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
- Pre-attentive analysis: automatic, non-conscious scanning of environment
- Focal attention: identify & categorise
- Comprehension: give meaning
- 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