Social Psychology Chapter 2 PDF

# Chapter 2 Social Cognition ## How We Think About the Social World ### Learning Objectives - Examine how heuristic strategies are employed to judge complex information. - Describe the role of schemas in guiding our thoughts and actions. - Distinguish between automatic and controlled processing m...

# Chapter 2 Social Cognition ## How We Think About the Social World ### Learning Objectives - Examine how heuristic strategies are employed to judge complex information. - Describe the role of schemas in guiding our thoughts and actions. - Distinguish between automatic and controlled processing modes of social thought. - Evaluate the imperfections of the social cognition process. - Assess the interrelation of affect and cognition. We live in an information-dense world. Yet, much of that information is ambiguous or contradictory, potentially leaving us uncertain about what to believe. How, then, do we assess the likelihood of different types of risk we might face? For example, what's our likelihood of getting into an auto accident, having our wallet (or identity) stolen, getting a cancer diagnosis, or purchasing a faulty mobile phone in constant need of repairs? None of these possibilities are easy to judge. But, as you will see, a social psychological analysis of how people think about risks illuminates the processes we use to make judgments, even when we have incomplete information about the risk likelihood. Judging our risks is just one of the challenges in life. Many of the decisions we must make require us to sift through large quantities of complex information. You probably faced a choice dilemma when deciding which university to attend. Did you try to choose rationally-create a list of all the pros and cons for each potential institution? Or, did you just choose based on a simple rule such as "which has more status," or "which one looks best in an advertisement?" Given that the university program you decide to enroll in may have implications about your future career prospects, like the person in Figure 2.1, you no doubt learned that selecting a university program is a complex process-one that may have a lasting impact on your life! After all your effort, it may still have been unclear which university would ultimately be best for your career aspirations and future life goals. After university, you will continue to face difficult choices with high-stake outcomes. These too involve wading through lots of complex information. For example, when you start a new job, you typically have to pick from a variety of seemingly incomprehensible health insurance plans and retirement savings options, all before receiving your first salary. When you decide to purchase your first home, it will be important to understand the pros and cons of the various types of mortgage loans from which you must select one. At first glance, it might seem wonderful that we have so many alternatives, but having lots of options can have a paralyzing effect that results in nonoptimal decisions. Do we give up hope of making the "correct" decision and just blindly make a selection? Thaler and Sunstein (2009) suggest in their popular book, Nudge, that what we know about the social psychology of human judgment can help us make better sense of large amounts of information. It turns out, when people receive information in a way that highlights the crucial data in an accessible style, the decision-making process can be made easier and the choices people actually make for themselves can be improved. ### Figure 2.1 Too Many Choices: When Information Is Complex and Confusing, How Do You Make a Decision? Many of our most important life decisions require us to wade through masses of seemingly incomprehensible information. When you are faced with such complexity, do you attempt to decide "rationally," by systematically weighing all the pros and cons? Or, might you instead make a choice based on some simple strategy? ## Social Cognition The manner in which we interpret, analyze, remember, and use information about the social world. ### Information Overload Instances in which our ability to process information is exceeded. As you will see in this chapter, people often use mental shortcuts or rules of thumb to arrive at judgments. This is especially the case when we are confronted with complex, contradictory, or difficult decisions where the "correct" answer may be hard to determine. Social cognition, which concerns how we think about the social world, our attempts to understand complex issues, and why we sometimes are less than "optimally rational," will be a major focus of this chapter (e.g., Fiske & Taylor, 2008; Higgins & Kruglanski, 1996). Research strongly suggests that our thinking about the social world often operates on "automatic"-it occurs quickly and without lots of careful reasoning. As you'll see later, automatic thought offers important advantages: It requires little or no effort and can be very efficient. Although thinking in this manner can lead to satisfactory judgments, it can also lead to important errors in our conclusions and result in suboptimal decisions. Although we do lots of social thought on "automatic," we do sometimes stop and think much more carefully and logically about some issues (e.g., which university to attend). This more controlled way of thinking tends to occur when something is important to us or is unexpected-both of which can jolt us out of automatic, effortless thought. In the first section of this chapter, we'll examine several rules of thumb we often use to quickly draw inferences about situations we face. We'll also consider the research conducted by social psychologists that addresses how these simple rules operate. Next, we will consider in depth the mental frameworks that we use to organize