Module 3 Social Cognition PDF

SOCIAL COGNITION SOCIAL COGNITION The manner in which we interpret, analyze, remember, and use information about the social world.  It suggests very strongly that often our thinking about the social world proceeds on “automatic” – quickly, effortlessly, and without lots of careful reason...

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