Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Social Thinking - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Keenly aware of our own emotions, we often suffer an illusion of transparency (a tendency to overestimate the transparency of an emotion; e.g. speakers overestimating the transparency of their nervousness).
        
        Kenneth Savitsky and Thomas Gilovich (2003): (...) experiments on feelings of anxiety during presentations.
        To those in the informed condition he explained the illusion of transparency (...).
        (...) those informed about the illusion-of-transparency phenomenon felt better about their speech and their appearance than did those in the control and reassurance conditions. What's more, the observers confirmed the speakers' self-assessments.
      - Spotlight effect: The belief that others are paying more attention to our appearance and behavior than they really are.
      - Our ideas and feelings about ourselves affect how we respond to others, and others help shape our sense of self.
        
        Self-interest colors our social judgment. When problems arise in a close relationship, we usually attribute more responsibility to our partners than to ourselves. When things go well at home or work or play, we see ourselves as more responsible.
        
        Self-concern motivates our social behavior. In hopes of making a positive impression, we agonize about our appearance. Like savvy politicians, we also monitor others' behavior and expectations and adjust our behavior accordingly.
        
        Social relationships help define our sense of self. In our varied relationships, we have varying selves, note Susan Andersen and Serena Chen (2002). (...) How we think of ourselves is linked to the person we're with at the moment. And when relationships change, our self-concepts can change as well.
        
        Social surroundings affect our self-awareness. When we are the only member of our race, gender, or nationality in a group, we notice how we differ and how others are reacting to our difference. (...) an African-American friend told me how self-consciously American she felt while in Africa.
      - Our sense of self organizes our thoughts, feelings, and actions and enables us to remember our past, assess our present, and project our future—and thus to behave adaptively.
  - - - "Schemas are mental templates by which we organize our worlds. Our self-schemas—our perceiving ourselves as athletic, overweight, smart, or anything else—powerfully affect how we perceive, remember, and evaluate other people and ourselves."
    - - Upward comparison: "(...) we raise the standards by which we evaluate our attainments. When climbing the ladder of success, we tend to look up, not down; we compare ourselves with others doing even better (Gruder, 1977; Suls & Tesch, 1978; Wheeler et al., 1982)."
      - 'When facing competition, we often protect our shaky self-concept by perceiving the competitor as advantaged. For example, college swimmers believed that their competitors had better coaching and more practice time (Shepperd & Taylor, 1999)."
        
        "Apparently, we judge not just how much fun we're having—but how it measures up to the fun everyone else is having."
    - - "When people think well of us, we think well of ourselves. Children whom others label as gifted, hardworking, or helpful tend to incorporate such ideas into their self-concepts and behavior."
        
        :pushpin: "If racial minority students feel threatened by negative stereotypes of their academic ability, or women feel threatened by low expectations for their math and science performance, they may "disidentify" with those realms. Rather than fight such prejudgments, they may identify their interests elsewhere (Steele, 2010)."
      - "The looking-glass self was how sociologist Charles H. Cooley (1902) described our use of how we think others perceive us as a mirror for perceiving ourselves."
        
        "Fellow sociologist George Herbert Mead (1934) refined this concept, noting that what matters for our self-concepts is not how others actually see us but the way we imagine they see us."
  - - - The Geography of Thought (2003), Richard Nisbett: "(...) collectivism also results in different ways of thinking."
        
        "When shown an underwater scene, Americans focus on the biggest fish. Asians are more likely to reference the background, such as the plants, bubbles, and rocks (Nisbett, 2003)."
      - :frame_with_picture: Self-Construal as Independent or Interdependent: "The independent self acknowledges relationships with others. But the interdependent self is more deeply embedded in others (Markus & Kitayama, 1991)."
        
        "In a collectivist culture, the goal of social life is to harmonize with and support one's communities, not—as it is in more individualistic societies—to enhance one's individual self and make independent choices."
    - - "In collectivist cultures, self-esteem tends to be malleable (context-specific) rather than stable (enduring across situations)."
      - "For those in individualistic cultures, self-esteem is more personal and less relational. If a Westerner's personal identity is threatened, she will feel angrier and sadder than when her collective identity is threatened (Gaertner et al., 1999)."
        
        "Western individualists like to make comparisons with others that boost their self-esteem. Asian collectivists make comparisons (often upward, with those doing better) in ways that facilitate self-improvement (White & Lehman, 2005)."
        
        "(...) when, do you suppose, are university students in collectivist Japan and individualist United States most likely to report positive emotions such as happiness and elation?"
        