large amounts of information in an efficient manner. These frameworks can exert strong effects on social thought-effects that are not always beneficial from an accuracy point of view. We'll also examine several specific tendencies in social thought-tendencies that can lead us to false conclusions about others and the social world. Finally, we'll focus on the complex interplay between our feelings and various aspects of social cognition. ## 2.1: Heuristics: How We Employ Simple Rules in Social Cognition ### Objective Examine how heuristic strategies are employed to judge complex information. Distracted driving represents a key risk factor for driving-related injuries and deaths, especially in countries that suffer a high death toll from road crashes, such as Thailand. According to a 2021 World Health Organization report, Thailand had the second highest number of road fatalities in the world. Different countries across the globe, from the United Kingdom to Qatar and the Philippines have imposed large fines and penalties for drivers caught using their mobile phone at the wheel. Why? As illustrated in Figure 2.2, these are very dangerous practices, particularly texting and the use of social media while driving (Jommonkawo, Uttra, & Ratanavaraha, 2021). It has been found over and over again that when drivers are distracted, they are more likely to get into accidents, and texting can certainly be highly distracting (Atchley, Hadlock, & Lane, 2012; Truong & Nguyen, 2019). What about global positioning systems that show maps to drivers or other in-car technology? Do you think that they, too, can distract our attention away from fast-moving traffic and cause accidents? At any given time, we are capable of focusing on a limited amount of information. Any input beyond our limit puts us into a state of information overload where the demands on our cognitive system are greater than its capacity. In addition, our processing capacity can be depleted by high levels of stress or other demands on us (e.g., Chajut & Algom, 2003). To deal with such situations, people adopt various strategies designed to "stretch" their cognitive resources-to let them do more, with less effort, than would otherwise be the case. This is one major reason that so much of our social thought occurs on "automatic"-in a quick and relatively effortless manner rather than in a careful, systematic, arduous way. We'll discuss the costs and potential benefits of this thought process later. Here, however, we'll focus on techniques we use to deal quickly with large amounts of information, especially under conditions of uncertainty where the "correct" answer is difficult to know or would take a great deal of effort to determine. While many strategies exist for making sense of complex information, one of the most useful tactics involve heuristics-simple rules for making complex decisions or drawing inferences in a rapid and efficient manner. ## 2.1.1: Representativeness: Judging by Resemblance Suppose that you have just met your next-door neighbor for the first time. While chatting with her, you notice that she is dressed conservatively, is neat in her personal habits, has a very large library in her home, and seems to be very gentle and a little shy. Later you realize that she never mentioned what she does for a living. Is she a business manager, a physician, a waitress, an artist, a dancer, or a librarian? One quick way of making a guess is to compare her with a prototype-a list of attributes commonly possessed by members of each of these occupations. How well does she resemble persons you have met in each of these fields or, perhaps, the typical member of these fields (Shah & Oppenheimer, 2009)? If you proceed in this manner, you may quickly conclude that she is likely to be a librarian; her traits seem closer to those associated with this profession than they do to the traits associated with physicians, dancers, or business executives. If you made your judgment about your neighbor's occupation in this manner, you used the representativeness heuristic. In other words, you made your judgment on the basis of a relatively simple rule: The more an individual seems to resemble or match a given group, the more likely they are to belong to that group. ### Conditions of Uncertainty Where the "correct" answer is difficult to know or would take a great deal of effort to determine. ### Heuristics Simple rules for making complex decisions or drawing inferences in a rapid and seemingly effortless manner. ### Prototype Summary of the common attributes possessed by members of a category. ### Representativeness Heuristic A strategy for making judgments based on the extent to which current stimuli or events resemble other stimuli or categories. Are such judgments accurate? Often they are, because belonging to certain groups does affect the behavior and style of persons in them, and because people with certain traits are attracted to particular groups in the first place. But sometimes, judgments based on representativeness are wrong, mainly for the following reason: Decisions or judgments made on the basis of this rule tend to ignore base rates the frequency with which given events or categories (e.g., occupations) occur in the total population (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973; Kahneman & Frederick, 2002). In fact, there are many more business managers than librarians. Thus, even though your neighbor seemed more similar to the prototype of librarians than managers in terms of her traits, the chances are actually higher that she is a manager than a librarian. The representativeness heuristic is also used when judging whether specific causes resemble each other and are therefore likely to produce effects that are similar in terms of magnitude. That is, when people are