Psychology Homework 2 PSYCH345
MIMI206
Unit2-SocialCognition.pptxSocial Cognition
Unit 2
Learning Objectives
Describe the types of thinking.
Explain the advantages and disadvantages of schemas.
Describe the types of automatic thinking.
Describe drawbacks to controlled thinking.
Social Cognition
How people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments and decisions
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The Controlled Thinker
Rodin’s famous sculpture, The Thinker, mimics controlled thinking, where people sit down and consider something slowly and deliberately
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Two Kinds of Social Cognition
Automatic thinking (System 1)
Quick
No conscious deliberation of thoughts, perceptions, assumptions
Controlled thinking (System 2)
Effortful and deliberate
Carefully selecting the right course of action
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Automatic Thinking
Thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless
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Automatic Thinking
Relate new situations to past experiences
Use schemas
Mental structures that organize our knowledge of the social world
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Automatic Thinking with Schemas
The term schema encompasses our knowledge and impression of:
Other people (stereotype)
Ourselves (self-schema)
Social roles (role schema)
Specific events (script)
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Function of Schemas
Schemas are used to
Organize what we know
Interpret new situations
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Schemas Affect what we remember
Carli (1999) study
Two versions of the story about a couple
Ends with marriage proposal
Ends with sexual assault
Two weeks later participants falsely remembered the details that were consistent with their schemas
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Which Schemas Do We Use?
Accessibility
The extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people’s minds and are therefore likely to be used when we are making judgments about the social world
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Accessibility and Priming
Something can become accessible for three reasons:
Chronically accessible due to past experience
Accessible because it is related to a current goal
Temporarily accessible because of our recent experience
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Which Schemas Do We Use?
Priming
The process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, or concept
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(Higgins, Rholes, & Jones, 1977)
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Accessibility and Priming
People who previously memorize words like adventurous, self-confident, independent, and persistent
Formed positive impressions
People primed with words like reckless, conceited, aloof, and stubborn
Formed negative impressions
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Priming
Watching a scary movie can later make a creaking house sound like an intruder
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Types of Automatic Thinking
Automatic goal pursuit
Priming goals in a subtle way to see if it influences behavior
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Types of Automatic Thinking
Example (Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007):
Task 1: Primed goals via a sentence unscrambling task
Condition 1: Words related to God (spirit, God, sacred, prophet)
Condition 2: Neutral words
Condition 3: Nonreligious words related to fairness (civic, contract)
Task 2: Economics game—given $1 coins ($10 total) to divide up between themselves and partner (thought task unrelated to first)
Results: Gave more money in the God ($4.56) and fairness ($4.44) than in the neutral ($2.56) condition
Automatic Thinking and Metaphors
We can prime not only schemas, but also metaphors
Metaphor
A cognitive tool that allows people to understand an abstract concept in terms of a dissimilar, concrete concept
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Automatic Thinking and Metaphors About the Body and the Mind
Physical sensations can prime metaphors
Example:
Scent of cleanliness
Cleanliness associated with morality; dirtiness with immorality
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Mental Strategies and Shortcuts
Judgmental Heuristics
Mental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently
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Availability Heuristic
Heuristic whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind
But sometimes what is easiest to remember is not typical of the overall picture, leading to faulty conclusions
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Availability Heuristic and Self-Judgments
People were asked to remember either 6 or 12 examples of their own past assertive behaviors
People who thought of 6 examples
Rated themselves as relatively assertive
It was easy to think of this many examples
“Hey, this is easy—I guess I’m a pretty assertive person”
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Availability Heuristic and Self-Judgments
People were asked to remember either 6 or 12 examples of their own past assertive behaviors
People who thought of 12 examples
Rated themselves as relatively unassertive
It was difficult to think of this many examples
“Hmm, this is hard—I must not be a very assertive person”
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How Similar is A to B?
Representativeness heuristic
A mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case
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The Representativeness Heuristic
Base rate information
Information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population
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Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic
A tendency to be biased toward the starting value or anchor in making quantitative judgments
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The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Self-fulfilling prophecy
The case where people have an expectation about what another person is like, which influences how they act towards that person, which causes that person to behave consistently with people’s original expectation, making the expectations come true
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The Effects of Teachers’ Expectations
Teachers can unintentionally make their expectations about their students come true by treating some students differently from others.
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Social psychologist and professor Robert Rosenthal has gathered experimental evidence
from over 400 studies to prove that something he calls the "Pygmalion effect" can
significantly influence the behavior of others around us.
And I found that things were beginning to happen that could only be explained by the fact
that I knew how each of the subjects of my research should be behaving. And so I did a
little bit of reading and found that there had been research that compared the results
that different experimenters got, but there'd been no direct experiments showing that an
experimenter's expectation could actually become the cause of a subject's response.
To test the notion that our expectations can have a direct influence upon results,
Dr. Rosenthal designed an ingenious experiment. Dr. Rosenthal told teachers in a typical
elementary school that a special test had identified students as intellectual bloomers,
who on their own would show remarkable gains in their abilities in the coming months.
Of course, the children had actually been chosen at random. The only difference between
these students and their classmates was in the mind of the teacher.
And what we found was that the teachers' expectations did come to serve as self-fulfilling
prophecies. When the teachers had been led to expect better performance from their
pupils, they got better performance from their pupils, probably because they treated
them as better-performing pupils, and then brought about the behavior that they had been
led to exp...
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Why did “bloomers” do better?
Example of automatic thinking
Treated “bloomers” differently in four critical ways:
Created a warmer emotional climate for those students, giving them more personal attention, encouragement, and support
Gave them more challenging material
Gave them more and better feedback
Gave them more opportunities to respond in class and gave them longer to respond
Negativity Bias
Negativity bias
tendency to pay attention to negative events more than to positive ones
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Controlled Social Cognition: High-Effort Thinking
Controlled Thinking
Thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful
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Who do you think would be happier: someone who won a silver medal at the Olympics or someone who won a bronze?
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Mentally Undoing the Past
Counterfactual Reasoning
Mentally changing some aspect of the past and imagining what might have been
The easier it is to mentally undo an outcome, the stronger the emotional reaction to it
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Upward counterfactuals
An imagined alternative in which the outcome is better than what actually happened
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Counterfactual Reasoning
Among people who had suffered the loss of a spouse or child
Imagining more ways to avert tragedy was associated with greater distress
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downward counterfactuals
An imagined alternative in which the outcome is worse than what actually happened
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The grading scale for a class is a follows: 94+, A; 90–93, A–; 87–89, B+; 84–86, B; 80–83, B–; and so forth.
One students in the class, Becky, received an 89 as her final grade.
Another students, Mary, received an 87 as her final grade.
Who do you think will be happier about their final grade? Why?
Improving Human Thinking
Make people more humble
Ask people to consider the point of view opposite to their own
Make fewer judgment errors
Teach basic statistical principles
Facilitates application of principles to everyday life
e.g., base rates
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Performance on a Test of Statistical Reasoning Abilities by Graduate Students in Different Disciplines
(Adapted from Nisbett, Fong, Lehman, & Cheng, 1987)
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