Week 2: Social Motives, Social Cognition and Attributions

• Social cognition shapes construals, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.

Central Social Motives (CSM)

• Belonging: the desire for stable, meaningful connections.
• Accuracy: understanding others and predicting accurately.
• Control: autonomy and competence.
• Self-enhancement: the desire to matter.
• Trust: the need to feel safe and that others will be kind.
• CSM are closely related to the core psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness in Self-Determination Theory.

Construal

• A construal describes the way a person understands the world or a particular situation.

Belonging

• Long periods of involuntary isolation are unpleasant and can be psychologically damaging.
• Low belonging can lead to increased openness to interaction, heightened caution to rejection, and greater sensitivity to others' behavior.
• Belonging fosters conformity, smooth relationships, and generates many of our customs.

Accuracy

• Wanting to predict what will happen and make sense of what does happen.
• Uncertainty can be unpleasant.
• When a situation is certain, adaptation and preparation can occur.

Control

• The ability to direct actions and feel competent and autonomous.
• A sense of control contributes to well-being by fostering feelings of competence.
• Lack of control is unpleasant and can become unhealthy.

Self-Enhancement

• The need to maintain self-worth, social status, and reputation.
• How much we value ourselves is directly related to how we think we are valued by others.
• Feeling insignificant can lead to despair or angry protest.

Trust

• Wanting to feel the world is safe, benevolent, and fair.

• Wanting to feel others will be kind and helpful.

• Betrayal or deceit can lead to feelings of surprise, anger, and hurt.

• CSM pursuit varies based on culture, individual personality, and situational details.

• Conflicting motives can lead to feelings of stress, unhappiness, or dehumanization.

• Conformity can aid belonging, but may conflict with other values.

Complexity of Social Cognition

• People quickly analyze novel situations, making near-instant inferences.
• Social cognition involves quickly drawing conclusions about who is present, what is happening, and potential future events.
• Irrelevant or mundane information is filtered out

Social Cognition

• The ways in which people think about themselves and the social world.
• How we select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments and decisions.
• It employs automatic and controlled thinking.
• Ranging from most automatic to most controlled, social cognition appears as: subliminal or conscious priming, chronic readiness, accessibility, procedures (e.g., driving), goal-inconsistent automaticity, goal-consistent automaticity, will, and intent.

Dual Process Model

• Automatic and controlled thinking can occur simultaneously.

Automatic Processing

• Unconscious/implicit and involuntary operations.
• Guides most behavior.
• Fast, efficient responses to sensory input.
• Can perform many operations simultaneously.

Controlled Processing

• Conscious/explicit effort.
• Deals with novel problems like learning to drive or complex problem-solving.
• Slower and sequential.

Two-Step Process

• Begins with automatic processing, followed by controlled processing if one is motivated and has access to valid information.
• Controlled thinking modifies initial impressions.
• Effortful and prone to fatigue, leading to shortcuts like heuristics and schemas.
• Shortcuts may lead to incorrect conclusions.

Shortcuts

• People act as everyday theorists, forming theories and hypotheses about the world.
• Schemas are inferred knowledge structures that organize knowledge around themes or topics.
• Schemas contain basic knowledge and impressions of others, ourselves, social roles, and events.
• Schemas reduce mental load by freeing up cognitive resources and reducing ambiguity.
• Culture is a source of schemas.

Cognitive Effects of Schemas

• Schemas guide attention, exemplified by confirmation bias, which involves seeking and remembering information that confirms existing beliefs.

• Schema filter information by filtering out inconsistencies or contradictions.

• Schemas are reconstructive, filling in blanks with schema-consistent information.

• Errors and assumptions can occur due to schemas; contradictory evidence may be dismissed as exceptions.

Accessibility of Schemas

• Accessibility is determined by what is at the front of one's mind.
• Chronic accessibility is due to past experience.
• Temporary accessibility is due to relevant goals or recent experiences like priming.
• Participants exposed to positive or negative word priming form impressions of a person in a neutral passage consistent with the prime.

Heuristics

• Mental shortcuts that guide problem-solving and decision-making.
• Used when there is not enough time to think carefully, too much information, the issue is not very important, or the required knowledge is lacking.

Types of Heuristics

• Representativeness Heuristic: Classifying things by similarity or typicality.
• Availability Heuristics: Classifying things according to what easily comes to mind.
• Anchoring and Adjustment heuristic: Using a numerical value as a starting point and adjusting from there.
• Affect heuristic: Feelings shape perceptions of people and events.

Issues with Heuristics

• False-Consensus Effect: Overestimating how much others agree with us and thinking our values, beliefs, and opinions are "normal".
• Base-Rate Fallacy: Thinking commonly reported or sensationalized things are more common.
• Overconfidence: Overestimating our own abilities and accuracy.

Counterfactual Thinking

• Upward counterfactual thinking: imagining a better outcome (can lead to negative feelings).
• Downward counterfactual thinking: expecting the worst (can lead to positive feelings).
• Focused counterfactual thinking: analyzing negative outcomes to develop better strategies for the future.

Controlled Social Cognition

• Prone to errors and limitations.
• Because it is effortful, it can lead to fatigue and loss of control over our thinking.
• Ironic process: The more we try not to think about something, the more likely those thoughts will intrude.
• Prejudices can result from automatic or controlled thinking.
• Schemas are always at play whilst heuristics are utilized.

Attribution

• Attribution refers to the process where people seek to identify the causes of others' behavior and to gain knowledge of their stable traits and dispositions.
• It influences perception and treatment of others.
• Making sense of the world by assigning reasons to people's actions.

Theoretical Perspectives

• Heider (1958) proposed two types of attributions: internal and external.
• Internal (personal/dispositional): Behavior is explained by the individual's traits or personal characteristics, mood, or effort.
• External (situational): Behavior is explained by situational factors.
• Jones & Harris (1967) developed the Correspondent Inference Theory.
• Determining what others are attempting to achieve through their actions and assessing whether an action reflects corresponding behavior requires one to observe for internal or external justification
• Action is freely chosen, not common, or low in social desirability indicate the behavior is due to the person's stable traits.
• Action is forced, common, or high in social desirability indicate the behavior is due to external factors.
• Kelley (1970) developed the Covariation Model.
• Judgements about someone's behavior are formed with 3 types of information from multiple experiences: consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency.

Criticisms of the Covariation Model

• Does not distinguish between intentional vs unintentional behavior.
• Does not account for real-world social complexity.
• Covariation does not mean causality requires multiple observations over time, and involves poor assessments of covariation between events.

Attribution: Configurations

• Causal Schemas: Theory built from experience about how certain causes interact to produce a specific effect.
• Allows fast interpretations.
• Discounting Principle: Tendency to attach less importance to one potential cause of a behavior when other causes are also present.
• Augmenting Principle: Attach greater importance to a cause of a behavior, if the behavior occurs despite the presence of other inhibitory causes.
• Internal/external attributions are assigned to behavior based on our perception

Categories of Attribution

• Multidimensional Approach (Weiner)
  • Locus of causality: internal or external.
  • Locus of stability: is the cause stable/consistent?
  • Locus of control: how much is the behavior under the control of the individual?

Sources of Error in Attribution

• Correspondence bias and Fundamental Attribution Error (Jones and Harris)
• Correspondence bias: Inference of a stable personality trait based on a behavior.
• FAE: Tendency to underestimate the influence/impact of situational factors.

Dual Process of FAE

• Use automatic thinking of categorisation and characterisation to assigned internal attributions.
• May make a correction using controlled thinking.