Chapter 2 Social Cognition - Vocab, studies

the way in which perceivers encode, process, remember and use information in social contexts in order to make sense of other people's behavior

a real or imagined scenario including reference to self or others

the way in which we categorize others and use cognitive shortcuts to clarify and understand all of the information bombarding our senses

• 1. the need to form a coherent view of the world
• 2. the need to gain control over the environment

people rationally and logically test out hypotheses about the behavior of others because of a desire for consistency and stability

theory that, far from being naive scientists, we are reluctant to expend cognitive resources and look for an opportunity to avoid engaging in effortful thought

time-saving mental short-cuts that reduce complex judgements to simple rules of thumb

• tendency to allocate a set of attributes to someone if they match the prototype of a given category
• quick and easy way of putting people into categoires

the way in which we organize our social world by putting people into groupings - males and females, old and young, black and white

• tendency to ignore statistical information in favor of representativeness information
• fallacy of the representative heuristic

tendency to judge the frequency of an event in terms of how easy it is to bring to mind examples of that particular event; we use availability as a cognitive short-cut; the easier it is for something to come to mind, the more likely it is that it will affect our behavior

extent to which a concept is readily brought to mind

• robust bias we have to overestimate how common one's own opinion is in the general population
• tendency to exaggerate how common one's own opinions are in the general population

Kruglanski, 1996

• the idea that people are neither cognitive misers nor naive scientists; instead, they are strategic in their allocation of cognitive resources, deciding whether to be a cognitive miser or a naive scientist depending on the situation
• People are flexible social thinkers who choose between multiple cognitive strategies based on their current goals, motives, and needs

Macrae, Hewstone and Griffiths, 1993

• In heuristic versus systematic processing
• people are more likely to be a cognitive miser when they are short of time; in addition, the longer the time lag between assessing a person's attitude and behavior toward a stimulus, the less likely it is that attitude and behavior will correspond with one another

• In heuristic versus systematic processing
• to be a naive scientist, one must think, analyze and contemplate; people are therefore more likely to be a cognitive miser when they have lots on their mind and do not have the cognitive resources available to think in depth about an issue

• In heuristic versus systematic processing
• if a decision we have to make is important to us, then we are much less likely to use a heuristic and much more likely to be a naive scientist

• In heuristic versus systematic processing
• we can only act as naive scientists if we have all the information we need at hand; where there is lack of information, we are more likely to rely on heuristics to make a decision; possessing more information about an attitude object leads to greater attitude strength and greater correspondence between attitude and behavior

• - the process of understanding what something is by knowing what others things is is equivalent to, and what other things it is different from
• - a way of classifying some collection of objects, events, opinions, attitudes, concepts or people
• - labeling
• - comparing

the most representative or typical object, person, or characteristic in a particular category

prototype of a social category

belief that two variables are associated with one another when there is little or no actual association

term that describes when two things are both infrequent and therefore distinctive, which tends to lead to an illusory correlation

a category that is perceived to be made up of many different sorts of people

a category that is perceived to be made up of only a few types of people who are all very similar to one another

the general tendency that people have to perceive outgroup members to be more homogeneous than ingroup members

the outgroup homogeneity effect may be explained by the fact that we are more familiar with our own group, holding a more detailed and varied impression of it

we tend to categorize on the basis of the features that are the most salient in a particular situation; the fundamental attribution error may be explained by the fact that the person being observed is the most perceptually salient aspect of the situation

some categories, such as age, gender, and race, are used so frequently that they become chronically accessible, and are automatically applied to people in most situations

categorization heightens accessibility of info that is consistent with the category stereotype

