Social Cognition

Defined: how people select, interpret, and use information to make decisions and judgements about the social world

Automatic Thinking

Controlled Thinking

Schemas

Heuristics

Defined:

  • fast
  • based on past experience
  • efficient
  • sometimes fails (is awkward and incorrect)

Defined: mental structures people use to organize information from the social world around them

We have Schemas for...

  • doing laudry
  • groups of people
  • an individual
  • yourself

Example: Kelley (1950)
Student were told to expect the lecturer would be either cold or warm. Students that expected him to be warm were more likely to ask questions and participate because they used a schema (warmth) to fill in the blanks on what they did not yet know about the guest lecturer

Stereotypes
Schemas applied to groups

can mean life or death
eg. Amidou Diallo... black male mistaken for a well-known rapist reaches for cell-phone and gets shot 41 times

They influence how we behave...

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
when our expectations of someone influences the way we treat them, which leads to that person acting the way we expected all along

Example: Rosenthal & Jacobson (1968)
IQ test start of term -> teachers told of students that were bloomers (randomly chosen) -> at the end of the year the bloomers improved IQ scores
teachers gave bloomers more attention and more challenging material

Schema Selection

Long Term Familiar Reminders
eg. baby is crying because its upset... (family history of temper tantrums)

Priming
eg. baby is crying because it someone hurt the baby...
(recently viewing a documentary about child abuse)

RONALD/DONALD
after reading a paragraph about donald, 2 groups were told to memorize 5 words (either positive or negative), those that memorized 5 positive words were more likely to have a positive impression of ronald

Bargh, Chen, & Burrows (1996) used scrambled sentence tasks to prime them
1) when scrambling rude vs. neutral or positive sentences participants were more likely to interrupt a rude experimenter
2) When scrambling elderly related sentences vs. neutral, people walked slower in a timed walking test

Durability... Schemas stick in our head even if proven wrong
Ross, Lepper, Hubbard (1975)

  • students read 25 suicide notes, determine if real or fake
  • told they were good or bad
  • told the feedback was false and told to rate future success
  • people fail to disregard bogus feedback and maintain perceptions or failure and success

Perseverance Effect: People's belief persisted even after supporting evidence is discredited

Availability: we make judgements based on how easy something is to come to mind... easy recall=more common

Representative: a mental shortcut whereby we classify something by how similar is sounds to typical case

Anchoring and Adjustment: a mental shortcut where we start with a figure in mind and move up or down from that point, often failing to adjust as much as needed

Defined: mental shortcuts people use to make judgements quickly and efficiently

Are shark attacks more common than being hit by plane parts.... NO but recalling a shark attack comes to mind faster therefore we think it must be true

Base Rate Information: info about the frequency of members of different categories in a population

Example: is Simon a Arts student or Computer Science student...

  • he likes coding
  • he is shy
    Therefore he SOUNDS like a comp sci student but there are MORE arts students so it is more likely that he is an arts student

Example: guessing how many people live in turkey...
more or less that 20 million?
(most of us stayed within 5-10 million but its actually 74 million

Counter Factual Thinking
when we imagine how things might have been... often after a close call involving negative events

Determinates:

Thought Suppression:
the attempt to avoid thinking about something a person would prefer to forget

Defined:

  • concious
  • voluntary
  • requires mental energy
  • can be turned on or off

Proximity

Exception vs. Routine

Controllability

Action vs. Inaction

Makes the counterfactual easier to imagine when the actual situation is closer to the counterfactual
eg. Chris missed the bus by 5 min... Tina missed it by 5 seconds

We construct mental models of events including how different factors could have influenced possible outcomes -> our emotions are stronger if we only have to change these factors slightly to achieve a more desirable outcome

Medvec (1995) Olympic Medalist Study

  • found that bronze medalists were happier than bronze medalists because silver medalists made comparisons upwards "I could have done better" whereas the bronze medalists made comparisons downwards "I could have done worse"

unusual events are easier than normal events to undo in our imagination

Exceptional events also influence the compensation awarded to the victims

Mr. jones gets killed after talking unusual route home.... easy to think "if only he hadn't taken his normal way"

Miller and McFarlane (1986)
Higher compensation offered to the man when he was injured in the robbery of a store he did not usually go into versus a store he routinely went to

We attempt to undo actions that are under the control of the person we are focusing on

Eg. Lets say Mr. Jones gets hit by a drunk driver.
few respondents completed an "if only..." by removing the drunk teen from the situation (however relatives remove the teen)


PROBLEM!!!
can lead to victim blaming

Action is more regrettable that inaction (stocks example)
But
this is most seen in the short term where as in the long-term, inaction is more regrettable

Inaction and Regret
Gilovich & Medvec (1994)
75% of people report regret over things that they wish they had done

  • missed educational opportunities
  • failure to seize the moment
  • not spending enough time with friends and family

Why thought suppression FAILS

  • under cognitive load (tired, distracted) we cannot successfully: search for distractors (think about sports rather than food)
    search for the target (monitor food related thoughts)

Can lead to increase in behaviour we want to stop
Erskine et al (2010)
actively trying to think about not smoking increased the behaviour

REMEDIES FOR UNWANTED THOUGHTS

Focused Distraction - simply think of something else

Un-focused Self-Distraction:
every time the unwanted thought pops up think about a different distractor (be careful not to associate distractors with the unwanted thought)

Focused Self-Distraction:
every time the unwanted thought pops up think about the same distractor eg. red VW

Thought Postponement - postpose thinking about the unwanted thought rather than attempting to erase it
EXAMPLE: set aside 1/2 an hour for worrying and focus on the present moment

Paradoxical Approaches - intentionally thinking about or seeking exposure to the unwanted thought
EXAMPLE: used to treat phobias by desensitization

Disclosure and Writing - writing down and therefore revealing the deepest and inner most thoughts and feelings

  • putting into words helps make the feelings more understandable
  • coming to terms with the thoughts involve inventing ways to bring them back into the life story