Week 3 - Social cognition Flashcards
(30 cards)
Social cognition
How we interpret, remember, and understand information that we receive about the people and situations that surround us every day
Social information
- Social information are bases of our attitudes, judgments, and behavior (Schemas!)
- Social information are interpreted (Construal!)
- We are really highly susceptible to erroneous judgments!
Types of social information
- (Misleading) Firsthand Information
- (Misleading) Secondhand Information
- Minimal Information
Firsthand Information
Information about the world that we get from direct experience
(Misleading) Firsthand Information: Pluralistic Ignorance
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
Pluralistic Ignorance - Illusory group consensus
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!
(Misleading) Firsthand Information: Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
The tendency to act in ways that bring about the very outcome that was expected
Secondhand Information
Information that comes from other sources (like newspapers, books, magazines, internet, gossip, etc.)
(Misleading) Secondhand Information: Biases in Secondhand Information
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
(Misleading) Secondhand Information: The “Bad-News Bias”
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.
Minimal information
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
Accuracy of Snap Judgments
Consistency between brief impression and thoughtful judgments
How do we seek social information
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!
Confirmation bias (Personal perception)
People asked to determine a particular trait of another individual asked questions that focused on that particular trait.
How do we process and interpret social information
1) Top-down processing
2) Heuristics
Top down processing
- “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
Top down processing: Prior knowledge
Schema
- A knowledge structure consisting of any organized body of stored information
- The general, default way of referring to knowledge structures
Effects of prior knowledge or schemas
- Schemas guide attention
Attention is a limited resource
People are usually very good at automatically allocating attention to relevant stimuli and ignoring irrelevant stimuli
What is relevant vs. irrelevant?
Whatever that is activated by your schema
The result: you see what you expect to see
Effects of prior knowledge or schemas
- 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
Effects of prior knowledge or schemas
- Schemas guide inference and construal
New information is almost always processed with SOME top-down influences
Priming – primed(exposed) to certain words
Effects of prior knowledge or schemas
- Schemas guide behavior
Priming: The temporary unconscious or conscious activation of a schema
People automatically behave in line with activated schema
Which schema would be most “strongly activated”?
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
Heuristics
A variety of mental operations (or rules) that are commonly used to make quick-and-efficient judgments and decisions
