PSY 200/SOC 200: Social Psychology//Social final

Once we have developed a set of schemas and attitudes, we naturally use that information to help us judge and respond to others. Our expectations help us think about, size up, and make sense of individuals, groups of people, and the relationships among people. If we have learned, for example, that someone is friendly and interested in us, we are likely to approach them; if we have learned that they are threatening or unlikable, we will be more likely to withdraw. And if we believe that a person has committed a crime, we may process new information in a manner that helps convince us that our judgment was correct. In this section, we will consider how we use our stored knowledge to come to accurate (and sometimes inaccurate) conclusions about our social worlds. Table 2.1 “How Expectations Influence Our Social Cognition” summarizes the concepts that we will discuss, some of the many ways that our existing schemas and attitudes influence how we respond to the information around us.

Table 2.1 How Expectations Influence Our Social Cognition

Cognitive Process	Description	Example
Cognitive accessibility	Some schemas and attitudes are more accessible than others.	We may think a lot about our new haircut because it is important to us.
Salience	Some stimuli, such as those that are unusual, colorful, or moving, grab our attention.	We may base our judgments on a single unusual event and ignore hundreds of other events that are more usual.
Representativeness heuristic	We tend to make judgments according to how well the event matches our expectations.	After a coin has come up heads many times in a row, we may erroneously think that the next flip is more likely to be tails.
Availability heuristic	Things that come to mind easily tend to be seen as more common.	We may overestimate the crime statistics in our own area because these crimes are so easy to recall.
Anchoring and adjustment	Although we try to adjust our judgments away from them, our decisions are overly based on the things that are most highly accessible in memory.	We may buy more of a product when it is advertised in bulk than when it is advertised as a single item.
Counterfactual thinking	We may “replay” events such that they turn out differently—especially when only minor changes in the events leading up to them make a difference.	We may feel particularly bad about events that might not have occurred if only a small change might have prevented them.
False consensus bias	We tend to see other people as similar to us.	We are surprised when other people have different political opinions or values.
Overconfidence	We tend to have more confidence in our skills, abilities, and judgments than is objectively warranted.	Eyewitnesses are often extremely confident that their identifications are accurate, even when they are not.