Week 3 - Social cognition

Question 1

Social cognition

Answer 1

How we interpret, remember, and understand information that we receive about the people and situations that surround us every day

Question 2

Social information

Answer 2

• Social information are bases of our attitudes, judgments, and behavior (Schemas!)
• Social information are interpreted (Construal!)
• We are really highly susceptible to erroneous judgments!

Question 3

Types of social information

Answer 3

• (Misleading) Firsthand Information
• (Misleading) Secondhand Information
• Minimal Information

Question 4

Firsthand Information

Answer 4

Information about the world that we get from direct experience

Question 5

(Misleading) Firsthand Information: Pluralistic Ignorance

Answer 5

Misperceptions about group norms due to individual motivations not to deviate from those norms
- Occurs whenever people act in ways that conflict with their private beliefs because of a concern for the social consequences

Question 6

Pluralistic Ignorance - Illusory group consensus

Answer 6

Behavior is easier to read than the mind but behavior does not necessarily reflect the mind so people make faulty inferences of the norm and because people have strong motivations to follow the norm -> People believe in and rely on these “false” norms as information which are misleading!

Question 7

(Misleading) Firsthand Information: Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Answer 7

The tendency to act in ways that bring about the very outcome that was expected

Question 8

Secondhand Information

Answer 8

Information that comes from other sources (like newspapers, books, magazines, internet, gossip, etc.)

Question 9

(Misleading) Secondhand Information: Biases in Secondhand Information

Answer 9

1) Ideological Distortions
- Distorting or suppressing some elements of a story to foster certain beliefs or behaviours and fulfill an ideological agenda

2) Desire to Entertain (“If it bleeds, it leads”)
- News and headlines: the more dramatic, the better

Question 10

(Misleading) Secondhand Information: The “Bad-News Bias”

Answer 10

Violence depicted on TV can make the world appear more dangerous than it really is, especially when the TV images are similar to your actual environment.

Question 11

Minimal information

Answer 11

Snap judgement 
- Thin slicing: the ability to infer a person’s personality, character, or other traits after brief exposure
- Two dimensions stand out:
Trustworthiness
Dominance

Question 12

Accuracy of Snap Judgments

Answer 12

Consistency between brief impression and thoughtful judgments

Question 13

How do we seek social information

Answer 13

Confirmation bias: The tendency to test a proposition by searching for evidence that would support it

This is not necessarily intentional—people often simply fail to realize that counter-evidence are important too!

Question 14

Confirmation bias (Personal perception)

Answer 14

People asked to determine a particular trait of another individual asked questions that focused on that particular trait.

Question 15

How do we process and interpret social information

Answer 15

1) Top-down processing

2) Heuristics

Question 16

Top down processing

Answer 16

• “Theory driven”
• Filter and interpret new data based on what you already know
• Judgments and decisions are based on pre-existing expectations and knowledge

-> Application of a schema

Question 17

Top down processing: Prior knowledge

Answer 17

Schema

• A knowledge structure consisting of any organized body of stored information
• The general, default way of referring to knowledge structures

Question 18

Effects of prior knowledge or schemas

Answer 18

1. Schemas guide attention
   Attention is a limited resource
   People are usually very good at automatically allocating attention to relevant stimuli and ignoring irrelevant stimuli

Question 19

What is relevant vs. irrelevant?

Answer 19

Whatever that is activated by your schema

The result: you see what you expect to see

Question 20

Effects of prior knowledge or schemas

Answer 20

2. Schemas guide memory
   Schema-consistent information is remembered well
   Think: confirmation bias… you’re on the lookout for behavior that confirms your schema, so you’ve usually paid enough attention to it to successfully encode, store, and retrieve it

behavior that is heavily schema-inconsistent will also be remembered very well because it’s surprising

Question 21

Effects of prior knowledge or schemas

Answer 21

3. Schemas guide inference and construal
   New information is almost always processed with SOME top-down influences
   Priming – primed(exposed) to certain words

Question 22

Effects of prior knowledge or schemas

Answer 22

4. Schemas guide behavior
   Priming: The temporary unconscious or conscious activation of a schema
   People automatically behave in line with activated schema

Question 23

Which schema would be most “strongly activated”?

Answer 23

1) Recent activation – if a schema was recently used in another context or brought into attention for some reason
2) Frequent activation – if someone relies on a schema a lot in their everyday life
3) Expectations – when you pre-empt that something will happen

Question 24

Heuristics

Answer 24

A variety of mental operations (or rules) that are commonly used to make quick-and-efficient judgments and decisions

Question 25

Types of heuristics

Answer 25

1) Representativeness heuristic

2) Availability heuristic

Question 26

Representativeness heuristic

Answer 26

A phenomenon where people judge the probability of an event by finding a similar or comparable known event and assuming that the probabilities will be similar

Question 27

Why representativeness heuristic

Answer 27

Base-rate neglect: The tendency to underuse information about the relative frequency of events or members of categories within the population

Question 28

Availability heuristic

Answer 28

A phenomenon where people predict the likelihood of an event based on how easily an example can be recalled

• Assumption: things that are easy to think about/recall are more common, probable, correct.
• Fluency—or how easy it is to process/understand specific information—increases the use of availability heuristic

Question 29

Availability heuristic applied

Answer 29

Biased assessment of risk

- If something comes to mind easily, people think it’s common

Question 30

Illusory correlation

Answer 30

• The belief that two variables are correlated when in fact they are not
• Occurs because of the joint operation of the representativeness and availability heuristics
  Representativeness leads to expectations of association between two variables
  When the association is seen, it becomes unusually memorable and thus, available