Wk 1: Social cognition and social influence

• How people think about themselves and the social world;
• More specifically, how people select, interpret, remember and use social info to make judgements and decisions.

• Thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary and effortless.
• Automatic thinking helps us understand new situations by relating them to schemas.

Mental structures that contain our basic knowledge and impressions that we use to organise what we know about the social world and interpret new situations.

• The extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people's minds and are therefore likely to be used when making judgements about the social world.
• 3 reasons:
• Due to past experience
• Related to a current goal
• Due to recent experience resulting in priming

• The process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema, trait or concept.
• Thoughts have to be both accessible and applicable before they will act as primes. 
• Example of automatic thinking.

• The case wherein people have an expectation about what another person is like, which influences how they act toward that person, which causes that person to behave consistently with people's original expectations, making the expectations come true.
• Eg. bloomers in school experiment.
• Example of automatic thinking.

• Automatic goal pursuit: decision of which goal to pursue can be based on which goal has been recently primed. eg. just walked past a church.
• Automatic decision making: eg. choosing apartment. Works best for complex decision making. 
• Automatic thinking and metaphors about the body and the mind:metaphors can affect thoughts. eg. holding something warm vs cold. Smelling something clean.

• Mental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently.
• Availability heuristic: People base judgment base on the ease with which they can bring something to mind. eg. Diagnosing bc just wrote about it.
• Representativeness Heuristic: a mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case. Eg. does Brian look like a Californian.

Information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population.

• Private acceptance: Conforming to other people's behaviour out of genuine belief that what they are doing or saying is right.
• Public compliance: conforming to other people's behaviour publicly without necessarily believing in what the other people are doing or saying.

• Analytic: People focus on the properties of objects without considering their surrounding context; common in western cultures.
• Holistic: focus on the overall context, particularly the ways in which objects relate to each other. (common in east asian cultures)

Thinking that is unconscious, intentional, voluntary and effortful.

• Mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been. 
• A type of controlled thinking.
• The easier to mentally undo the outcome, the stronger the emotional reaction.

The fact that people usually have too much confidence in the accuracy of their judgements.

• Relying on other people as a source of information to guide our behaviour.
• We conform because we believe others' interpretation of an ambiguous situation is correct and can help us choose an appropriate course of action.
• In situations where it is important to be accurate, tendency to conform through info social influences increases.
• Also if the situation is ambiguous, in a crisis or if experts are present.

• Conformity occurs when people change their behaviour due to the real (or imagined) influence of others. 
• Two main reasons people conform; informational and normative social influences.

• When we change our behaviour to match that of others because we want to remain a member of the group.
• Usually results in public compliance. 
• Conform to group's social norms.
• Social norms: the implicit or explicit rules a group has for the acceptable behaviours, values and beliefs of its members.
• More likely to resist normative influence when it is important to be accurate but public conformity still occurs.

• Social impact theory: (Bibb Latanne's) The idea that conforming to social influence depends on the group's importance, immediacy, and the number of people in the group.
• Immediacy- how close is the group to you in space and time during the attempt to influence you?
• More likely to conform when the group is:
• One we care about,
• Group members are unanimous in their thoughts or behaviours,
• When the group has 3 or more members,
• When we are members of collectivist cultures.

The tolerance a person earns, over time, by conforming to group norms; if enough credits are earned, the person can, on occasion, deviate from the group without retribution.

• The case where a minority of group members influences the behaviour or beliefs of the majority.
• Key is consistency: people with minority views must express the same view over time and different members of minority must agree with one another.

• Injunctive: people's perceptions of what behaviours are approved or disapproved of by others.
• Descriptive: people's perceptions of how people actually behave in given situations, regardless of whether the behaviour is approved or disapproved by others.

• When trying to lessen the frequency of an undesirable behaviour, descriptive norms can cause a 'boomerang effect' where it causes the opposite. 
• Eg. telling students how much the average student drinks can cause students who were drinking less to drink more.

• Foot-in-the-door technique: social influence strategy in which getting people to agree first to a small request makes them more likely to agree later to a second, larger request.
• Door-in-the-face technique: social influence strategy in which first asking people for a large request that they will probably refuse makes them more likely to agree later to a second, smaller request.
• Propaganda: a deliberate systematic attempt to advance a cause by manipulating mass attitudes and behaviours, often through misleading or emotionally charged info.

• Participant is a teacher. 
• Shock other when they make a mistake.
• Normative pressures make it difficult for people to stop obeying authority figures. Want to please authority.
• Informational social influence: situation was confusing, with ambiguous demands. Unclear about how to define what was going on, they followed the orders of the expert.

• Conforming to the wrong norm: started with conforming to 'obey to authority norm'. Hard to change midway to 'shouldn't hurt this person'.
• Self justification: The small increments. Increments justified in their own mind.
• Loss of personal responsibility: their idea, your just following orders.