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PSYC UN2640: Intro to Social Cognition
Columbia UNY
Study guide, definitions & notes
Cognition: perceiving, interpreting, remembering and using info [aka our thoughts ] Social: related to or about people
Social Cognition
o Social cognition: how people perceive, interpret, remember and use info about themselves and others Influenced by needs, wants, and expectations Active construction of meaning
The New Look Movement
o Perception is a decision process o Perceiver decides whether a thing is A and not B o Process could be conscious or not conscious o Also influenced by our expectations, needs and wants
Framing Effects
o People make decisions based on how info is presented Steak is 80% lean Steak is 20% fat More likely to want steak when it says 80% lean
Confirmation Bias
o We tend to seek info that confirms our ideas and neglect info that disconfirms an idea o We tend to interpret ambiguous info as confirmatory info Horoscopes, psychic readings
Processing
o Bottom-up processing: what you see is what you think Data-driven [color, shape, smell, sound] Guided by the immediately presented stimulus Stimulus Info first Cognition follows Guys think with their dick—look at attraction first o Top-down processing: what you think is what you see Concept-driven Guided by prior thoughts and knowledge Cognition first stimulus info follows Girls think first before judging attractiveness
Schemas
o Schemas: mental frameworks that we use to make sense of social situations and organize our world Help us go beyond info that is given [make inferences!] Guide processing of info o Schemas reside primarily in the prefrontal cortex of the brain (social part of the brain) o Think categories o Advantages Increase ability to understand remember events Provide structure in an ambiguous setting o Disadvantages Biased perceptions Confirmation bias—seek schema-confirming info Self-fulfilling prophecies
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
o Self-fulfilling prophecy: schemas lead to expectations about other people and these expectations influence how we behave around them Example: We have a stereotype that Italians are friendly. Bianca is Italian
o Can be situationally accessible: priming
Priming
o Priming: a technique in which info is temporarily brought into memory through exposure o situational events, which can then influence judgments entirely out of awareness Supraliminal priming: priming at the conscious level [ex: words, images, scents, music, etc.] Subliminal priming: outside of conscious awareness [ex: stimuli flashing on a screen] o Priming DOES NOT equal mind control o Priming impacts behavior but does not force you to do something against your own will o Helps disambiguate
Thought Processes
o Automatic processing: unaware, nonconscious, unintentional, effortless thinking o Controlled processing: aware, conscious, intentional, effortful thinking Deliberately size up and think about something Both motivation and ability are required for controlled processes Motivation: think more when relevant, important, or interesting to you Ability: think more when less demanded (from time or distraction) o Most behaviors result from a combo of both types
Heuristics
o Heuristics: mental shortcuts or “rules of thumb” Overriding requires motivation and ability o Representative heuristic: making a judgment on the basis of similarity If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck... than it’s a duck Ignore base rate information Base rates: the likelihood that events occur across a large population o Availability heuristic: basing a judgment on its ease of mental retrieval If it feels easier to recall, than it must be correct Processing fluency: the ease with which we can process info in our environments
Biases
o False consensus bias: the tendency to overestimate the extent to which other people hold similar views to your own o Projection bias: the tendency to assume that others share our cognitive and affective states o Overconfidence bias: a tendency to be overconfident in our own skills, abilities and judgments o Optimistic bias: tendency to believe that positive outcomes are more likely to happen than negative ones, particularly in relation to ourselves versus others o Depressive realism: social judgments about the future are less positively skewed and often more accurate than those who do not have depression o Planning fallacy: tendency to overestimate the amount that we can accomplish over a particular time frame
o Limited processing capacity: humans cannot physically perceive, encode, store and retrieve everything So… must efficiently simplify processing: Less info Top-down processing (schemas) Heuristics o Determinants of processing: amount of processing depends on motivation and ability o Types of processing: perceiving can be automatic or controlled
