Module 3 SOCIAL COGNITION PDF

SOCIAL COGNITION The manner in which SOCIAL we interpret, analyze, remember,...

SOCIAL COGNITION The manner in which SOCIAL we interpret, analyze, remember, and use COGNITION information about the social world. It suggests very strongly that often our thinking about the social HEURISTICS world proceeds on “automatic” – quickly, effortlessly, and without lots of careful reasoning. Simple rules for making complex decisions or - It can lead to satisfactory judgments, it can also lead to important drawing inferences in a rapid manner and seemingly errors in the conclusions we draw. - For example, should one Muslim’s actions be taken as effortless manner. representative of 100, 000 Muslims? –Rules of thumb –Intuitive judgments Controlled processing – tends to occur when something –Common sense unexpected happens – something that jolts us out of automatic, effortless thought.  – After considering how schema use can lead to judgment errors, we have to consider several specific tendencies or tilts in social thought – tendencies that can lead us to false conclusions about SCHEMAS others or the social world. – These are mental frameworks that INFORMATION OVERLOAD – where the demands on allow us to organize large amounts of our cognitive system are greater than its capacity. information in an efficient manner. – Our processing capacity can be depleted by high levels of stress - It can exert strong effects on social or other demands. thought – effects that are not always CONDITIONS OF UNCERTAINTY – where the beneficial from the point of view of accuracy. “correct” answer is difficult to know or would take a great deal of effort to determine. TYPES OF HEURISTICS CAN YOU GUESS WHAT THIS GUY DO FOR A LIVING? A. Representative Heuristics A strategy for making judgments based on the extent to which current stimuli or events resemble other stimuli or categories. –The more object X is similar to class Y, the more likely we think X belongs to Y. RUBEN MADRIDEJOS  PROTOTYPE – summary of the common –The representative heuristic is used not only in judging attributes possessed by members of a category. the similarity of people to a category prototype, but also when judging whether specific causes resemble and are –Taking the situation given above, you may quickly therefore likely to produce effects that are similar in conclude that she is probably a librarian because her terms of magnitude. traits seem close to those associated with this When people are asked to judge the likelihood that a particular profession. effect (e.g. either many or a few people die of a disease) was –The more an individual seems to resemble or match a produced by a particular cause (e.g. an unusually infectious given group, the more likely she or he belongs to that bacteria or a standard strain), they are likely to expect the group. strength of the cause to match its effect. TYPES OF HEURISTICS TYPES OF HEURISTICS B. Availability Heuristics C. Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristics A strategy for making judgments on the basis of how easily specific A heuristic that involves the tendency to use a number of kinds of information can be brought to mind, the greater its impact on subsequent judgments or decisions. value as a starting point to which we then make Relying on availability in making social judgments can also lead to adjustments. errors: It can lead us to overestimate the likelihood of events that – For example, the seller’s price provides such a starting point, to which are dramatic but rare because they are easy to bring to mind. buyers try to make adjustments in order to lower the price they pay. – For example, physicians who examine the same patient often reach different Such lowering makes the buyer feel that, by comparison to the diagnoses about the patient’s illness.Why? One reason is that physicians have different experiences in their medical practices and so find different kinds of original asking price, they are getting a very good deal. diseases easier to bring to mind.Their diagnoses then reflect these differences in ease of retrieval – or their reliance on the availability heuristic. SCHEMAS: MENTAL FRAMEWORKS FOR ORGANIZING SOCIAL INFORMATION SCHEMAS –Mental frameworks that help us to organize social Indeed it’s a DUCK!!! information and that guide our actions and the – It has a beak like a duck processing of information relevant to those – It walks like a duck contexts. – It has feathers like a duck Influences three basic processes: b. Encoding a. Attention – It refers to the processes through which information we notice – It refers to what information we notice. gets stored in memory. – Schemas often act as a kind of filter: information consistent with – The information that becomes the focus of our attention is them is more likely to be noticed and to enter our much more likely to be stored in long-term memory. consciousness. – However, information that is sharply inconsistent with our Cognitive overload – when we are trying to handle a lot of schemas – information that does not agree with our information at one time. expectations in a given situation – may be encoded into a separate memory location and marked with a unique “tag”. For example, expectation to a professor is different in actual behavior of the professor. c. Retrieval PRIMING: WHICH SCHEMAS GUIDE OUR –It refers to the processes through which we THOUGHT? Cognitive frameworks help us interpret and use social information: recover information from memory in order to – The stronger and better-developed schemas are, the more likely they are to influence our use it in some manner - for example making thinking, and especially our memory for social information. PRIMING – a situation that occurs when stimuli or events increase the judgments about people. availability in memory or consciousness of specific types of information held in memory. – For instance, suppose you have just seen a violent movie. Now, you are looking for a parking spot and you notice one, but another driver turns in front of you and takes it first. Do you perceive her behavior as aggressive? Because the violent movie has activated your schema from “aggression”, you may, in fact, be more likely to perceive her taking the parking spot as aggressive. PRIMING: WHICH SCHEMAS GUIDE OUR Schemas are often resistant to change – they show a THOUGHT? strong PERSEVERANCE EFFECT, remaining Unpriming – It refers to the fact that the effects of unchanged even in the face of contradictory the schemas tend to persist until they are somehow information. expressed in thought or behavior and only then do their effects decrease. Schemas can sometimes be SELF-FULFILLING: They influence our responses to the social world in ways that makes it consistent with the schema. –For example, expectations of teachers to their students. POTENTIAL SOURCES OF ERROR IN Overconfidence Barrier SOCIAL COGNITION – The tendency to have more confidence in the accuracy of our own A. Basic “Tilt” in Social Thought judgments than is reasonable. Optimistic Bias – For example, students were asked to indicate early in the academic year whether they would perform a number of actions (e.g. drop a course, move on or off – People tend to “see the world through rose-colored glasses”. campus) and to indicate how confident they were in their predictions. The students – A powerful predisposition to overlook risks and expect things to turn out were wrong a substantial proportion of the time, and even when they were 100 well. percent confident in their predictions they were wrong 15 percent of the time. – For example, most people believe that they are more likely than other to get a – One important reason we display overconfidence is that we lack the relevant good job, have a happy marriage, and live to a ripe old age, but less likely to feedback that would help moderate our confidence. experience negative outcomes such as being fired, getting seriously ill or getting divorced. b. Rocky Past vs Golden Future Planning Fallacy When we think about the past, we can recall failures, unpleasant –The tendency to believe that we can get more done in a events, and other disappointments, whereas these unexpected given period of time that we actually can, or that a given possibilities are not salient when we think about our future. job will take less time than it really will. –For example, announced schedules for public works (e.g. When we think about the future, in contrast, we tend to new roads, airports, bridges, stadiums) that have no concentrate on desirable goals, personal happiness, and doing things chance of being met. we have always wanted to do – such as traveling to exotic places. - Factors: 1. When individuals make predictions about how long will it take Motivation – plays an important role in the planning them to complete a given task, they enter a planning or narrative fallacy. When predicting what will happen, individuals often mode of thought in which they focus primarily on the future and guess that what will happen is what they want to happen. how they will perform the task. - This, in turn, prevents them from looking backward in time and remembering how long - It appears that our estimates of when we will complete a similar tasks took them in the past. task are indeed influenced by our hopes and desires: we 2. When individuals do consider past experiences in which tasks took want to finish early or on time, so we predict that we will. longer than expected, they tend to attribute such outcomes to factors outside their control. - The result they tend to overlook important potential obstacles that cannot be easily foreseen when predicting how long a task will take, and fall prey to the planning fallacy. If individuals imagine upward counterfactuals, comparing their c. Situation-Specific Sources of Error in Social Cognition current outcomes with more favorable ones that they experienced, Counterfactual Thinking – The tendency to imagine the result may be strong feelings of dissatisfaction or envy, other outcomes in a situation than the ones that actually especially when people do not feel capable of obtaining better outcomes in the future. occurred (“what might have been”) – For example, Olympic athletes who win a silver medal but who can easily imagine –Counterfactual thoughts about what might have happened winning a gold one experience such reactions. instead of what did happen can influence your sympathy – as – Alternatively, if individuals compare their current outcomes with less favorable ones – it might have been worse – they may experience positive feelings of well as your recommendations concerning compensation satisfaction or hopefulness. for the victim. Counterfactual thinking can sometimes help us to perform better – to do a better job at various tasks. – Why? Because imagining how we might have done better, we may come up with improved strategies and ways of using our effort more effectively. AFFECT AND COGNITION: HOW FEELINGS A. The Influence of Affect on Cognition SHAPE THOUGHT AND THOUGHT SHAPES Our current moods can influence our perceptions of the world around us. FEELINGS – When we are in good mood (experiencing positive affect), we tend to perceive Research findings indicate that there is a continuous and almost everything – situations, other people, ideas, even new inventions – in complex interplay between affect – our current moods or more positive terms than we do when we are in a negative mood. emotions – and cognition – various aspects of the ways in – Positive moods can also encourage people to feel they understand the world better. which we think, process, store, remember, and use For example, when interviewers are in good mood they assign higher ratings to the people they information (e.g. Forgas, 2000; Isen & Labroo, 2003). interview. While positive moods can increase our confidence about our interpretation for given to actions performed by other people, they can also result in less accuracy. B. Impact on Memory C. Creativity Mood Congruence Effects Several studies suggest that being in a happy mood can – The fact that we are more likely to store or remember positive information increase creativity – perhaps because being in a happy when in a positive mood and negative information when in a negative mood. – Current moods serve as a kind of filter, permitting primarily information mood activates a wider range of ideas or associations than consistent with these moods to enter into long-term storage. being in a negative mood, and creativity consists, in part, of Mood Dependent Memory combining such associations into new patterns (Estrada, – When experiencing a particular mood, individuals are more likely to Isen, & Young, 1995; Isen, 2000). remember information they acquired in the past while in a similar mood. – Current moods serve as a kind of retrieval cue, prompting recall of information consistent with these moods. D. Engage in heuristic processing THE INFLUENCE OF COGNITION ON – Thinking that relies heavily on mental “shortcuts” (heuristics) AFFECT and knowledge acquired through past experience. A.Two-Factory theory of emotion E. Our interpretations of the motives behind people’s – This theory suggests that often, we do not know our own feelings or behavior attitudes directly. Rather, since these internal reactions are often somewhat ambiguous, we infer their nature from the external world – from the kinds – Positive affect tends to promote attributions of positive motives, of situations in which we experience these reactions. while negative affect tends to encourage attributions of negative – Examples: motives. If we experience increased arousal in the presence of an attractive person, we may conclude that we are in love. If we experience increased arousal if that attractive person is with someone, we may conclude that what we feel is irritation. B. Activating schemas containing a strong affective component –If we categorize an individual as belonging to a group different than our own, we may experience a different emotional response than if we categorized that same individual as a member of our own group.