Cognition & Perception

Theoretical Perspectives

Impression Formation

Schemas

Schemas

Categories

  • Prototypes: representation of typical / ideal features of category (may be extreme) - used to assess family resemblance
  • Exemplars: concrete instance of category
  • More familiar: prototype -> exemplar

Stereotypes

Schemas

Use

Acquire

Social Encoding

Heuristics (Shortcuts)
& Biases

Attributions

Attributional Biases

Intergroup Attribution

Cognitive Consistency

  • People try to reduce inconsistency in thoughts
  • BUT people tolerant of inconsistency

Naive Scientists

  • People are rational, scientific, use cause-and-effect
  • BUT people have errors / biases / shortcuts

Cognitive Misers

  • People use simplest, easiest cognitions - limited processing -> heuristics, errors, biases

Motivated Tacticians

  • People have multiple strategies, choose based on goals / motives / needs; schema or data-driven

Social (Cognitive) Neuroscience

  • Use fMRI to look at parts of brain

Social cognition vs perception

  • Cognition: general thoughts about social world, to explain & predict behaviour
  • Perception: specific explanations about behaviour/why - attributions

Configural model

  • Central traits (e.g. warm/cold) have bigger influence than peripheral traits (e.g. polite/blunt) on impression formation

Central if:

  • Correlation (Asch): Highly correlated with other traits
  • Context: distinctive, semantically linked
  • Personal constructs: personal/idiosyncratic
  • Implicit personality theories: what characteristics go together

Order of impressions

  • First impressions count
  • Primacy effect: earlier information more influential
  • Recency effect: later information more influential (if distracted or unmotivated to attend)

Physical appearance

  • Big influence, accurate
  • May lead to stereotypes, gender inequity

Snap judgements = accurate

  • Use thin slicing - but need to know which factor is important

Negativity bias

  • Negative information has more weight than positive
  • Negative harder to change
  • Distinctive/unusual - survival value

We categorise (compare exemplar to prototype), then apply schema

  • Mental representations / frameworks to organise/interpret social world
  • Storing information
  • Cue actives schema, schema fills in details
  • Top-down, concept-driven, theory-driven processing

Types: person, role, script (event), self, content-free (e.g. attribution)

  • 'Groupings' to simplify social world
  • 'Fuzzy set' of instances that have something in common -
    share family resemblance (defining properties of category)
  • Schemas of social groups & their members
  • Simplified images of group members - visible differences
  • Ethnocentric (favour own) & derogatory for out-groups
  • Shortcut to make sense of intergroup relations
  • Slow to change
  • May be acquired early
  • Depend on nature of groups involved (stronger if hostile)
  • Accentuation principle (Tajfel): categorisation accentuates
  • Similarities within groups
  • Differences between groups (& between instances in diff groups)
  • Amplified if important, relevant, valuable; uncertain how to judge

Usually use:

  • Basic-level categories (not too big or small) - optimal distinctiveness balances need to see people as similar & different
  • Social & role, not trait schemas
  • Distinctive / stand out
  • Subjectively important - recently / often used

Circumscribed accuracy: optimises top-down vs bottom-up cognition

  • Costs being wrong high -> more accurate schema (reward/punishment depends on others)
  • Costs indecision high -> quick decision
    (time pressure, anxious, distracted)

Change

Through interactions with instances

  • More encounters -> more abstract schema

Difficult to change, self-fulfilling/perpetuating

  • Bookkeeping: slowly with evidence
  • Conversion: suddenly with evidence
  • Subtyping: subcategory to accommodate evidence

Encoding: representing external stimuli in our mind

  1. Pre-attentive analysis: automatic, non-conscious scanning of environment
  2. Focal attention: identify & categorise
  3. Comprehension: give meaning
  4. Elaborative reasoning: link to other knowledge -> inferences

Salience: property that makes stimulus stand out

  • Antecedents: novel, unexpected, important to you
  • Consequences: considered influential, prsonally responsible, less influenced by situation
    -> attend closely, form coherent mental picture

Accessibility: ease of recall of categories/schemas

  • Use often, consistent with goals/needs/expectations, easily activated

Priming: activation of cognitive representation to increase accessibility -> more likely to be used

  • Influences how we process new info

Heuristics: cognitive shortcuts -> simpler, faster decisions / judgements

  • Adequately accurate for most of us, most of time

Social inference: how we process social information to form impressions & make judgements

Illusory correlation: exaggeration of correlation

Top-down processing / automatic

  • Peripheral, fast, effective, intuitive
  • Schemas, categories, stereotyopes, heuristics, biases
  • Default - too much info
  • Relatively accurate

Bottom-up processing / controlled

  • Deliberate, systematic, central, logical, effortful
  • Based on data, pieces of info

Associative meaning: go together because 'should' based on prior experience

  • Stereotypes: ... because other Asians I know do

Paired distinctiveness: go together because unusual distinctive features

  • Stereotype: minority groups & negative events both rare / distinctive -> negative stereotype ...Asians game too much

Representative: assign to category if similar / resemble
BUT ignores contrary information

Availability: if easily comes to mind -> more common
BUT ignores odd / rare, use self-relevant or familiar info more

Anchoring & adjustment: tied to initial standards / starting point
BUT adjustments aren't enough to overcome anchor

Status quo: current is good (change might not be good)
BUT new could be better

Attributions: assigning causes to behaviours & events


  • Internal / dispositional: personal, e.g. personality, ability
  • External / situational: environmental, e.g. situation, social pressure
  • Biased to internal attributions

Kelley's covariation model

  • Consistency: does this person always act like this in this situation?
  • Distinctiveness: does this person act like this in other situations?
  • Consensus: does everyone act like this in this situation?
  • High distinctiveness & consensus -> external
  • Low distinctiveness & consensus -> internal
    BUT people underuse consensus & not good at assessing covariation

Weiner: performance

  • Locus: internal / external - performance caused by actor or situation
  • Stability: stable / unstable
  • Controllability: controllable / uncontrollable - less important
  • Assess performance -> causal attribution -> emotions & expectations

Bem's self-perception theory

  • Gain knowledge of self by making self-attributions
    e.g. infer own attitudes from behaviour

Attributional styles: individual (personality) predisposition to make particular causal attributions

  • Internal (own control) vs external (no control, luck)
  • General/diffuse/widespread vs specific/narrow causes

Correspondence bias (aka fundamental attribution error): attribute behaviour internally (to stable, personality), despite evidence

  • Because people focus on person, then person is more salient
  • Essentialism: extreme form, behaviour is from immutable, innate properties

Actor-observer effect: attribute own behaviour externally, others' internally

  • Focus of attention: person not situation salient when observing, situation more salient for us
  • Asymmetry of info: lots of info about self - 'know' our behaviour diff in diff situations

False consensus effect: think own behaviour is more typical than it is
(assume others behave the same)

  • We seek out similar people
  • Own opinions so salient to us
  • Consensus helps validate own opinions/values
  • Stronger for beliefs that are: important, certain, if threatened, in minority group

Self-serving bias: protect / enhance self-esteem/concept

  • Self-enhancing: +ve behaviour - take credit, who we are
  • Self-protecting: -ve behaviour - coercion, norms, situational
  • Self-handicapping: publicly make external attributions if know will fail


    Because of:


  • Illusion of control: belief we have control over world

  • Belief in a just world: good things happen to good people

Intergroup attribution

  • Causal explanations for ingroup & outgroup members

Ultimate attribution error

  • Bad outgroup & good ingroup behaviour = internal
  • Good outgroup & bad ingroup behaviour = external
  • Group-level self-serving biases

Prejudice: intergroup attributions are ethnocentric