asked to judge the likelihood that a particular effect (e.g., a fatal car crash) was produced by a particular cause (e.g., distracted driver or bad road conditions), they are likely to expect the strength of the cause to match its effect. However, cultural groups differ in the extent to which they rely on the representativeness heuristic and expect "like to go with like" in terms of causes and effects. In particular, people from Asia, due to their preferential reliance on holistic thinking styles, tend to adopt more explanations when explicating the causes of events and, accordingly, consider more potential causal factors, as compared to Westerners from individualistic countries, who tend to focus on a narrower set of explanatory factors, usually relevant to personality dispositions and traits (Lim, Sung, & Lee, 2018). Because Asians consider more information and arrive at more complex attributions when judging an event, they should show less evidence of thinking based on the representativeness heuristic-a judgment simplification strategy-compared to Westerners, such as North Americans. To test this reasoning, researchers (Choi, Dalal, Kim-Prieto, & Park, 2003; Study 1) asked students in America and South Korea to provide an explanation of a deviant behavior (e.g., murder) committed by another person, and gave them a long list of causal factors that could (or could not) be relevant to the murder. Participants were asked to imagine that they were police officers trying to resolve the murder case, and that they had to judge the relevance of the potential causal factors that led to the murder. Compared to American students, Koreans considered more causal factors before explaining the murder case. A similar pattern of results was observed in yet another study, this time identifying causal factors for prosocial behavior (Choi et al., 2003; Study 2). Korean students were again more likely than Americans to consider a wider array of information before making an attribution, possibly due to their tendency to engage in holistic causal understanding. ## 2.1.2: Availability: “If I Can Recall Many Instances, They Must Be Frequent?" When estimating event frequencies or their likelihood, people may simply not know the "correct" answer-even for events in their own lives. So how do they arrive at a response? Ask yourself: How many people in your country suffer from depression? How safe are vaccines against COVID-19? How many elite athletes use doping substances? If you recently read in the news that two athletes were banned from the Olympic Games because they tested positive for banned substances, you may determine that the use of doping among elite level athletes is high. Accordingly, if you can easily recall from memory instances where you heard people talking about depression, you may think that the prevalence of depression in your country should be relatively high. Likewise, Zimbardo and colleagues asked research participants to give their estimates about the risk of an imminent terrorism attack in their country (Breckenridge, Zimbardo, & Sweeton, 2010). However, half of the participants firstly watched a short video about a terrorist bombing in another, remote country, before estimating terrorism risk. The results showed that participants who watched this video gave significantly higher terrorism risk estimates than those who did not watch it. This study illustrates that events that are more easily recalled from memory can lead to biased judgments about their typicality, prevalence, or likelihood. So, this "ease-of-retrieval" effect may mislead us. We assume that because such scenes or events are readily available in memory, they accurately reflect the overall frequency, when, in fact, they don't. This example, and many similar judgment errors, illustrates the operation of the availability heuristic, another cognitive "rule of thumb" suggesting that the easier it is to bring information to mind, the greater its impact on subsequent judgments or decisions. Use of this heuristic makes good sense much of the time. After all, the fact that we can bring some types of information to mind quite readily suggests that it may indeed be frequent or important, so it should influence our judgments and decisions. But relying on availability in making social judgments can also lead to errors. Specifically, it can lead us to overestimate the likelihood of events that are dramatic but rare, because they are easy to bring to mind. Consistent with this availability principle, many people fear traveling in airplanes more than traveling in automobiles, even though the chances of dying in an automobile accident are hundreds of times higher. Likewise, people tend to overestimate murder as a cause of death and underestimate more mundane but much more frequent killers such as heart disease and stroke. Because of the frequency that murder and other dramatic causes of death are seen in the mass media, instances are easier to retrieve from memory than the various natural causes of death that are rarely presented in the media. Here's another, perhaps more troubling, example: Physicians who received information about a disease later misdiagnosed clinical cases that were superficially similar to the disease they had learned about earlier (Schmidt et al., 2014). When the media or other sources focus frequently on a particular type of illness, even doctors may show the influence of this bias because certain disease features are more readily brought to mind than others. As a result, doctors' diagnoses may reflect differences due to the ease of data retrieval-thus revealing the effect of availability heuristic use. In what other way can the availability heuristic influence us? Research suggests that our health risk judgments can be influenced by media exposure, and