• information that goes against our normal stereotypical expectation about a member of a particular group; may be better remembered than stereotype consistent info because it is attention getting, but only if people have enough cognitive resources available to process it
• Salient and attention-grabbing

even if stereotype inconsistent information is remembered, it may often be discounted as an 'exception to the rule' where the stereotype is concerned; subtyping often preserves and perpetuates the overall stereotype as it negates the impact of disconfirming information

phenomenon whereby when people think about a particular category they can unconsciously begin to act in line with the stereotype associated with that category (elderly = slow)

unconscious activation of knowledge structures, such as traits or stereotypes, which can then have an unintended influence on an individual's subsequent behavior

when a negative stereotype about the group to which we belong is made salient, we tend to show impaired performance on dimensions related to that stereotype

theory that argues when forming impressions of others, people take either a heuristic or a systematic approach

• Fiske and Neuberg argue that there is a continuum from category-based (heuristic) processing where people are seen as individuals to attribute based (systematic) processing where people are seen as representative of a group
• They say people begin the process of impression formation by adopting a cognitive miser mode of processing, unless they find there is not a good fit - then they shift to naive scientist mode

seeing a person as an idiosyncratic individual with unique characteristics rather than as an interchangeable group member

process by which people switch from forming impressions based on categories to forming impressions based on individual characteristics

Describes the way people encode, process, remember, and use information in social contexts in order to make sense of other’s behavior

• 1. Time
• 2. Cognitive overload
• 3. Importance
• 4. Information

• Naïve scientist
• Cognitive miser

Processing resources are valuable so we engage in time-saving mental shortcuts when trying to understand the world

Fiske and Taylor, 1991

Heider

• Representativeness
• Availability
• Anchoring
• False consensus effect

• Time-saving mental shortcuts that reduce complex judgments to simple rules of thumb
• Quick and easy, but can result in biased information processing

• Representativeness
• Availability

• Tversky and Kahneman, 1974
• Ajzen, 1996

Tendency to judge the category membership of people based on how closely they match the prototypical member of that category

Kahneman and Tversky, 1973

Quick and easy way of putting people into categories

• The representativeness heuristic is prone to error
• It has a tendency to ignore statistical information in favor of representativeness information

Tendency to judge the frequency or probability of an event in terms of how easy it is to think of examples of that event

Tversky and Kaneman, 1973

Concept of accessibility

• Methods
• Had participants recall 12 or 6 examples of assertive/unassertive behavior, then rate themselves as assertive or unassertive
• Results
• Participants recalled 6 examples of their assertive (or unassertive) behavior subsequently rated themselves as more assertive (or unassertive) than those who had recalled 12 examples
• People attend to the difficulty of retrieving instances of certain behaviors and not just the content – when recalling 12, examples became less available to them so they didn’t believe they were assertive/unassertive

Gross and Miller, 1997

• The false consensus effect
• Methods
• “Would you walk around campus for thirty minutes wearing a large sandwich board saying EAT AT JOE’S”
• Students estimated that the number of students who would make the same choice as them
• Results
• Whatever choice the participant made, they estimated that the majority of other people would make the same choice

Anchoring is the tendency to be biased toward the starting value or anchor in making quantitative judgments

Wyer, 1976

• The anchoring heuristic
• Methods:
• Survey during the Cold War
• Asked either:
• Is there a greater than 1% chance of nuclear war occurring soon?
• Is there less than a 90% chance of a nuclear war occurring soon?
• Results:
• Participants who received the 1% question anchor estimated a 10% chance of nuclear war, while those who received the 90% anchor estimated a 25% chance

In a mock jury study, participants asked to consider first a harsh verdict were subsequently harsher in their final decision than participants asked to first consider a lenient verdict

Our judgments on a range of issues are significantly influenced by the point at which we start our deliberations

• Speed/ease
• Accuracy/logic

Time constraints, cognitive overload, low importance, little information regarding issue = heuristic

• In systematic processing the perceiver acts like a naïve scientist, using rational, logical analysis of available information – higher accuracy
• In heuristic processing the perceiver acts like a cognitive miser making quick and easy analyses – lower accuracy

Systematic

Kruglanski, 1996

• Process of understanding what something is by knowing what other things it is equivalent to, and what other things it is different from
• Way of classifying some collection of objects, events, opinions, attitudes, concepts or people

Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin (1956) – category membership determined via defined features, if one feature was missing, then it was something else

