Transcript THINK SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY Chapter Social Cognition: Thinking About the Social World THINK Social Psychology Kimberley Duff Copyright ©2012 by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.

THINK
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Chapter
3
Social Cognition:
Thinking About the
Social World
THINK Social Psychology
Kimberley Duff
Copyright ©2012 by Pearson Education, Inc.
All rights reserved.
How Do Schemas Guide the Way You
Think about the World Around You?
• Schemas




Cognitive frameworks
Automatically created
Guide us to understanding the world
Can exist for people, places, events, or other
stimuli
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How Do Schemas Guide the Way You Think
about the World Around You? (continued)
• Schemas are formed on the basis of experience
• Prime – to activate a schema through a stimulus
• The way a schema is primed affects our
attention and processing
• Stereotypes are an example of a schema
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Cognitive Development Theories
• Jean Piaget
 Cognitive Development Theory
• Lev Vygotsky
 Sociocultural Theory
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Jean Piaget and the Role of Schemas
Cognitive Development
• Jean Piaget used five key concepts to
explain how cognitive development
occurs:


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

Schema
Assimilation
Accommodation
Equilibrium
Equilibration
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Jean Piaget and the Role of Schemas
Cognitive Development
• Schema
 A cognitive structure that is used to used to
identify and process information
 It operates like a mental index file where
each index card represents a different
category (or schema) of information
 Once acquired, individual schemas (or
categories) can be accessed for future
reference.
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Jean Piaget and the Role of Schemas
Cognitive Development
• Assimilation
 The cognitive process that occurs when a
child uses an existing schema to classify a
new stimulus (or piece of information)
 This process influences the growth of an
individual schema but it does not change the
change the schema
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First Schema for Tree
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New Stimulus for a tree
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Schema for Cat
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New Stimulus for Cat
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Schema for Caterpillar
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New Stimulus for Caterpillar
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Jean Piaget and the Role of Schemas
Cognitive Development
• Accommodation
 The process allows a child to modify an
existing schema to accommodate a new
stimulus (or piece of information)
 If modification does not work, the child will
create a new schema
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Jean Piaget and the Role of Schemas
Cognitive Development
• Equilibrium
 Piaget used this term to describe the rapid
mental process that occurs when assimilation
and accommodation work together to create
increasingly more adequate schemas for the
understanding of the world
 This mental process suggests a steady and
comfortable state
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Jean Piaget and the Role of Schemas
Cognitive Development
• Equilibration
 On occasion, the nature of the new stimulus (or
information) does not submit to the equilibrium
process and disequilibrium occurs
 This uncomfortable state forces the child to
make their cognitive structure more adequate
 Once this is done, the child shifts back to
assimilation; it is this process that Piaget calls
equilibration
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Kimberley Duff
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How Do Schemas Guide the Way You Think
about the World Around You? (continued)
• The trouble with schemas
 The confirmation bias
- Information that supports a schema is attended to
- Information that contradicts a schema may be
filtered out
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Stereotyping
• A stereotype assumes that all members of
a group share some common feature
• Perseverance effect
 Once a schema is formed, it is hard to
change
 It may be difficult for people to "let go" of
these types of schemas
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Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
• Predictions that cause themselves to come true
• When a person "becomes" the stereotype that is
held about them
• Selective filtering
 Paying attention to sensory information that affirms a
stereotype
 Filtering out sensory information that negates a
stereotype
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Automatic Versus
Controlled Processing
• Automatic processing
 Unconscious
 Effortless and on-the-fly
• Controlled processing
 Takes careful thought and effort
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Automatic Versus
Controlled Processing (continued)
• What parts of the brain are involved?
 Automatic processing
- The limbic system – emotional processing
- The amygdale – emotional learning and
fear conditioning
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Automatic Versus
Controlled Processing
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Automatic Versus
