Automatic vs Controlled Thinking

Course Information

• Course name: Social Cognition and Social Perception
• Course code: PSYC-2700
• Lecture number: 3
• Semester: Winter 2025

Today's Agenda

• Social Cognition
  • Low-effort (automatic) thinking
  • High-effort (controlled) thinking
• Social Perception
  • Nonverbal communication
  • Implicit Personality Theories
  • Attributions
• Wrap-Up

Today's Learning Objectives

• Describe and contrast automatic and controlled thinking
• Apply understanding of social cognitive processes (e.g., schemas and heuristics) to personal life
• Explain nonverbal behaviors aiding social perception
• Identify and predict types of attributions people make for behavior

Two Kinds of Thinking

• Low-effort thinking (Automatic thinking): Fast, automatic, habitual, emotional, impulsive, driven by values
• High-effort thinking (Controlled thinking): Slow, effortful, logical, reflective, planning

Automatic vs. Controlled Thinking (Bargh's 1994 Four Horsemen of Automaticity)

• Awareness: Automatic thoughts often occur outside conscious awareness. Controlled thinking requires awareness.
• Efficiency: Automatic thinking is very efficient, requiring few attentional resources. Controlled thinking demands more mental effort.
• Intentionality: Automatic thinking is largely unintentional; controlled thinking requires conscious initiation.
• Controllability: Automatic processes are typically less controllable than controlled processes.

Awareness

• Awareness of stimulus triggering a response
• Awareness of potential influences on subjective states
• Awareness of a mental process (chain of mental events)
• In automatic thinking, people are typically unaware of things guiding their thoughts, feelings, and behavior.

Efficiency

• Automatic thoughts and heuristics are efficient
• People quickly trust categorizations, self-judgments, and attributions with little effort.

Intentionality

• Automatic thoughts, feelings, and behavior are triggered unintentionally
• People are typically not in control of initiating automatic processes

Controllability

• Controllability refers to the degree to which people control the initiation or stopping of processes
• When people lack motivation or ability, certain thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are more likely to occur uncontrollably

How Does Automatic Thinking Work?

• Often through the activation and use of schemas, helping connect new situations with prior experiences
• Schemas: Mental structures organizing knowledge about the social world
  • Influence what we notice, think about, and remember
  • Guide behavioral responses
  • Determined by lived experience and culture
  • Difficult to change (self-fulfilling prophecies)

Why Do Schemas Exist?

• Help organize and make sense of the world
• Fill gaps in knowledge (e.g., Kunda, 1997)
• Useful for brief, confusing, or ambiguous information
• Help figure out what's happening

Which Schemas Are Applied?

• Schemas must be "activated" to be applied, which can be done by:
  • Chronic accessibility
  • Current goals/motivations
  • Recent experiences (priming)

How to Prime

• To prime, an experience must be directly applicable to the schema, using tasks like:
  • Sentence scrambles (e.g., "steady hands the was boat" versus "unsteady hands the was boat")
  • Words or pictures

Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

• People's schemas/expectations about others can influence their behavior toward those others, which in turn leads others to behave consistently with the initial expectation.
• Significant processes involved are largely automatic

Embodied Cognitions

• Bodily sensations can activate specific schemas based on underlying metaphors (e.g., warmth=friendliness)

NO Evidence for Physical Warmth on Interpersonal Warmth

• A study reported that holding a hot cup of coffee caused judgments of personality as warmer. However, subsequent attempts to replicate these findings with tripled sample sizes and more rigorous procedures found no or near-zero effects.

Can Holding a Pencil in Your Teeth Make You Happy?

• A famous study involved forcing a smile by holding a pencil in your mouth; this was later reported to be non-replicable.

Mental Strategies and Shortcuts (Heuristics)

• Mental shortcuts used for quick, reasonably good judgments.
• Helpful, but sometimes lead people astray.
• Often happen outside awareness

Availability Heuristic

• Judgments based on how easily things come to mind.
• Availability doesn't always reflect representativeness.
• News reports might over-represent violent crime, affecting perceptions of personal safety.

Representativeness Heuristic

• Classification based on how similar something is to a typical case.
• People may ignore base rate information if a case seems highly representative of a category.
• Related to stereotypes.

Anchoring Heuristic

• Judgments influenced by an initial piece of information.
• Can strongly impact negotiations and marketing.

Automatic Thinking "Styles"

• Cultural differences influence automatic thinking:
  • Analytic thinking: focusing on object properties, ignoring context
  • Holistic thinking: focusing on overall context, object relations

High-Effort Thinking

• Controlled thinking is the opposite of automatic thinking. It's conscious, deliberative, and requires mental energy.
• Limited mental capacity.
• Sometimes overrides automatic thinking and impulses.
• Important for learning from the past, problem-solving, and planning for the future.
• Needed for optimal decision-making when time isn't an issue.