        "For Japanese students, happiness comes with positive social engagement—with feeling close, friendly, and respectful. For American students, it more often comes with disengaged emotions—with feeling effective, superior, and proud (Kitayama & Markus, 2000)."
        
        :pushpin: "Conflict in collectivist cultures often takes place between groups; individualist cultures breed more conflict (and crime and divorce) between individuals (Triandis, 2000)."
        
        "In collectivistic cultures, harmony comes from sameness and agreement."
  - - - "Yet sometimes we think we know, but our inside information is wrong. That is the unavoidable conclusion of some fascinating research."
    - - "Observers predicted psychology students' exam grades better than the students themselves—mostly because they relied on past performance rather than the student's hopes for acing the test (Helzer & Dunning, 2012)."
      - "(...) if you want to predict your routine daily behaviors—how much time you will spend laughing, on the phone, or watching TV, for example—your close friends' estimates will likely prove at least as accurate as your own (Vazire & Mehl, 2008)."
      - Planning fallacy: The tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task.
        
        "College students writing a senior thesis paper were asked to predict when they would complete the project. On average, students finished 3 weeks later than their 'most realistic' estimate—and a week later than their 'worst-case scenario' estimate (Buehler et al., 2002). However, friends and teachers were able to predict how late these papers would be. Just as you should ask your friends how long your relationship is likely to survive, if you want to know when you will finish your term paper, ask your roommate or your mom."
        
        "You could also do what Microsoft does: Managers automatically add 30 percent onto a software developer's estimate of completion—and 50 percent if the project involves a new operating system (Dunning, 2006)."
        
        How can you improve your self-predictions?
        
        "The best way is to be more realistic about how longs tasks took in the past."
        
        "Estimate how long each step in the project will take. Engaged couples who described their wedding-planning steps in more detail more accurately predicted how long the process would take (Min & Arkes, 2012)."
        
        Are people equally bad at predicting how much money they will spend?
        
        "Johanna Peetz and Roger Buehler (2009) found that the answer was yes. Canadian undergraduates (...) who said they wanted to save money were more likely to predict they would spend less—but ended up spending the same amount as everyone else."
        
        "He who knows others is learned. He who knows himself is enlightened."—Lao-Tzu.
    - - Many of life's big decisions involve predicting our future feelings.
        
        "Studies of 'affective forecasting' reveal that people have greatest difficulty predicting the intensity and the duration of their future emotions (Wilson & Gilbert, 2003). People mispredict how they would feel some time after a romantic breakup, receiving a gift, losing an election, winning a game, and being insulted (Gilbert & Ebert, 2002; Loewenstein & Schkade, 1999)."
        
        e.g. "When young men are sexually aroused by erotic photographs, then exposed to a passionate date scenario in which their date asks them to 'stop,' they admit that they might not stop. If not shown sexually arousing pictures first, they are less likely to say they might be sexually aggressive. When not aroused, they easily mispredict how they will feel and act when aroused—which can lead to unexpected professions of love during lust, to unintended pregnancies, and to repeat offenses among sex abusers who have sincerely vowed 'never again.'"
        
        Impact bias: Overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events.
        
        "People overestimate how much their well-being would be affected both by bad events (a romantic breakup, failing to reach an athletic goal [Eastwick et al., 2007; van Djik et al., 2008]) and good events (warmer winters, weight loss, more television channels, more free time). Even extreme events, such as winning a state lottery or suffering a paralyzing accident, impact long-term happiness less than most people suppose."
        
        "Gilbert and Wilson invite you to imagine how might feel a year after losing your nondominant hand. Compared with today, how happy would you be?"
        
        "Although you likely would forever regret the loss, your general happiness some time after the event would be influenced by 'two things: (a) the event, and (b) everything else' (Gilbert & Wilson, 2000). In focusing on the negative event, we discount the importance of everything else that contributes to happiness and thus overpredict our enduring misery. 'Nothing that you focus on will make as much difference as you think,' write researchers David Schkade and Daniel Kahneman (1998)."
        
        "Moreover, say Wilson and Gilbert (2003), people neglect the speed and the power of their coping mechanisms, which include rationalizing, discounting, forgiving, and limiting emotional trauma. Because we are unaware of the speed and strength of our coping, we adapt to disabilities, romantic breakups, exam failures, layoffs, and personal and team defeats more readily than we would expect."
        