Controlled Processing (continued)
• What parts of the brain are involved?
 Controlled processing
- The prefrontal cortex
• Involved in higher-order thinking and
evaluation
• May be involved in automatic
processing as well
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Automatic Versus
Controlled Processing
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Automatic Versus
Controlled Processing (continued)
• Automatic processing helps us deal with the
enormous amount of information in our world
• Sometimes we are "forced" into controlled
processing
 When a situation does not match our
schemas
 When we need to think with extra care and
logic
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How Effective are
Mental Shortcuts?
• Heuristics
 Simple rules that reduce mental effort
 Mental shortcuts
 Allow us to make decisions or judgments
quickly
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The Availability Heuristic
• Our assessment of how likely an occurrence is
based on how easily an example of that event
can be recalled
• Tversky and Kahneman (1973)
 Which are there more of – words starting with
N or words that have N as the third letter?
 Is your answer based on the examples you
can immediately call to mind?
• Which is safer? Travelling by plane or by car?
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Death and the
Availability Heuristic
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The Representativeness
Heuristic
• Our assessment of how likely an occurrence is
based on how much it resembles our
expectation for a model of that event
• Tversky and Kahneman (1974)
 "Deciding the probability that object A belongs
in category Bﾉ based on how closely A seems
to represent B."
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The Representativeness
Heuristic
• The base rate fallacy
 An error caused by drawing a conclusion
using the representativeness heuristic without
considering the base rate
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The Availability and
Representativeness Heuristics
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The Anchoring and
Adjustment Heuristic
• We use a number as a starting point on which to
anchor our judgment
• Have you ever bought a car?
 What did you expect to spend?
 Was the sticker price above or below your
estimate?
 Did your final purchase price change based
on these data?
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The Framing Heuristic
• Decision-making based on the framework in
which a situation or item is presented
• Have you ever bought ground beef? Which
would be more tempting?
 "92% fat-free"
 "92% lean"
 "Contains 8% fat"
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What are other Sources of Bias
in Social Cognition?
• The illusion of control
 The perception that uncontrollable events are
somehow controllable
 Do you have a "lucky shirt" that you wear to
help your favorite football team win each
Sunday?
• The negativity bias
 Attending to and remembering only negative
information, thus impacting future evaluations
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The Optimistic Bias
• Believing that bad things happen to other
people and that you are more likely to
experience positive events in life
• How often do you think about being
unemployed someday?
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The Optimistic Bias (continued)
• Do you think you will be in a car accident
this weekend? Let’s hope not!
• The overconfidence barrier
 The belief that our own judgment or control is
better or greater than it truly is
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Counterfactual Thinking
• Imagining different outcomes for an event that
has already occurred
• Is usually associated with bad (or negative)
events
• Can be used to improve or worsen your mood
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Counterfactual Thinking (continued)
• Upward counterfactuals
 “If only I had bet on the winning horse!"
 "If only I’d cooked the turkey at 350 instead of
400 degrees!"
 "I would have won if I’d bought the OTHER
scratch-off lottery ticket!"
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Counterfactual Thinking (continued)
• Downward counterfactuals
 "I got a C on the test, but at least it’s not a D!"
 "He won’t go out with me but at least he didn’t
embarrass me in front of my friends."
 "My team lost, but at least it was a close
game and not a blowout!"
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Marketing and
Counterfactual Thinking
• How do advertisements (television,
billboards, magazines, radio) influence our
decisions?
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The Effect of Mood on Cognition
• The mood-congruence effects
 We remember positive details of an event if
we were in a good mood
 We remember negative details of an event if
we were in a bad mood
• Mood dependent memory
 Our mood at the time of learning is a retrieval
cue for remembering that information
 If you are calm and happy when you study,
how should you be when you take an exam?
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Kimberley Duff
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The Effect of Mood on Cognition
(continued)
• Moods, particularly good ones, can cause
us to over-rely on heuristics
 This can lead to more decision-making errors!
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Kimberley Duff
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