Automatic and Controlled Thinking PDF

Awareness can refer to a few different things: Awareness of a stimulus that triggers a response Awareness of potential influences on subjective states Awareness of a mental process (a chain of mental events) In automatic thinking people are typically unaware of things that guide their th...

Awareness can refer to a few different things: Awareness of a stimulus that triggers a response Awareness of potential influences on subjective states Awareness of a mental process (a chain of mental events) In automatic thinking people are typically unaware of things that guide their thoughts, feelings, and behavior Efficiency refers to how much a process depends on attentional resources Automatic thoughts and heuristics are considered very efficient People tend to trust categorizations, self-judgments, attributions, etc. quickly and with little effort Think “trusting your senses/intuition/gut” Intentionality refers to the degree to which people are in control of initiating processes Automatic thoughts, feelings, and behavior are triggered unintentionally Controllability refers to the degree to which people are in control of stifling or stopping processes When people lack motivation or ability, certain thoughts, feelings, and behavior are more likely to occur uncontrollably Note: Intentionality and controllability both have to do with how much people (believe that they) are in control of their thoughts, feelings, and behavior HOW DOES AUTOMATIC THINKING WORK? Often through the activation and use of schemas, which help us connect new situations to our prior experiences Schemas are mental structures that organize our knowledge about the social world Influence what we notice, think about, and remember, and they guide our behavioral responses Content is determined by lived experience (culture) Difficult to change (see self-fulfilling prophecies) WHY DO SCHEMAS EXIST? Help people organize and make sense of the world Fills gaps in knowledge (e.g. Kunda, 1997) Useful when people encounter brief, confusing, or ambiguous information Help people figure out what is going on WHICH SCHEMAS ARE APPLIED? Schemas must be “activated” to be applied! 1. Chronic accessibility 2. Current goals / motivations 3. Recent experiences (aka priming) people are not always aware that they have been primed HOW TO PRIME To prime, an experience has to be directly applicable to schema. Various tasks have been used to prime schemas: Sentence scrambles E.g., “steady hands the was boat” versus “unsteady hands the was boat” Words or pictures Others SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECIES People’s schemas/expectations about others can influence how they behave toward those others This, in turn, can lead others to act in a manner consistent with the original schemas/expectations, this is known as a self-fulfilling prophecy Many of the processes involved in self-fulfilling prophecies are automatic EMBODIED COGNITIONS? Bodily sensations might activate certain schemas because of mental connections underlying metaphors: Citrus Windex (morality schema: reciprocity, trust, volunteering) (Liljenquist et al. 2010) Physical warmth (friendliness of stranger) (Williams and Bargh, 2008) Instability (relationships expectation for celebrities / desired traits for partner) (Kille et al., 2012) MENTAL STRATEGIES AND SHORTCUTS Automatic thinking has also been investigated from the perspective of heuristics Heuristics: Mental shortcuts are used to make reasonably good judgments quickly and efficiently Helpful, but sometimes lead people astray Often happens outside of awareness AVAILABILITY HEURISTIC Judgments are made based on how easily things come to mind Unfortunately, availability does not always reflect representativeness E.g., news reports that over-represent violent crime influence perceptions of personal safety Both good and bad in most professions (e.g. doctors) REPRESENTATIVENESS HEURISTIC Classification of something based on how similar it is to a typical case People will tend to ignore base rate information if the case seems to very representative of some category Ties to stereotypes ANCHORING HEURISTIC Judgments are made based on an initial piece of information Can be a big influence in negotiations, marketing, etc. AUTOMATIC THINKING “STYLES” Cultural differences in automatic thinking: Analytic thinking: People focus on the specific properties of objects, without considering the surrounding context Holistic thinking: People focus on the overall context, particularly how objects relate to one another HIGH-EFFORT THINKING Controlled thinking is essentially the opposite of automatic thinking Conscious, deliberative, etc. Requires mental energy Limited capacity Controlled thinking can (sometimes) override automatic thinking or impulses Controlled thinking is absolutely essentially for Learning from the past COUNTERFACTUALS Mentally altering some aspect of a past event as a way of imagining what might have been Additive counterfactual: Engaging in something that didn’t occur originally (“If only I had done...”) Subtractive counterfactual: Removing something that occurred originally (“If only I hadn’t done...”) Can sometimes help people cope better in future situations but dwelling on counterfactuals seems to compound misery Counterfactual thinking is more likely to occur when we experience a negative event that could have been easily avoided (a “close call”), and the more counterfactual thinking we engage in following negative events the more distressed we tend to be. E.g., Earning a 48% versus a 25% on an exam Although an example of controlled thinking, counterfactual thoughts are not always intentional or controllable Rumination and depression MENTAL PRACTICE Envisioning engaging in a particular behavior, usually to help prepare for a task THOUGHT SUPPRESSION Trying not to think