more specifically, by the beliefs, behaviors, or even personal stories of "exemplars," such as celebrities (Spence et al., 2017). So, being exposed to the personal story of a celebrity who tested positive for COVID-19 can make COVID-19 infection more salient in memory and, accordingly, influence our judgments about our own personal risk of being infected as well as our motivation to engage in preventive behavior (see Figure 2.3). ### Figure 2.3 Availability Heuristic Use: Health Risk Judgments Can Be Influenced by Media Exposure Being exposed to the personal story of a celebrity (e.g., Tom Hanks) who tested positive for COVID-19 can make the infection more salient in memory and, accordingly, influence our judgments about our own personal risk of being infected as well as our motivation to engage in preventive behavior. This idea was empirically examined by Cohen (2020), who had participants read a story about a person who was infected with the coronavirus. That person was either a noncelebrity or a celebrity exemplar (i.e., actor Tom Hanks who was tested positive with COVID-19 in March 2020). The study found that exposure to the celebrity exemplar was associated with greater personal risk perceptions for COVID-19 infection, higher anxiety over COVID-19, and stronger intentions to engage in preventative behavior. Cohen (2020) argued that Tom Hanks' story might have served as a heuristic that made COVID-19 infection risk more memorable and easier to retrieve from memory which, in turn, was associated with the way people felt about COVID-19 infection and their motivation to be protected against it. Interestingly, research suggests that there is more to the availability heuristic than merely the subjective ease with which relevant information comes to mind. The amount of information we can bring to mind seems to matter, too (e.g., Schwarz et al., 1991). The more information we can think of, the greater its impact on our judgments. Which of these two factors is more important? The answer appears to involve the kind of judgment we are making. If the judgment involves emotions or feelings, we tend to rely on the "ease" rule. However, if the judgment involves facts, or the task is inherently difficult, we tend to rely more on the "amount" rule (e.g., Rothman & Hardin, 1997; Ruder & Bless, 2003). ### Figure 2.4 Availability Heuristic Use: Perceived Creativity of the Self Depends on Ease of Retrieval Ratings of perceived self-creativity depended on ease of retrieval. When it was easy (vs. difficult) to generate diagnostic examples for the self, then perceived self-creativity increased. The ease or difficulty of generating creative instances for another person did not affect judgments of the other's creativity. It is also the case that the ease of bringing instances to mind affects judgments that are self-relevant more readily than judgments about others. In fact, even judgments about objects that we are personally familiar with such as consumer brands-are influenced by ease of retrieval more than judgments about brands that we are less familiar with (Tybout, Sternthal, Malaviya, Bakamitsos, & Park, 2005). This is because when we are aware that we have less information about other people or unfamiliar objects, making judgments about them seems more difficult, and ease of retrieval is given less weight. But when we think we are familiar with a task, know more about it, or believe the task itself is easy, then ease of retrieval is particularly likely to be the basis of our judgment. Let's see how this plays out in self-judgments. Would you find it easier to think of two instances that indicate your own creativity, or six instances? What about listing instances of creativity that an acquaintance exhibited? In research by Caruso (2008), students found it easier to provide two examples of their own creativity compared to six examples and, as shown in Figure 2.4, this influenced ratings of their own creativity. Ease of retrieving examples of an acquaintance's creativity did not affect ratings of creativity for that other person. That's because when tasks are more difficult, which is the case when it concerns attributes of another person, subjective ease of retrieval is given less weight. ## 2.1.3: Anchoring and Adjustment: Where You Begin Makes a Difference When people attempt to sell something-whether it's a house or a car, through an ad in a newspaper or online-they typically set the "asking" price higher than they really expect to get. Likewise, buyers often bid less initially than they expect to ultimately pay. This is mostly because buyers and sellers want to give themselves some room for bargaining. Often the selling price is the starting point for discussion; the buyer offers less, the seller counters, and the process continues until an agreement is reached. When a seller sets a starting price, this is an important advantage related to another heuristic that strongly influences our thinking: anchoring and adjustment. ### Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic A heuristic that involves the tendency to use a number of values as a starting point to which we then make adjustments. This heuristic involves the tendency to deal with uncertainty in many situations by using something we do know as a starting point (the "anchor") and then making adjustments to it. The seller's asking price provides such a starting point, to which buyers try to make adjustments in order to lower the price they pay. Lowering the price makes buyers feel they are getting a very good deal in comparison to the original asking price. This too is how "sale pricing" and highly visible "reductions" work in retail stores-the original starting point sets the anchor so shoppers feel like they are then getting a bargain in comparison. In a sense, the existence