Social Cognition

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Social Cognition

• Over the next few days well focus on social
  cognition and self justification.
• Tonight overview of concepts
• election-related social cognition
• Thursday film analysis Capturing the
  Friedmans
• Tuesday article seminar and self
  justification

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Making sense of the world

• People are constantly trying to make sense of our
  social world
• Our brains are powerful and efficient, but
  imperfect
• We try to be rational, but we arent always

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Cognitive misers

• We try to conserve our cognitive energy
• We adopt strategies to simplify complex problems
• We ignore some information to reduce our
  cognitive load
• This leads to biases in our thinking
• How do you try to simplify the information
  related to the election?

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A few ads to get you thinking

• http//www.yeson1098.com/videos.html
• http//www.defeat1098.com/media/video
• http//www.pattymurray.com/multimedia/video?id002
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• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vV66tq1Rmdd4

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Effects of Context on Social Judgment

• Reference points and contrast effects
• Good compared to what?
• Priming
• What are we thinking about?
• Framing
• Gain or loss? Positive or negative?
• Ordering
• Primacy effect and impression formation
• Amount of information
• Dilution effect

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Judgmental heuristics(definition)

• A mental shortcut
• Simple rules that guide our judgment and problem
  solving

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When do we use heuristics?

• When we dont have time to think carefully
• When we are overloaded with information
• When the issues at stake arent very important
• When we have insufficient information to use in
  making a decision

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Judgmental heuristics

• Representative heuristic its like this in one
  way, must be like it in other ways
• Availability heuristic specific examples come
  easily to mind
• Attitude heuristic our positive or negative
  attitudes affect our judgment
• Halo effect
• False consensus

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Availability heuristic

• http//www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-july-15-2002
  /i-know-what-you-did-last-summer-of-the-shark

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Stereotyping and Categorization

• Self-fulfilling prophecy Our stereotypes lead
  us to treat people in ways that make them conform
  to expectations
• Illusory Correlation we see a relationship we
  expect but where none exists
• Ingroup/outgroup effects all of them are the
  same and my group is better

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Human cognition is conservative

• We try to preserve that which is already
  established
• We maintain our existing knowledge, beliefs,
  attitudes and stereotypes
• Confirmation bias
• Hindsight bias

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Attribution Biases

• Three general biases we use when we are
  interpreting and explaining the world
• Fundamental Attribution Error
• Actor Observer Bias
• Self Biases

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Fundamental attribution error

• The tendency to overestimate the importance of
  personality factors rather than situational
  factors when describing and explaining the causes
  of social behavior

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Actor-observer bias

• The tendency for actors to attribute their
  actions to situational factors while observers
  attribute the same actions to personality factors

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Self Biases - Egocentric thought

• The tendency to perceive ourselves as more
  central to events than is actually the case
• We tend to think we influence events and people
  more than we do

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Self-serving bias

• The tendency to make dispositional (personality)
  attributions for our successes and to make
  situational attributions for our failures