about something Monitoring (automatic) vs. operating processes (controlled) Ironically, sometimes the target thoughts become more accessible when trying to suppress them Cognitive load will disrupt the operating processes but not the monitoring processes! WHAT IS SOCIAL PERCEPTION? The study of how we form impressions of other people and make inferences about them In other words, how we observe and try to explain the behavior of others Why does this matter? Helps people understand and predict the social world Evolutionary perspective: Accurate social perception ensures our survival NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR We get a lot from what others say verbally, but accurately reading nonverbal behavior can be just as (or more) important Facial expression Body posture/movement Tone of voice Use of touch Gestures Eye gaze Nonverbal behavior can communicate emotions, attitudes, and personality Can also substitute for verbal messages People tend to mimic the nonverbal behavior of others May be “hard-wired”: mirror neurons Empathy: feeling what others feel FACIAL EXPRESSIONS People are not always accurate at figuring out facial expressions Context matters! Impressions of a target face are influenced by the faces around them. Social cues / information matter too. Affect blends where one part of the face registers one emotion but another part registers a different emotion can make it hard to decipher faces. Cultural display rules can prohibit the public expression of certain emotions, or strong emotions generally Interesting gender effect: People are faster and more accurate to judge anger in a male face and happiness in a female face Evolutionary and cultural reasons CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN NONVERBAL BEHAVIORS Some nonverbal behavior differs across cultures The interpretation of eye-gaze varies (interest vs. disrespect) The physical proximity we expect between strangers varies The meaning of some gestures (emblems) varies IMPLICIT PERSONALITY THEORIES People tend to make assumptions about the types of personality traits that go together (schemas) E.g., If someone is beautiful, they are also kind, intelligent, and more moral. Spontaneous trait inferences: Judgments of personality traits tend to happen automatically, with no conscious intention Low self-esteem Shy If you like X EXPLAINING BEHAVIOR Attribution theory: Seeks to explain how we infer the causes of our own and other people’s behavior People explain the causes of behavior in two ways: Internal / dispositional attribution: Behavior was caused by something about the person External / situational attribution: Behavior was caused by something about the situation Kelley’s (1967) covariation model takes attribution theory a step further We use different types of information (consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency) to decide whether Person A’s behavior toward Person B was caused by internal or external factors COVARIATION MODEL Consensus information: How do others behave toward Person B? When consensus is high (everyone behaves this way towards B), then it’s probably not something internal to A that makes A behave this way towards B. Distinctiveness information (unusualness): How does Person A respond to others? When distinctiveness is high (A only behaves this way towards B), then it’s probably not something internal to A that makes A behave this way towards B. Consistency information: How often does Person A’s behavior toward Person B occur across time and situations? When consistency is high... People make an internal attribution for Person A’s behavior if the behavior is low in consensus and low in distinctiveness. People make an external attribution for Person A’s behavior if the behavior is high in consensus and high in distinctiveness. When consistency is low, we can’t make a clear internal or external attribution We tend to make a “special circumstance” external attribution ATTRIBUTIONS IN TWO STEPS Step 1: We make an automatic internal attribution (e.g., a spontaneous trait inference) Step 2: We (sometimes) consider situational factors that may have played a role This can change the initial internal attribution into an external attribution REVISITING CORRESPONDENCE BIAS Correspondence bias: The tendency to infer that the behavior of others is caused by dispositional factors Also called the fundamental attribution error Occurs when we engage in Step 1 of the attribution process but not Step 2 Why do people engage in correspondence bias? People are salient, the situation is not One consequence of correspondence bias: People can (erroneously) believe that victims have control over their situation when the victim doesn’t. Such internal attributions result in less sympathy and sometimes overt hostility towards victims. Internal attributions for victimhood can also be form of motivated attribution: belief in a just world: beliefs that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people ACTOR/OBSERVER DIFFERENCE People tend to believe that others’ behavior is caused by dispositional factors, but their own behavior is caused by situational factors E.g., Exam performance The actor/observer tendency varies by culture Collectivistic cultures are less likely to make dispositional attributions of others Why does this exist? Perceptual salience Actors and observers have different information available to them Actors have more consistency and distinctiveness information about themselves SELF-SERVING ATTRIBUTIONS Our successes and failures engender different attributions Success: Internal, dispositional Failure: External, situational This tendency also varies by culture Very low or no self-serving bias in some collectivistic cultures The pattern can even reverse in some cultures! Why do we engage in self-serving attributions? The need to feel good about ourselves