Causal Attributions

• Heider (1958)
• Internal attribution
• An attribution to a personal characteristic of an
  actor (e.g., ability, mood, personality, etc.)
• External attribution
• An attribution to a situational factor, outside
  the actor (e.g., luck, task, etc.)

17
Causal Attributions

• Correspondent Inference Theory (Jones Davis,
  1965)
• Choice
• Expectedness
• Effects

18
Causal Attributions

• Covariation Model (Kelley, 1967)
• Consensus
• Information about the extent to which other
  people behave the same way as the actor does
  toward the same stimulus
• Distinctiveness
• Information about the extent to which one
  particular actor behaves the same way to
  different stimuli
• Consistency
• Information about the extent of which the
  behaviour between one actor and one stimulus is
  the same across time and circumstances.

19
Causal AttributionsKelleys Covariation Model
Consensus
Distinctiveness
Consistency
Attribution
Internal (Personal) Attribution The stranger
caused the behaviour
High The stranger always raves about this film
Low The stranger raves about many other films
Low Others do not rave about the film



The stranger raves about the film
External (Stimulus) Attribution The film
caused the behaviour
High The stranger always raves about this film.
High The stranger does not rave about many
other films
High Others rave about the film



20
Causal Attributions

• The Fundamental Attribution Error (Heider, 1958)
• The tendency to focus on the role of personal
  causes and underestimate the impact of situations
  on other peoples behaviours.

21
Causal Attributions
22
Causal Attributions
23
Causal Attributions

• The Actor/Observer Bias
• The tendency to attribute our own behaviour to
  situational causes and the behaviour of others to
  personal factors.

24
Causal Attributions

• Self-Serving Bias
• Explanations for ones successes credit internal,
  dispositional factors and explanations for
  failures blame external, situational factors.

25
Causal Attributions

• Defensive Attributions
• Help us to avoid feelings of vulnerability and
  morality
• Unrealistic Optimism
• The belief that good things are more likely to
  happen to oneself than to peers and bad things
  are more likely to happen to peers than to
  oneself.
• Belief in a Just World
• The belief that people get what they deserve in
  life, such that good things happen to good people
  and bad things happen to bad people.