Social Cognition: Thinking About People Chapter Three Social Cognition: Thinking About People

Social Cognition Social cognition refers to the processes by which information about people is processed and stored topics include schematic processing, reconstructive memory, reasoning, problem-solving, counterfactual thinking, stereotyping, among others

Schemas Schemas are mental representations of objects or categories of objects schemas aid in the categorization of events schemas aid in the predictability of events schemas influence our interpretation of events

Concept Review

Memory: The Storage System of the Mind Memory is an associative network of interconnected schemas schemas are activated when an schema-relevant object is encountered related schemas become active through the process of spreading activation Encoding and retrieval refer to the processes of getting information into and out of memory

Accessibility: What’s On Your Mind? Accessibility refers to the ease with which a schema becomes activated priming produces greater accessibility chronic accessibility describes schemas that are habitually activated for some people more than others a basketball coach has greater accessibility to a “basketball schema” than does a casual fan

Figure 3.2 Percent of accessible and non-accessible traits recalled or included in the description.

Cultural Differences in Accessibility Cultural differences exist in the accessibility of schemas individualism vs. collectivism is one dimension that predicts differences in chronic accessibility

Stereotypes Stereotypes are schemas about members of a group although they have the same properties as any schema, of greatest interest are negative stereotypes advantages of schematic processing, such as speed and efficiency, can be corrupted in negative stereotypes

Ingroups and Outgroups Ingroups are groups to which a social perceiver belongs; outgroups are not stereotypes about the ingroup are generally positive we often exaggerate the similarities among members of an outgroup this is the outgroup homogeneity effect stereotypes influence our perception of ambiguous actions by outgroup members

Automatic versus Controlled Processes Automatic processes occur outside of conscious awareness and with little effort categorization of objects and people is an example Controlled processes are deliberate, intentional, and effortful mindfully determining the causes of a person’s behavior is an example

Reconstructive Memory Memory is fallible and susceptible to influence Reconstructive memory involves rebuilding the mental past based on cues, estimates, and likelihoods retrieval cues contribute to this process autobiographical memory is often reconstructive eyewitness testimony can be colored by this process

Heuristics & Biases in Everyday Judgments Heuristics are mental shortcuts that speed information processing the “cognitive miser” model suggests that social perceivers conserve resources by following simple rules when making judgments heuristic processing represents this

The Availability Heuristic The tendency to base a judgment on how quickly or easily examples come to mind events that are more available in memory are judged as being more likely to occur

The Representativeness Heuristic The likelihood of an object’s belonging to a certain category is based on how representative that object is of the larger category Learning of a person’s qualities that sound like an engineer lead us to believe the person is an engineer, despite more diagnostic evidence to the contrary

Concept Review

Illusory Correlation Believing that two variables are related to one another when in fact they are not twitchy thumbs and cold weather are an example We often see what we want to see, and therefore overestimate the correspondence between events the “hot hand” in basketball is an example

The Hindsight Bias After learning of an event’s outcome, people may believe that they “knew it all along” we overestimate the extent to which we could have predicted an event’s occurrence

Figure 3.7 Hindsight bias.

The Perseverance Effect People persist in holding self-evaluative beliefs even in the face of disconfirming evidence we might learn that an expert judged us to be high in sociability we then learn the expert is completely fictitious we still cling to our belief in our sociability

Counterfactual Thinking Entertaining thoughts of how past events might have turned out otherwise “if only I had done X instead…” Upward counterfactual thoughts focus on how things might have turned out better Downward counterfactual thoughts focus on how things could have been worse counterfactual thinking accounts for the unanticipated reactions of Olympic medalists

Concept Review

Hot Cognition Hot cognition mixes feeling with thinking Many such thoughts are related to the self in a social context Self-serving judgments paint the self in a positive light Self-serving perceptions of others lead us to improve our evaluation of others Self-serving activation of stereotypes strategically make us look good

Mood and Social Cognition Mood states can heat up cognition mood can activate stereotypes mood-congruent recall suggests a correspondence between mood states and the valence of information to be recalled mood can influence a variety of information processing mood can serve as information itself