Social Cognition

1
Social Cognition

• How we think about the social world

2
Schemas

• Mental structures people use to organize their
  knowledge about the social worldand that
  influence the information that people notice,
  think about and remember

3
Schemas as Memory Guides

• Memory is reconstructive, so we use what usually
  happens
• We may remember things that didnt actually
  happen but usually do
• Low-effort thinking

4
Belief Perseverance

• Belief perseverance-persistence of ones initial
  conceptions even when the basis for ones belief
  is discredited but an explanation of why the
  belief might be true survives.

5
Their predictions

• Current task Success condition 17
• Current task- failure feedback 12.2
• Future task -17
• Future task- 13.7

6
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

• 1. people have an expectation of another person
• 2. they act on their expectations
• 3. that causes the person to behave consistently
  w/ the persons original expectations
• 4. making the expectations become true

7
Rosenthal Jacobson

• The Self-fulfilling prophesy in school
• Teachers told that an IQ test had shown some
  students would soon bloom
• Students were actually randomly chosen
• But did bloom all labeled bright performed well
• Teachers expectations became reality

8
Truth or Lie?

• Exercise 1

9
Which is more common?

• Homicide or diabetes.
• Breast cancer or heart disease in women
• All accidents or strokes
• All cancers or heart disease
• Lightening or appendicitis
• Motor veh accidents or cancer of the digestive
  system
• Traffic deaths in Co or SARs worldwide

10
The point of the demos

• Most of you were far more confident than accurate
  
• On the lying demonstration, most of you committed
  the base rate fallacy that we will turn to now

11
Availability Heuristic

• Powerful anecdotes more compelling than
  statistics
• Thus, you remember what you read and hear

12
Controlled Thinking

• Conscious, intentional, voluntary, effortful
  thinking
• Rather than going on auto pilot, you consciously
  think about whats presented
• Most ads rely on you being on auto pilot

13
Tendency to Believe

• We believe what we see, are told, etc.
• Initial acceptance occurs automatically
• Rejection of ideas takes effort

14
Counterfactual Thinking

• Mentally changing some aspect of the past as a
  way of imaging what might have been
• Changes emotional response to events

15
Reaction Paper

• 1. Choose one (or two if you insist) of the
  following psychological phenomenon and write
  about a real life incident involving the concept.
• Availability heuristic, illusory correlation
• Base rate fallacy, hindsight bias