L&M in a Social World Lecture Notes PDF

L&M in a Social World (Lecture 19) ​ Learning and memory in a social world ○​ Social environments are complex and often ambiguous ​ Populated by agents with individual goals/motivations, internal states (emotional state, beliefs), and latent attributes...

L&M in a Social World (Lecture 19) ​ Learning and memory in a social world ○​ Social environments are complex and often ambiguous ​ Populated by agents with individual goals/motivations, internal states (emotional state, beliefs), and latent attributes (personality traits) ​ Agents interact: others try to affect your behavior or beliefs (negotiation, impression formation, reputation management) ​ Attributes of agents can’t be directly perceived, but have to be inferred from their actions ​ But actions are also affected by situational constraints (the same person may act differently depending on the social situation) ○​ Example: when do you try to help someone lying in the street? ○​ How do we navigate the uncertainty of the social world? ​ Retrieve social knowledge from memory to fill in the gaps, to interpret ambiguous situations, or to relate new situations to past experience ​ Social priming ○​ Social priming: when exposure to socially relevant stimuli influences impressions, judgements, goals, and actions ​ Application of a general memory phenomena (priming) to socially relevant concepts in memory ○​ Role of social priming in ​ Impression formation (how other people are perceived) ​ Activation of behavioral norms (how to act) ​ Attributions (explanation for others behavior) ​ Social priming: impression formation ○​ Study: exposure to trait adjectives influences judgments of other behaviors ○​ Prior to reading a description of a person, completed a separate task in which they had to remember a set of words (primes) ​ Positive condition: adventurous, self confident, independent, persistent ​ Negative condition: reckless, conceited, aloof, stubborn ○​ Priming in first task affected judgment of personality in the second task: positive primes led to positive description, negative primes lead to negative description ​ Social priming: norms ○​ Study: examined priming of social norms ​ Picture task (priming): view a picture for 30 seconds in preparation for a memory test later  ​ One group of participants saw an image strongly associated with a social norm (staying quiet in the library) ​ Compared to the control condition (image of train station), participants were primed by the image of the library were faster to identify words related to silence ​ In a second experiment, library primed participants used a quieter voice when asked to read aloud a set of unrelated words ​ Activation of a behavioral goal (keep quiet) ​ Social priming: situational ambiguity ○​ Participants first completed a picture naming task in which they were primed either by business related or neutral images ○​ Situation perception ratings (competitive vs. cooperative, discussion vs. argument) ○​ Participants primed by business related images rated an ambiguous situation as more competitive (compared to people exposed to non business images) ​ As in more priming studies of this type, participants were unaware of the connection between the picture naming and situation rating tasks ○​ In further experiments, business priming also increases competitive behavior (in bargaining and negotiation) ○​ Is this rapid, automatic activation of social knowledge a good thing? ​ In novel or ambiguous situations, helps us quickly figure out the right way to act ​ Social priming: attributions ○​ Do we interpret people's actions as reflecting their personal attributes or situational constraints? ○​ Attributions: explanations for others behavior ​ Did he attack the trespasser because he’s short tempered (personal) or because he was feeling threatened (situational) ○​ Fundamental attribution error: ascribing a behavior to a person’s disposition of personality rather than situational factors ​ Actor observer error: people assume their own behavior is largely determined by situational factors, but that the behavior of others reflect their personal traits ○​ Study: proposed a two stage theory of attributions: ​ Stage 1: personal attribution: fast, automatic, requires little cognitive effort ​ Stage 2: situational attribution: slower, controlled, requires effort to analyze the situation and correct initial judgment ○​ Study: participants watched a video showing a women acting anxiously during a conversation  ​ Priming manipulation: some participants were primed to view the women as anxious, other participants were primed to view the situation as anxiety provoking ​ Cognitive load manipulation: participants either just watched the video (no cognitive load) or had to simultaneously complete an attention demanding task (high cognitive load) ○​ Study: people default to personal attributions of behavior ​ If they have spare cognitive capacity, they can analyze a situation in more detail and correct their initial impression ​ Summary ○​ Social environments are inherently complex and often ambiguous ​ We use existing knowledge to fill in the gaps to figure out the reasons for others behavior and how we should act ○​ Priming is a marker of automatic retrieval of memory (based on mechanism like spreading activation through semantic networks) ​ Typically occurs without awareness of relationship between tasks ○​ Subtle, seemingly irrelevant information that we experience in the environment can influence how we perceive and respond to social situations