Social Cognition

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Social Cognition

• Carolyn Briggs - Christian Fundamentalism
• How can someone believe so intensely and then
  reject those same beliefs?
• How are our beliefs shaped by those around us?
• What are some cognitive biases and errors we make?

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What is Social Cognition?

• Thinking about people
• People first
• Inner processes serve interpersonal functions
• Social acceptance, relationship formation and
  maintenance
• Competing against others for our goals

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Thinking

• Three goals of thinking
• Discover the right answer
• Confirm the desired answer
• Reach the answer quickly
• Cognitive miser
• Reluctance to do much extra thinking

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Elements of Automatic Thinking

• Intention not guided by intention
• Control not subject to deliberate control
• Effort no effort required
• Efficiency highly efficient

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Knowledge Structures

• Schemas
• Substantial information about a concept, its
  attributes, and its relationships to other
  concepts
• Scripts
• Schemas about certain events

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Priming and Framing

• Priming - activating a concept in the mind
• Influences subsequent thinking
• May trigger automatic processes
• Framing presentation as positive or negative

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Thought Suppression and Ironic Processes

• Two processes to suppress thought
• Automatic checks for incoming information
  related to unwanted thought
• Controlled redirects attention away from
  unwanted thought
• Relax conscious control and mind is flooded with
  cues from the automatic system

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Food for Thought - Its the Thought That Counts
(or Doesnt Count!) the Calories

• Dieters and nondieters will eat different amounts
  of food based on eating pattern
• Milkshakes and ice cream (Herman Mack, 1975)
• Counterregulation
• Driven by cognition not bodily need

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Attributions

• Causal explanations
• Internal factors
• External factors

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Attributions Explaining Success and Failure

• Causal explanations
• Internal factors
• External factors
• Two dimensions
• Internal Stable - Ability
• Internal Unstable Effort
• External Stable Difficulty of task
• External Unstable Luck
• Self-serving bias

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Actor/Observer Bias

• External Internal Attribution
• Actor (situation external)
• Observer (actor internal)
• Fundamental Attribution Error
• Ultimate Attribution Error
• Behavior freely chosen is more informative about
  a person (Jones Harris, 1967)

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Fundamental Attribution Error

• Four possible explanations
• Behavior is more noticeable than situational
  factors
• Insignificant weight is assigned to situational
  factors
• People are cognitive misers
• Richer trait-like language to explain behavior

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Attribution Cube

• Covariation Principle
• Consensus
• Consistency
• Distinctiveness

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Attribution Cube and Excuses

• Excuses
• Raise consensus it happens to everyone
• Lower consistency it doesnt usually happen to
  me
• Raise distinctiveness it doesnt usually happen
  in other situations

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Heuristics

• Representativeness Heuristic
• Judge likelihood by the extent it resembles the
  typical case
• Availability Heuristic
• Judge likelihood by ease with which relevant
  instances come to mind
• ESP beliefs

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Heuristics

• Simulation Heuristic
• Judge likelihood by ease with which you can
  imagine it
• Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic
• Judge likelihood by using a starting point and
  adjusting from that point

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Cognitive Errors and Biases

• Information Overload
• Too much information, contradictions in
  information, irrelevant information
• Generally access two types of information
• Statistical information
• Case History
• Generally pay closer attention to case history

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Cognitive Errors and Biases

• Confirmation Bias
• Tendency to notice and search for information
  that confirms ones beliefs and ignore
  information that disconfirms it
• Conjunction Fallacy
• Tendency to see an event as more likely as it
  becomes more specific

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The Social Side of SexCounting Sex Partners

• Men always report more previous sex partners than
  women
• Processes that account for biased answers
• How people count
• Mental list (underestimate) or estimate (inflated
  numbers)
• Shifting criteria
• What constitutes sex?

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Cognitive Errors and Biases

• Illusory Correlation
• Tendency to overestimate link between variables
  that are related only slightly or not at all
• Hamilton Gifford (1976)

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Cognitive Errors and Biases

• Base Rate Fallacy
• Tendency to ignore base rate information and be
  influenced by distinctive features of the case
• Gamblers Fallacy
• Tendency to believe that a chance event is
  affected by previous events and will even out

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Cognitive Errors and Biases

• False Consensus Effect
• Tendency to overestimate the number of other
  people who share ones opinions
• False Uniqueness Effect
• Tendency to underestimate the number of other
  people who share ones prized characteristics or
  abilities

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Cognitive Errors and Biases

• Statistical Regression
• Statistical tendency for extremes to be followed
  by less extreme or those closer to average
• Illusion of Control
• A false belief that one can influence events

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Is Bad Stronger Than Good?Good News and Bad News

• People think more about bad things than good ones
• Thinking is guided by search for explanations
• More concerned with explaining bad events than
  good events
• Bad news attracts more attention

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Cognitive Errors and Biases

• Magical Thinking
• Assumptions that dont hold up to logical
  scrutiny
• Touching objects pass on properties to each other
  (contamination)
• Resemblance to something shares basic properties
  (contamination)
• Thoughts can influence physical world

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Counterfactual Thinking

• Imagining alternatives to past or present factual
  events or circumstances
• First instinct fallacy
• Upward counterfactuals positive outcome
• Help make future situations better
• Downward counterfactuals negative outcome
• Comfort it could have been worse

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Are People Really Idiots?

• We make predictable errors
• Cognitive misers
• Heuristics are short cuts
• How serious are the errors
• On trivial events use heuristics and automatic
  processing
• On important events use conscious processing
  and make better decisions

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Reducing Cognitive Errors

• Debiasing
• Consider multiple alternative
• Rely less on memory
• Use explicit decision rules
• Search for disconfirmatory information
• Use meta-cognition

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What Makes Us Human?

• Human thought uses and combines symbols
• Language allows for exploration of linkages of
  meaning
• Conscious mind is uniquely human
• Complex patterns of thought

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What Makes Us Human?

• Only humans engage in counterfactual thinking
• Human thought creates unique errors and unique
  capabilities to find the truth