Many categories have uncertain or “fuzzy” boundaries – Rosch, 1978

• Not all or nothing
• Members are more or less typical of a category
• Typicality is variable

Most representative members of a category

May be slower/error-full because they are less available

By prototypes

Stereotypes

• Social learning and exposure
• Illusionary correlations

Stereotypes

Prototypes that are social categories

Two variables are associated with one another when there is little or no actual association

Negative stereotypes associated with minority groups

• Illusory correlations
• Methods:
• Asked participants to read info about people from two made-up groups
• Twice as much info was provided about group A (majority) than group B (minority)
• Twice as much of the info provided for both groups involved desirable behaviors rather than undesirable
• Results:
• More of the undesirable negative behaviors were attributed to group B, than group A
• Participants believed that negative behaviors were more characteristic of the smaller group than the bigger group
• Explained this through shared distinctiveness

• Heterogeneous
• Homogenous

Perceived to be made up of many sorts of people

Perceived to made up of only a few types of people who are all very similar to each group

The general tendency to perceive outgroup members to be more homogenous than ingroup members

• Outgroup homogeneity effect
• Found that white people found it difficult to tell Asian faces apart, and Asian people found it difficult to tell white faces apart

• The outgroup homogeneity effect in how people structure their memory
• People remember more about someone they encounter from their own group than another group

• Saves us time and cognitive processing
• Categorization provides meaning

Frees up cognitive resources for other tasks

• Reduces uncertainty
• Provides prescriptive norms for understanding ourselves in relation to others

• Temporal primacy
• Perceptual salience
• Chronic accessibility

We categorize on the basis of the features we encounter first

• Heightened accessibility of stereotype consistent information
• Categorization and prejudice

Selective encoding of subsequently acquired target information

People recall more positive than negative information about someone from their own group, but more negative than positive information about someone in another group

When people think about categories, they can unconsciously begin to act in line with the stereotype associated with those categories

When people think about categories, they can unconsciously begin to act in line with the stereotype associated with those categories

Prototypes

• Investigated whether priming participants with a social category would lead them to behave in line with the stereotypical traits associated with that category
• Methods:
• Participants were primed with words related to the elderly stereotype vs neutral words using a "scrambled sentence task"
• They were then told the experiment was finished
• The experimenters then timed/observed the participants walking down the hall
• Results:
• Participants who had been primed with the elderly stereotype walked significantly slower from the experimental norm
• The participants behaviorally assimilated to the stereotype they were primed for

The individuals tend to show impaired performance on dimensions related to that stereotype

Your estimation of how effective you are

• Stereotype threat and gender identification
• Methods:
• Female and male participants indicated how important their gender identity was to them at the beginning of the semester
• Two conditions - gender identity relevant condition and gender identity irrelevant
• Participants then took a difficult math test
• Results:
• In the gender identity relevant condition, women performed significantly worse than men if they HIGHLY identified with their gender group, proving the stereotype threat effect

Either a heuristic versus systematic approach is used when forming impressions of others

Cognitive miser and naive scientists

• Categorization (heuristic)
• Individuation (systematic)

A switch from using categorization to individuation (target primarily defined as individual rather than group member)

Individuation because it defines individually instead of in groups

• Methods:
• Showed participants a videotape of a woman having a birthday dinner
• They were told she was a waitress or a librarian
• Results:
• Participants told she was a waitress remembered her drinking beer
• Participants told she was a librarian remembered her wearing glasses
• This illustrates how stereotypes can influence our attention and what we remember from any social scene

Found that white participants were faster to name positive words after they had seen the racial category 'white' compared to 'black'

• On behavioral assimilation
• Found that participants who imagined a typical professor subsequently outperformed those who imagined a typical secretary, on a general knowledge task
• Although priming did not change the participants' actual intelligence, it did temporarily induce participants to behave differently in their reaction to the multiple choice task

Found that African-Americans underperformed on a test when they were told it was indicative of intelligence, but they also found simply asking African-Americans to state their race before taking a test reduced the students' subsequent performance