Counterfactuals

• Mentally altering aspects of a past event to imagine "what might have been."
  • Additive counterfactuals: imagining doing something different that wasn't done originally.
  • Subtractive counterfactuals: removing something that already occurred.
• Can help cope with negative events but dwelling on them can compound misery.
• More likely to occur with negative events (e.g., "close calls") where the event could have been easily avoided.

Mental Practice

• Envisioning a behavior to prepare for a task.
• Can enhance performance

Thought Suppression

• Trying not to think about something.
• Monitoring (automatic) vs. operating processes (controlled).
• Ironically, the target thoughts can become more accessible when trying to suppress them.
• Cognitive load disrupts operating processes, not monitoring.

Social Perception

• The study of how we form impressions of others and make inferences about them.
• Involves observing and trying to understand the behavior of others.
• Helps understand and predict the social world through evolutionary perspectives to ensure survival

Nonverbal Behavior

• Crucial for perceiving others accurately; it can be just as important as verbal communication.
  • Facial expressions
  • Tone of voice
  • Gestures
  • Body posture/movement
  • Use of touch
  • Eye gaze

Nonverbal Behavior Communication

• Nonverbal communication can convey emotions, attitudes, and personality.
• Can sometimes replace verbal communication.
• People are prone to imitating nonverbal behavior (mirror neurons).
• Empathy: understanding the feelings of others.

Facial Expressions

• People aren't always accurate at interpreting facial expressions.
• Context matters greatly; impressions are often influenced by cues from the surrounding social scenes.
• Cultural display rules affect facial expressions, (e.g suppressing emotional display)
• Interesting gender effects exist (we are faster at judging anger in males and happiness in females)
• Duchenne (genuine) smiles are distinguished from non-Duchenne smiles.

Cultural Differences in Nonverbal Behavior

• Nonverbal behaviors vary across cultures:
  • Interpretation of eye contact varies (interest vs. disrespect)
  • Physical proximity expectations vary
  • Meaning of emblems (gestures) differs

Implicit Personality Theories

• People make assumptions about personality traits that go together (schemas).
• E.g., beauty is often associated with kindness, intelligence, and morality.
• Spontaneous trait inference judgments of personality traits occur automatically (without conscious intention).
• Low self-esteem potentially associated with other negative personality traits
• Specific theories vary across cultures.

Explaining Behavior (Attribution Theory)

• Seeks to explain how we infer the causes of our own and other people's behavior
• People often make attributions in two ways:
  • Internal/dispositional attribution: Behavior attributed to aspects of the person.
  • External/situational attribution: Behavior attributed to aspects of the situation.

Explaining Behavior (Kelley's Covariation Model)

• We use various kinds of information (consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency) to determine if attributions should be towards internal or external factors.
  • Consensus: How others behave toward the target
  • Distinctiveness: How the actor behaves toward other targets.
  • Consistency: How often the actor behaves this way towards the target over time and across situations

Covariation Model

• When consistency is high, people make internal attributions.
• When consensus and distinctiveness are high, people make external attributions.

Attributions in Two Steps

• Automatic internal attribution initially made.
• Situational factors later considered, which can change the initial attribution.

Revisiting Correspondence Bias

• Correspondence bias (fundamental attribution error): The tendency to infer behavior is caused by dispositional factors, ignoring situational influences.
• Occurs in attributions when Step 1 is made in the attribution process, but not step 2.
• People often underestimate situational factors and focus on dispositional inferences about others’ actions.

Revisiting Correspondence Bias (Consequences)

• People can mistakenly believe victims have control over their unfortunate situations.
• Leads to less sympathy and sometimes hostility towards those victims.
• Could stem from beliefs about a "just world", suggesting good things happen to good people

Actor/Observer Difference

• People attribute their own behavior to situational factors but others' to dispositional factors.
• E.g., good exam performance is due to hard work (internal) while bad performance is due to tough test (external).
• Cultural differences are present.

Actor/Observer Difference (why?)

• Actors and observers have different information available to them (perceptual salience).
• Actors are more aware of the situation factors that influenced their behavior
• Observers focus more on the actor.

Self-Serving Attributions

• Attribute successes to internal factors (e.g., ability) but attribute failures to external factors (e.g., bad luck).
• This tendency can vary by culture; some collectivistic cultures have little or reversed self-serving attributions

Self-Serving Attributions (why?)

• Need to feel good about ourselves.

Test your knowledge about automatic and controlled thinking. This quiz covers reliance on automatic thinking, its characteristics, and strategies to reduce its influence. Explore the nuances of social cognition.