Social Cognition and Attribution Flashcards
(18 cards)
Central Social Motives
- Belonging
- Understanding Others and PrMental shortcuts that guide problem solving and decision makingedicting Accurately
- Control
- Self-Enhancement
- Trust
Construal
construal is how people perceive, interpret, and understand their world,
especially the actions of others
Control
autonomy and competence to direct our own actions and make things happen
Accuracy
navigating the world safely and in a way that optimizes our relationships
Self-Enhancement
self-worth, social status, positive reputations
Dual Process Model
Automatic processing
* Unconscious (implicit) and involuntary operations
Controlled processing
* Conscious (explicit) effort
Dual Process Model
Two Step Process
- First (automatic, unconscious, implicit)
― an intuition, a feeling, an unthinking preference - Second (controlled, conscious, explicit)
― If we are motivated and if we have access to valid information
Confirmation Bias
― We notice, remember, and accept information that confirms what we already believe
― We tend to ignore, forget, and reject information that disconfirms what we believe
Heuristics
Mental shortcuts that guide problem solving and decision making
- Representativeness
- Availability
- Anchoring & Adjustment
- Affec
Heuristics Issues:
Issues:
* False-Consensus Effect
- The tendency to overestimate the extent to
which others agree with us (i.e., egocentric)
* Base-Rate Fallacy
- Lottery, Plane crashes
-Investing based on recent news, rather than
the broader market
* Overconfidence (accuracy)
- We tend to overestimate our own abilities
* Counterfactual Thinking ▪ “If only…”
Attribution:
process through which people seek to identify the causes of others’ (and one’s own) behaviour and to gain knowledge of their stable traits and dispositions
2 types:
1. Internal
2. External
Heider (1958) …
People are naïve scientists
Jones & Harris (1967) …
Correspondent Inference Theory
― What are others trying to achieve when they act?
- Tendency to explain others’ actions as stemming from dispositions (internal factors) even in the presence of clear situational causes
Kelley (1970’s) …
People are naïve scientists, but…
–> We use information from multiple experiences to form judgments about others’ behaviour
–> We use 3 Types of Information:
* Consensus
- How other people behave toward the same stimulus
* Distinctiveness
- How the actor responds to other stimuli
* Consistency
- Frequency of the behavior between the same actor & the same stimulus
Kelley – Covariation Model
- Internal Attribution
– Consensus low
– Distinctiveness low
– Consistency high - ExternalAttribution
– Consensus high
– Distinctiveness high
– Consistency high - CombinationAttribution
– Consensus low
– Distinctiveness high
– Consistency high
Causal Schemas
Preconceptions or theories built up from experience about how certain kinds of causes interact to produce a specific effect
The Actor/Observer Effect
Tendency to attribute our own behavior mainly to situational (external) causes, but the behavior of others mainly to internal (dispositional) causes
Self-Serving Attributions
Our tendency to attribute our own:
* Success –> internal, dispositional factors
* Failure –> external, situational factors
