Social Cognition and Automatic vs. Controlled Processing

Social Cognition

• Social cognition refers to how we think about ourselves and the social world, including selecting, interpreting, remembering, and using social information to make decisions and judgments.

Automatic vs. Controlled Processing

• Automatic processing involves simple, intuitive judgments, and is associated with the amygdala-limbic system, also known as the "old mammalian" brain.
• Controlled processing involves careful, conscious, self-controlled, strategic, and long-term goal-oriented thinking, and is associated with executive functions in the frontal lobe/prefrontal cortex.

Schemas

• Schemas are mental models of ourselves, others, objects, and events, based on our own experiences and secondhand sources.
• Schemas influence our behavior, especially when we are under high cognitive load, in ambiguous situations, or when they are strong, well-developed, accessible, and applicable.
• Once activated, schemas exert a strong influence on our behavior and fill in gaps in our knowledge.
• The perseverance effect occurs when schemas tend to remain unchanged, even when contradictory information is present.

Making Schemas Come True

• Schemas have a self-confirming nature and can create a self-fulfilling prophecy (Pygmalion effect), where our expectations about others influence how we act towards them, causing them to behave consistently with our expectations.
• Automatic goal pursuit involves pursuing goals that have been primed.
• Automatic decision-making can be improved by using both conscious thinking and distraction (intermittently) and heuristics.

Heuristics and Biases

• Metaphors about the body and mind (embodied cognition) can affect how we evaluate social stimuli and act, especially when primed.
• Heuristics are mental shortcuts that enable rapid and efficient decision-making, but can also lead to biases.
• The representativeness heuristic involves judging the likelihood of an event based on how similar it is to a typical case, often ignoring base rates.
• The availability heuristic involves judging the likelihood of an event based on how easily it comes to mind.
• The anchoring and adjustment heuristic involves starting with an initial value or experience and making adjustments, often insufficiently.

Culture and Social Cognition

• Schemas can differ across cultures, with holistic thinking styles (focusing on context) prevalent in Eastern cultures and analytic thinking styles (focusing on object properties) prevalent in Western cultures.

Biases in Social Cognition

• Automatisms can be both beneficial and problematic.
• The fundamental attribution bias involves overestimating the role of personality traits in shaping behavior, and is culture-dependent.
• Other biases include actor-observer bias, self-serving bias, negativity bias, optimistic bias, overconfidence barrier, planning fallacy, and change blindness.