discussion 4
styrdestiny24-
Ch5SocialCognitionpart1.pptxChapter 5
Social Cognition Part 1
Today’s outline
Social cognition in general
Elaboration likelihood model
A model that explains two possible routes for processing information and making decisions
Controlled vs automatic processing
Knowledge structures
Schemas, scripts, priming, framing
Cognitive coherence
A model that explains how people make decisions in the real world
Development of social cognition
Behaviorism had been focused on observable actions and not internal states
But social psychologists contended that we can still measure/access thoughts, both directly and indirectly, using clever methodology
E.g. Measuring behavior after a discussion with someone of another race, in order to assess racist attitudes
Social cognition
Social Cognition: the study of any kind of thinking by people about people or social relationships
It’s a good thing social psychologists decided to look into social cognition because it turns out we think more about people than any other subject (Fiske & Taylor, 1991)
Social psychology
Do you like to think?
Humans have the largest prefrontal cortex of any animal, but…
Do humans like to think???
Turns out, no!
Conscious, rational thought requires a lot of energy and effort
Social cognition
Social psychologists developed the term ‘cognitive miser’ to describe human thought
Just as a miser doesn’t like to spend money and does so rarely, so do cognitive misers avoid thinking
*Notable exceptions:
When it comes to people’s favorite things (hobbies, sports, interests, etc.) people can and do readily think and devour knowledge
Some people do like to think in general, how do we know?
Need for cognition
Caccioppo & Petty (1982) developed a scale called Need for Cognition (NFC)
It measures the “tendency for an individual to engage in and enjoy effortful thinking”
Going back to persuasion from last lecture, someone’s NFC level is an audience (to whom) characteristic
Those high in NFC are more easily persuaded by strong arguments, but do not find weak arguments compelling
Example of strong argument: college students should have to take comprehensive exams at the end of senior year because that boosts starting salaries
Example of a weak argument: college students should have to take comprehensive exams because graduate students complained that because they have to, undergrads should too
Brief Note:
Before we continue, we are going to use a lot of terms in this chapter to mostly express the same things concerning the two different modes of thinking and the duplex mind:
Conscious vs. non-conscious
Central vs. peripheral
Systematic vs. heuristic
Controlled vs. automated
At different points we will use different terms, only because those were the terms the researchers used for their specific studies
But it’s important to recognize the themes and similarities
Elaboration Likelihood Model
Petty and Caccioppo (1986) later proposed a general model of how people process information to make decisions
Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM):
There are two routes to processing information or something a speaker says
Central route: conscious, systematic, slow, deliberative processing that evaluates the content of a message
Peripheral route: involves automatic, heuristic, non-conscious decision-making that is influenced by simple cues, e.g. the speaker is attractive
Elaboration Likelihood Model continued
So which route of processing (central or peripheral) will someone use?
Well, it depends!
How high is their ‘need for cognition’?
If high, they will most likely use the central route
The other huge determinant of route is motivation
Someone who is only passingly concerned with whatever they’re hearing/reading will most likely digest the information through the peripheral route
I suspect this happens with evaluating the arguments of politicians
Whereas if the information is extremely important, e.g. about your health, your bills, etc., someone will likely use the central route
Elaboration Likelihood Model continued
Which route
Distraction is also a factor, it often forces people to process the information peripherally
Ability to understand the aspects of the decision matter as well
E.g. if you had to sit in on an advanced lecture on biochemistry, you may be processing it peripherally because you lack the requisite knowledge to process it centrally
In 1980 Petty & Caccioppo demonstrated this by showing that men were more easily persuaded by an article about current fashion trends, whereas women were more easily persuaded about a football article
Elaboration Likelihood Model continued
Attitude change from a message processed peripherally tends to be weaker than one processed centrally
Some peripheral cues people often attend to:
Experts know best
What’s beautiful is good
The more arguments the better
Good products are more expensive
Controlled vs automatic thinking
There are 5 key differences:
Effort
Automatic processing does not leave one feeling tired and taxed like controlled thinking does
Intention
Automatic processing occurs regardless of our intention, like when tried reading the Stroop test (black) quickly but automatic processing got in the way
Efficiency
Automatic processing happens faster
Awareness
Automatic processing happens outside of awareness, e.g. driving a very familiar route
Control
We don’t have control over automatic thinking (which is good and bad)
Automatic thinking
One way that automatic thinking is able to help us and save us time/effort is by making use of ‘knowledge structures’
Organized packets of information that are stored in memory
When people think about a concept, it becomes active in memory, and so do related concepts
When activated enough times, those concepts become a set, they run together like an airplane on autopilot
The following are some examples of this; automatic thinking in action
Schemas
Schemas are an important way we go through life without expending too much effort to understand the world
We have schemas for everything
A fish (scales, slimy, gills, fins, etc.)