of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic is far from surprising. In uncertain situations we have to start somewhere. What is more surprising, however, is the power of this effect-even in situations where, rationally, it should not operate. For instance, consider an unsettling study by Englich, Mussweiler, and Strach (2006) that indicates court decisions and sentences can be strongly influenced by anchoring and adjustment. Moreover, this occurs even with experienced judges! In this research, the participants were highly experienced legal professionals. They were asked to read a very realistic court case and then learned of prison sentences recommended for the defendant. In one condition of the study, these recommendations came from a journalist-someone with no legal training. In another condition, the recommended sentences were actually generated randomly by throwing dice; the crime itself was not considered. Finally, in another condition, sentences were recommended by an experienced prosecutor. Some of the recommendations were lenient (e.g., 1 month of probation), and others were harsh (e.g., 3 years in prison for the same crime). After receiving this information, these experienced legal participants made their own sentencing recommendations. You might expect that the recommendations of these experts would not be influenced by the anchors they received, especially when the sources were either irrelevant or purely random. But, as you can see in Figure 2.5, these recommendations anchors did have a significant effect on the judges. Sentences were harsher when participants were exposed to a harsh anchor but more lenient when they were exposed to a lenient anchor. Furthermore, it did not matter whether the source of the anchor was a journalist, an experienced prosecutor, or merely the throw of dice. ### Figure 2.5 Anchoring and Adjustment in Legal Decisions Experienced legal experts recommended harsher sentences when the anchors were harsh but more lenient sentences when the anchors were lenient. This was the case regardless of the relevance of the anchor source, indicating that anchoring can exert powerful effects on social thought. These findings, while a compelling demonstration of the power of anchoring, are also quite disturbing. If even experienced and highly trained legal experts can be influenced by anchoring and adjustment, it seems clear that this heuristic indeed has a very powerful effect-indicating how shortcuts in social thought can have real consequences in important life contexts. There are many situations in which our behavior can be subtly affected by an anchor. Consider the requests for donations that most of us receive. In most requests, you are given several options for an "appropriate" donation. When the first option is $50, increasing by $25 for each successive option, the organization almost certainly receives less money than when the first option is $100, with $50 increases in subsequent options. Because we are typically not conscious of the effects that anchors can have on us, the anchor set by others not only affects how much money we donate but can also affect us in ways you might not even suspect. Consider, for example, whether the size of the meal portion you receive at a restaurant could affect how much you eat. Recent research by Marchiori, Papies, and Klein (2014) illustrates how the portion size effect-the tendency to eat more when a larger portion of food is received than a smaller portion-is really a good example of anchoring and inadequate adjustment. Participants who were given a low gram anchor as a food serving of cheese, soup, steak, and pasta estimated they would eat significantly less of those foods than the participants who were given no anchor or a large portion (high anchor). In fact, estimates of food intake were a whopping 77 percent greater in the high-anchor condition compared to the low-anchor condition. So, as shown in Figure 2.6, how much we eat may be insufficiently adjusted downward when we are presented with a large portion of food. ### Portion Size Effect The tendency to eat more when a larger portion of food is received than if a smaller portion is received. Portion size acts as a starting point (anchor) for how much food is perceived to be appropriate to eat. Since portion sizes have steadily increased over time, this effect is believed to play an important role in overeating in western societies. Why are the effects of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic so powerful? Although we do make adjustments following exposure to externally provided anchors, these adjustments are often not sufficient to overcome the initial impact of the anchors. Interestingly, the tendency to make insufficient judgment correction is greater when individuals are less capable of engaging in effortful thought-for instance, after consuming alcohol or when busy doing other tasks (Epley & Gilovich, 2006). Overall, then, it appears that our tendency to let initial anchors influence our judgments-in both important and mundane situations-stems, to an important degree, from a tendency to avoid the effortful work involved in making adjustments away from initial anchors. ## 2.1.4: Status Quo Heuristic: "What Is, Is Good" When people are asked to make judgments and choices, they often act as though they believe the way things are currently is better than any other alternative. Similar to the availability heuristic, objects and options that are more easily retrieved from memory may be judged in a heuristic fashion as "good." In fact, these objects and options are often judged as better than ones that are new, are rarely encountered, or represent a change from the status quo. Assuming that a long-standing product on the market is superior to a new version might seem logical