Transcript Chapter 5: Social Cognition

Chapter 5
Social Cognition
What is Social Cognition?
• The processes by which information about
people is processed and stored
• Thinking about people
• Humans think about people more than
anything else.
Why Don’t We Think Some Times?
• Cognitive Miser
•
– Reluctance to do much extra thinking
– We conserve our thinking
We use shortcuts
– Conscious thinking requires a lot of effort
– We have limited thinking capacity.
– STM = 7+/-2 items
Automatic versus Controlled Processes
• Automatic processes occur outside of
conscious awareness and with little effort
– categorization of objects and people is
an example
• Controlled processes are deliberate,
intentional, and effortful
– mindfully determining the causes of a
person’s behavior is an example
Elements of Automatic Thinking
• Intention – not guided by intention
• Control – not subject to deliberate control
• Effort – no effort required
• Efficiency – highly efficient
The Stroop Test
Online example
Automatic Processing
•
Relies on Knowledge
Structures
– Organized pieces of
information
•
Dog
Cat
Max
Bird
Steve Fun Fest
BCC
Example
– Semantic Network
Bark
Walk
Andy
Old
House
LBI
Panetta
NC
Other Knowledge Structures
• Schemas are mental representations of
objects or categories of objects
– Aid in the categorization of events
– Aid in the predictability of events
– Influence our interpretation of events
• Scripts
– Schemas about certain events
Functions of Schemas
Priming and Framing
• Priming - activating a concept in the mind
– Influences subsequent thinking
– May trigger automatic processes
• Framing – presentation as positive or
negative
Framing
• If you had the choice, would you chose
• 1) A situation in which 200 people will be
•
saved (a 1/3 chance 600 people will be saved
and a 2/3 chance nobody will be saved).
2) A situation where 400 people will die (a 2/3
chance 600 people will die and a 1/3 chance
nobody will die).
Framing
• Should advertisers say the ground beef is
– 90% lean or
– 10% fat
Thought Suppression
• 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
Trying to suppress thoughts tend to make
those thought more prevalent.
Attributions
• Causal explanations; inferences we make
about events or behaviors.
• “Intuitive scientists” seek explanations in a
systematic, orderly way
– much like a trained scientist,
laypeople gather evidence, weigh
possibilities, form hypotheses, to
understand others
Attributions
• Three dimensions
– Internal / External
– Stable / Unstable
– Global / Specific
Attributions: Explaining Success and Failure
• Two dimensions
– Internal Stable - Ability
– Internal Unstable – Effort
– External Stable – Difficulty of task
– External Unstable – Luck
• Self-serving bias
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)
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
Attribution Cube
• Covariation Principle
– Consensus
– Consistency
– Distinctiveness
Attribution Cube and Excuses
• Excuses
– Raise consensus – it happens to everyone
– Lower consistency – it doesn’t usually
happen to me
– Raise distinctiveness – it doesn’t usually
happen in other situations
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
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
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
Cognitive Errors and Biases
• Confirmation Bias
•
– Tendency to notice and search for
information that confirms one’s beliefs and
ignore information that disconfirms it
Conjunction Fallacy
– Tendency to see an event as more likely as
it becomes more specific
Cognitive Errors and Biases
• Illusory Correlation
– Tendency to overestimate link between
variables that are related only slightly or
not at all
– Hamilton & Gifford (1976)
Cognitive Errors and Biases
• Base Rate Fallacy
•
– Tendency to ignore base rate information
and be influenced by distinctive features of
the case
Gambler’s Fallacy
– Tendency to believe that a chance event is
affected by previous events and will “even
out”
Cognitive Errors and Biases
• False Consensus Effect
•
– Tendency to overestimate the number of
other people who share one’s opinions
False Uniqueness Effect
– Tendency to underestimate the number of
other people who share one’s prized
characteristics or abilities
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
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
Cognitive Errors and Biases
• Magical Thinking
– Assumptions that don’t 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
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
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
Reducing Cognitive Errors
• Debiasing
– Consider multiple alternative
– Rely less on memory
– Use explicit decision rules
– Search for disconfirmatory information
– Use meta-cognition
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
What Makes Us Human?
• Only humans engage in counterfactual
•
thinking
Human thought creates unique errors and
unique capabilities to find the truth