Playing golf (club, golf balls, tees, golf carts)
Driving in a car
When something unexpected occurs that violates our schema, this can give us pause and shift us into conscious, controlled thinking
Scripts
Scripts are schemas for events
They guide our expectations and behavior in social situations
E.g. how to act at: a job interview, lunch with your mom, a party, a grocery store, etc.
They can be learned from direct experience
Or just from observational learning
You probably saw movie scenes from what a college party looks like long before you ever attended one
Priming
*Priming is an incredibly important concept
Concepts are linked together in memory
E.g. chalk and board, apple and juice
When a concept becomes active, so to do the other nearby/related concepts
William James described priming as, the “wakening of associations”
Let’s review how we know this happens from the wide variety of research on priming
Priming continued
If you are doing a word sorting task, and you sort ‘nurse,’ and then you are given ‘doctor’, you will sort doctor faster if the preceding word was nurse but not if it was aardvark
Participants were primed with a set of words that included neutral words (him, as, usually) and then either a rude word (bother) or a polite word (courteous)
Participants then have an interaction with an experimenter and a confederate; the participant must wait until they are finished talking
If primed with a rude word, participants are annoyed they had to wait and rate the experimenter as rude
This does not occur if primed with the concept of polite
Priming continued
Other studies in priming have yielded interesting results as well
If participants do a study during which subliminal images of old faces are flashed
Those participants walk down the hall more slowly when leaving the study than control condition participants
Legal psychology studies have demonstrated really clearly that guns prime violence
When participants came in for a study and saw objects on a nearby table, some saw a gun, some saw a racquet
Those who saw the gun behaved more aggressively (gave more shocks and higher voltage shocks) to an imagined confederate
Priming continued
Consider, for a moment, all of the implications of priming
If you have a bad interaction/argument with your roommate, how does that taint your perception of ambiguous events that follow it?
Would you think the cashier at the store was rude to you too?
If Sue works with kids all day, would the concepts of youth, energy, naivety, etc. all just be permanently primed for Sue?
If someone carries a gun, does that prime them to interpret ambiguous events as hostile?
Will that person be more likely to escalate a situation that could have been diffused because concepts of violence are already active in their mind?
Framing
Would you rather eat a hamburger that’s 10% fat or 90% lean?
Functionally, the same thing
But research says you’d be more likely
to eat it if it said 90% lean
Gain-framed appeals
Eating vegetables will prevent diabetes
Gain-framed appeals more effective when targeting behaviors that prevent a disease
Loss-framed appeals
If you don’t floss, you’ll have bad breath
Loss-framed appeals more effective at getting people to detect a disease they already have but are unaware of
Automatic processing
We just covered different ways in which automatic thinking can occur
Schemas
Scripts
Priming
Framing
We will essentially cover more next lecture when we discuss heuristics
For now though, let’s take a break and consider how some legal psychologists explain decision-making
Coherence Methodology
Participants read through a legal case and rated evidence at 3 different times while going through the case
Evidence Rating # 1 - Abstract Evidence Vignettes
Here participants read about unrelated, abstract situations relating to evidence, they’re not part of a story
E.g. How compelling would you find it if a witness who observed a crime identified the perpetrator from a line-up and stated he/she had 90% confidence in his/her identification
These same evidence scenarios comes up again later, as part of the case
-baseline. Unrelated. E.g. fingerprint
-Complex trial, both sides compelling. individ dm
-Same as earlier, just fleshed out now.