because over time bad products tend to be removed from the market. But, it is also true that old products sometimes stay on the market through inertia, and people may continue buying them partly out of habit. So, are marketers who put "new and improved" on packaging labels hurting their sales by doing so? In the special feature, "What Research Tells Us About…People’s Preference for the Status Quo," we’ll see whether people really do favor the "old" or the "new." ## What Research Tells Us About…People's Preference for the Status Quo In a series of studies, Eidelman, Pattershall, and Crandall (2010) addressed the question of whether people heuristically favor "old" over "new" or the opposite. Participants in one study were given a piece of chocolate to taste. Before doing so, they were either told that the chocolate was first sold in Europe in 1937 (70 years on the market) or in 2003 (3 years on the market). Participants were then asked to rate how much they enjoyed the taste of the chocolate, whether they were impressed by it, and whether they would purchase it. Next, participants were asked about the reasons for their evaluation of the chocolate. Overwhelmingly, they rated the "older" chocolate as more delicious than the chocolate that represented a new brand. These participants seemed to be unaware that time on the market had influenced their evaluations of the chocolate. In fact, they uniformly rated brand age as the least important reason for their evaluation and taste as the most important factor. They didn’t know that the chocolate was exactly the same; only the supposed length of time on the market differed! What about when the "old" versus "new" involves people? Will the same preference for the "old" emerge? Eidelman and Crandall (2014) suggest it will, and that this may account for the well-known advantage that political incumbents have over new persons seeking elected office. To test this idea, they gave students a photograph and description of a candidate for mayor of a town in another state. For half the students, the candidate was described as "the current Mayor who was running for a second term." To the other half, the candidate was described as "running for Mayor for the first time." As with the chocolate study, participants perceived the "status quo" incumbent candidate as more attractive than the candidate who was "new" and running for office for the first time. Even though the candidate photo and information were exactly the same in both test groups, perception differed. Additional studies have revealed that political candidates who are presented as the "new option" are consistently subjected to greater scrutiny. In other words, more questions are asked about them than the "status quo" options. Since "new" receives closer attention, potential flaws seem more obvious. Likewise, since the "status quo" is less closely scrutinized, flaws may be noticed less. So, would marketers be better off presenting their products as "tried and true" rather than as "new and improved"? According to Eidelman and Crandall (2014), the answer is a resounding, "Yes!" For example, when they varied the length of time, a practice (acupuncture) was said to be in existence-250, 500, 1,000, or 2,000 years-the perceived effectiveness of acupuncture increased according to its apparent age. Likewise, a painting judged for its aesthetic qualities was rated more pleasing when study participants were told it was painted in 1905 compared to 2005. So, people do seem to heuristically use the length of time a product or practice has been in existence as a cue to its goodness. Although judgments of all products are unlikely to be biased in favor of age, and occasionally novelty may win, tradition and longevity often do seem to imply heuristically that the "tried and true" is better than the new. ## 2.2: Schemas: Mental Frameworks for Organizing Social Information ### Objective Describe the role of schemas in guiding our thoughts and actions. What happens when you visit your doctor? We all know it goes something like this. You enter the office and give your health insurance information. Then you sit and wait. If you are lucky, the wait is not very long and you may be taken into the examination room quickly. Once there, you wait some more. Eventually, the doctor enters and talks to you and perhaps examines you. Finally, you return to the front desk and perhaps pay some part of your bill or get a prescription for medication (if needed) on the way out. It doesn’t matter who your doctor is or where you live-this sequence of events, or something very much like it, commonly takes place. None of this surprises you. In fact, you expect this sequence to occur-including the waiting. Why? Through past experience, you have built up a mental framework containing the essential features of this kind of situation-appointments with a health professional. Similarly, you have formed other mental frameworks related to eating at restaurants, getting a haircut, shopping online, going to the gym, or boarding an airplane (see Figure 2.7). ### Schemas Mental frameworks centering on a specific theme that help us to organize social information. Social psychologists term these mental frameworks schemas: They help us to organize social information, guide our actions, and process information relevant to particular contexts. Since your personal experience in such situations is probably similar to that of others in your culture, everyone in a given society tends to share many basic schemas. Once schemas are formed, they play a role in determining what we notice about the social world, what information we remember, and how we use and interpret such information. Let's take a closer look at these effects, because as we'll soon see, they exert an important impact on our understanding