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Social cognition:
the study of how people select, interpret, and use information to make judgements and decisions
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2 portraits of cognition
-rational
-biased
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(portraits of cognition) Rational: (2)
-controlled
-individuals engage in careful processing of information about the world
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(portraits of cognition) what does the process of rational yield?
an accurate representation of the social world
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(portraits of cognition) Biased (2)
-individual-level information processing is dependent on past experience, culture, and emotions
-automatic
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(portraits of cognition) what does the processing of biased yield?
is somewhat skewed representation of the social world
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What are schemas?
inferred knowledge structures that organize beliefs about a specific topic (like a person or event)
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what are 2 significant things about schemas
-cant be studied directly
-studied indirectly by looking at their effects
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schemas) automatic activation (2)
brought to mind unconsciously and without effort
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(cognitive effects of schemas) effects on attention (2)
-likely to pay attention to information that fits a pre-existing schema
-forget things that are inconsistent
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(cognitive effects of schemas) effects on memory
-likely to remember things that fit our schemas unless they are extremely inconsistent with our schemas
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(cognitive effects of schemas) effects on interpretations
-schemas guide our interpretations of events or questions
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(cognitive effects of schemas) Inferences
helps us go beyond the information given and make assumptions about things for which we may not have direct evidence
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what 2 things do we see through schemas?
-our perceptions and memories actively constructed in the moment
-incoming information is filtered
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schemas) how do we see constructions or construals?
as direct representations of reality even though they may differ depending on the schema used to filter information
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(which schema) accessibility
the extent to which schema and concepts are at the forefront of people's minds
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(which schema) Priming:
the process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema trait or concept
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what occurs with a self-fulfilling prophecy?
-we have an expectation about what a person is like which influences the way we act towards that person which causes that person to behave consistently with our expectations
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what is the consequence of a self-fulfilling prophecy?
our beliefs/schemas become a reality
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what occured in rosenthal & jacobson study?
- the students that were placed as bloomers had higher IQs than the other students.
- *perhaps given a preferential treatment
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(Shortcuts to judgement) Heuristics:
simple rules for making complex decisions or drawing inferences in a rapid and seemingly effortless manner
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(shortcuts to judgement) Availability heuristic
basing judgement on the ease with which you bring something to mind
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(shortcuts to judgement) representatives heuristic:
classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case (often stereotypical)
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(shortcuts to judgement) Base-rate information:
the actual frequency of something within in the population
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(shortcuts to judgement) Anchoring and adjustment Heuristic:
mental shortcut whereby people use a number or value as a starting point andthen adjust insufficiently from this anchor
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what is the false-consensus effect?
the tendency to assume that others behave or think as we do to a greater extent than it is actually true
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What is automatic processing thinking?
- thinking that is non-conscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless
- *driving a car
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what is controlled processing thinking?
- thinking that is conscious,intentional, voluntary, and effortful.
- *can be turned on and off at will
- **takes motivation and effort
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(motivated skepticism) X-rays are terminal
-must have been a mix up
-seek out second opinion
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(motivated skepticism) X-rays were positive..
-wrong xrays
-forget about it
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when are people more likely to think more during negative or positive circumstances?
negative
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what is thought supression?
the attempt to avoid thinking about something we would just as soon forget
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what 2 processes are required to thought suppress?
-automatic
-controlled
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controlled processing) Counterfactual thinking:
mentally changing some aspects of the past as a way of imagining what might have been
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Controlled processing) Magical Thinking:
thinking involving assumptions that do not hold up to rational scrutiny
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an error in thought can occur when... (2)
-incorrect schema
-too heavy reliance on heuristics
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What does the use of schemas, heuristics etc help us with?
make sense of our social world around us
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