Mistake, no input from vet judge.
23
Coherence Methodology
Participants told they will now play the role of a trial judge & eventually render a verdict
Evidence Rating # 2
They now read through case narrative and provide their initial feelings about the case by rating each piece of evidence
These are the same pieces of evidence from before, only now they have the names from the trial and are strung together to form a narrative/story/case
The case is deliberately ambiguous, some pieces of evidence point to guilt, others point to innocence
Coherence Methodology
Participants are then given some time to consider their decision
Finally, participants were asked to render a verdict of guilty or not guilty
Evidence Rating # 3
Then they rated each piece of evidence again, after having provided their verdict
Results
~ 50/50 split among participants in terms of voting guilty or not guilty
we would expect this, the trial was designed to be ambiguous
but.....
Almost all participants had 'near maximum' confidence in their decision
how?!?! How can they be so confidence with so much contrary evidence starring them in the face
Acquitters vs. 'Convicters'
50/50 with respect to verdict. Amazing finding, pretty strong opinions. Little insight into these shifts when asked about them.
27
Coherence Results continued
Results from the previous slide
Over time, people’s decisions began to ‘cohere’/shift
Meaning, when a participant rated the evidence during the second set of ratings, if a participant was leaning toward the evidence implying the defendant’s guilt
Then by the time that participant reached a guilty verdict and rated the evidence one final time, he/she strongly believed the evidence implied the defendant was guilty
Even though everyone saw the same evidence, convictors strongly believe in the suspect’s guilt, acquiters strongly belived in the suspect’s innocence
And everyone’s ratings of each individual piece of evidence shifted in correspondence with their eventual decision
And remember, the evidence itself never changes
Discussion
Every participant came to a polarized decision
we would have expected people to be more neutral, as that's what the evidence reflects
When participants rated the evidence the first time, they rated it as neutral
Implication:
***this is a huge problem for the 'beyond a reasonable doubt' standard***
look how much reasonable doubt there should have been in this trial. Half the evidence pointed to the defendant being not-guilty
yet 50% of people convicted the defendant
Discussion Cont'd
What was Simon's explanation
of these 'coherence' findings?
1. The mind does NOT like ambiguity
it seeks to make complex decisions simple
coherent decisions that result in a confident choice
2. Each piece of evidence doesn't seem to have a discrete 'weight' or 'value'
they're not just added up. Or we would have seen participants with neutral opinions
because half the evidence was inculpating and half exculpating.
Discussion Cont'd
Different from confirmation bias
they had no prior opinions to confirm
their initial ratings of evidence in the abstract were neutral
Different from Dissonance
it's not a post-decision dissonance reduction finding
their opinions shifted throughout
a follow-up Simon study had them just try to memorize the case info (not make a decision)
people still ended up with polarized opinions!
Discussion Cont'd
The Coherence study results are an interesting illustration of conscious vs non-conscious decision-making
Participants were consciously trying to weigh the evidence and arrive at a verdict
Yet, when asked follow-up questions, participants did not realize their opinions had shifted so dramatically
The non-conscious/automated mind seems to function in such a way as to help us feel confident and secure when making our decisions
Even when the decisions are incredibly ambiguous
Take-home point
Try to be aware of coherence in your own complex decisions
is your mind shifting towards one conclusion just to shift? or is there really good reason for it?
Many facets of decision-making occur non-consciously
Be aware of overconfidence in decisions