of the social world and our relations with other people. ### Figure 2.7 Schemas: Mental Frameworks Concerning Routine Events Through experience, we acquire schemas-mental frameworks for organizing, interpreting, and processing social information. For instance, you almost certainly have a schema for events such as boarding an airplane (left photo) and going to a bar or restaurant where you have to wait to be seated (right photo). In other words, you know what to expect in these and many other situations and are prepared for these events to unfold in certain sequences. ## 2.2.1: The Impact of Schemas on Social Cognition: Attention, Encoding, Retrieval How do schemas influence social thought? Research findings suggest that schemas influence three basic processes of social cognition: attention, encoding, and retrieval (Wyer & Srull, 1994). Attention refers to the information we notice. Encoding refers to the processes we use to store noticed information in memory. Finally, retrieval refers to how we recover information from memory in order to use it in some manner-for example, in making judgments about other people. With respect to attention, schemas often act as a kind of filter. Information consistent with them is more likely to be noticed and to enter our consciousness. We especially tend to rely on schemas when experiencing cognitive load-when we are trying to handle a lot of information at one time (Kunda, 1999). In this case, we rely on our schemas because they help us process information efficiently. During encoding, the information that becomes the focus of our attention is much more likely to be stored in long-term memory. In general, the information that is consistent with our schemas is encoded. 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." Inconsistent information is sometimes so unexpected that it literally seizes our attention and almost forces us to make a mental note of it (Stangor & McMillan, 1992; Küppers & Bayen, 2014). Here's an example: You have a well-developed schema for the role of "professor." You expect professors to give lectures, to answer questions, to give and grade exams and coursework, and so on. Suppose that one of your professors comes to class and performs magic tricks instead of lecturing. You will certainly remember this experience because it is so inconsistent with your schema for professors-your mental framework for how professors behave in the classroom. That leads us to the third process: retrieval from memory. What information is most readily remembered? Is it information that is consistent with our schemas, or is it information that is inconsistent with these mental frameworks? This complex question has been investigated in many different studies (e.g., Stangor & McMillan, 1992; Tice, Bratslavsky, & Baumeister, 2000). Overall, research suggests that people tend to report remembering information that is consistent with schemas more than information that is inconsistent. However, this could potentially stem from differences in actual memory or, alternatively, from simple response tendencies. In other words, information inconsistent with schemas might be present in memory as strongly as information consistent with schemas, but people simply report the information that is consistent with their schemas. In fact, the latter appears to be the case. When measures of memory are corrected for this response tendency, or when individuals are asked to actually recall information rather than indicate whether they recognize it, there is a strong tendency to remember information that is incongruent (does not fit) with schemas. So, which do we remember better-information consistent or inconsistent with our schemas? The answer depends on the memory measure employed. In general, people report information consistent with their schemas, but information inconsistent with schemas may be strongly present in memory, too. ## 2.2.2: Priming: How Schemas Guide Our Thought and Action? We all develop a large array of schemas-cognitive frameworks that help us interpret and use social information. That raises an interesting question: Which of these frameworks influence our thought at any given point in time? One answer involves the strength of various schemas. The stronger and better developed the schemas are, the more likely they will influence our thinking, and especially our memory for social information (e.g., Stangor & McMillan, 1992; Tice et al., 2000). Second, schemas can be temporarily activated by what is known as priming-temporary increases in the accessibility of specific schemas, usually caused by (deliberate or accidental) exposure to certain stimuli in our social environment ### Priming A situation that occurs when stimuli or events increase the availability in memory or consciousness of specific types of information held in memory. (Sparrow & Wegner, 2006). Suppose someone just asked you to recall the non-technical features of your mobile phone-its color, shape, whether it has rounded or sharp edges, and so on. Bear in mind that millions (if not billions) of people worldwide use their mobile phones to connect with others through social media. A 2016 Pew Research poll on mobile phone use showed that 60 percent of adults in China-the world's most populous country-reported using online social networking sites. Now, after recalling the seemingly mundane features of your mobile phone, you're asked to perform a completely different task: fill in the blanks to make a word in a word fragment task. For instance, if you are asked to complete the word VE, you can use letters M and O and create MOVE, or L and O and create the word LOVE. Does recalling the features of your mobile phone have anything to do with the way you complete the fragmented word task? Priming research says it does. Researchers