        "When a feeling was there, they felt as if it would never go; when it was gone, they felt as if it had never been; when it returned, they felt as if it had never gone."—George MacDonald, What's Mine's Mine, 1886
        
        Chat-GPT (Apr 17th 2023): The sentence by George MacDonald is describing how people experience emotions.
        The first part of the sentence, "When a feeling was there, they felt as if it would never go," means that when someone is experiencing a certain emotion, it can feel very intense and overwhelming, as if it will never go away.
        The second part of the sentence, "when it was gone, they felt as if it had never been," means that once the emotion passes, it can feel like it never happened or like it wasn't that important.
        The third part of the sentence, "when it returned, they felt as if it had never gone," means that if the same emotion comes back, it can feel just as intense and overwhelming as the first time, even if it had previously passed.
        Overall, the sentence is highlighting the intense and ever-changing nature of emotions, and how they can feel all-consuming when present and nonexistent when gone.
    - - "To a striking extent, then, our intuitions are often dead wrong about what has influenced us and what we will feel and do. But let's not overstate the case. When the causes of our behavior are conspicuous and the correct explanation fits our intuition, our self-perceptions will be accurate (Gavanski & Hoffman, 1987). When the causes of behavior are obvious to an observer, they are usually obvious to us as well. Overall, the correlation between predicted feedings and actual feelings was .28—a modest, though far from perfect, correlation (Mathieu & Gosling, 2012)."
      - "We are unaware of much that goes on in our minds. Perception and memory studies show that we are more aware of the results of our thinking than of its process. Creative scientists and artists often cannot report the thought processes that produced their insights, although they have superb knowledge of the results."
        
        "Timothy Wilson (1985, 2002) offers a bold idea: Analyzing why we feel the way we do can actually make our judgments less accurate. In nine experiments, Wilson and colleagues (1989, 2008) found that the attitudes people consciously expressed toward things or people usually predicted their subsequent behavior reasonably well. Their attitude reports became useless, however, if participants were first asked to analyze their feelings. For example, dating couples' level of happiness with their relationship accurately predicted whether they would still be dating several months later. But participants who first listed all the reasons why their relationship was good or bad before rating their happiness were misled—their happiness ratings were useless in predicting the future of the relationship! Apparently, the process of dissecting the relationship drew attention to easily verbalized factors that were not as important as harder-to-verbalize happiness. We are often 'strangers to ourselves,' Wilson concluded (2002)."
        
        Dual attitude system (Wilson et al., 2000): "(...) our automatic implicit, unconscious attitudes regarding someone or something often differ from our consciously controlled, explicit attitudes (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006; Nosek, 2007). When someone says they make decisions by 'trusting my gut,' they're referring to their implicit attitudes (Kendrick & Olson, 2012). Although explicit attitudes may change with relative ease, notes Wilson, 'implicit attitudes, like old habits, change more slowly.' With repeated practice, however, new habitual attitudes can replace old ones."
        
        :pushpin: Dual attitude system: Differing implicit (automatic) and explicit (consciously controlled) attitudes toward the same object. Verbalized explicit attitudes may change with education and persuasion; implicit attitudes change slowly, with practice that forms new habits.
        
        "This research on the limits of our self-knowledge has two practical implications. The first if for psychological inquiry. Self-reports are often untrustworthy. Errors in self-understanding limit the scientific usefulness of subjective personal reports."
        
        "The second implication is for our everyday lives. Even if people report and interpret their experiences with complete honesty, that does not mean their reports are true. Personal testimonies are powerfully persuasive (...). But they may also be wrong. Keeping this potential for error in mind can help us feel less intimidated by others and become less gullible."
  - - - Everyone desires self-esteem, which we are motivated to enhance. But can self-esteem sometimes be problematic?
        
        Is self-esteem the sum of all our self-views across various domains?
        
        If we see ourselves as attractive, athletic, smart, and destined to be rich and loved, will we have high self-esteem?
        
        "Yes, say Jennifer Crocker and Connie Wolfe (2001)—when we feel good about the domains (looks, smarts, or whatever) important to our self-esteem."
        
        "But Jonathon Brown and Keth Dutton (1994) argue that this 'bottom-up' view of self-esteem is not the whole story. The causal arrow, they believe, also goes the other way. People who value themselves in a general way—those with high self-esteem—are more likely to value their looks, abilities, and so forth. They are like new parents who, loving their infant, delight in the baby's fingers, toes, and hair: The parents do not first evaluate their infant's fingers or toes and then decide how much to value the whole baby."