Social Psychology

Individual in Society
Social cognition and social thinking I

Roberto Muelas Lobato

Week 3
Agenda

● Social psychology and cognition

● Forming impressions of other people
● Social schemas and categories
 You have been interviewed for a job

Your possible future boss, Ms Jones, has decided that you are intelligent, sincere and
helpful

However, you did not laugh at one of her jokes – she may suspect you don’t have a sense
of humour!

How would she form an overall impression of you?

Social psychology and
cognition
Social psychology and cognition

Thought is the internal language and symbols we use; it is often conscious or at least
something we are or could be aware of

Cognition is broader; it also refers to mental processing that can be largely automatic;
we are unaware of it and only with some effort notice it, let alone capture it in language
or shared symbols

Their operation can be inferred from what people do and say – from people’s actions,
expressions, sayings and writings
Social psychology and cognition

Social cognition: cognitive processes and structures that influence and are influenced by
social behaviour

Social cognition remains the dominant perspective on the explanation of social

behaviour

It has taught us much about how we process and store information about people, and
how this information affects how we perceive and interact with others
Social psychology and cognition

Other definitions:

● The process involved in perceiving other people and how we come to know about
the people in the world around us
● The study of the mental processes that are involved in perceiving, remembering,
thinking about and attending to the other people in our social world
● The reasons we attend to certain information about the social world, how this
information is stored in memory and how it is then used to interact with other
people
Social psychology and cognition
What processes are included in social cognition?

Attitudes
Self-concept
Perceptions (of people)
Discrimination
Prejudice
Persuasion
Stereotypes
Decision-making
Social psychology and cognition
How the study of cognition in social psychology has changed

Gestalt psychology: perspective in which the whole influences constituent parts rather than vice versa

Cognitive consistency: a model of social cognition in which people try to reduce inconsistency among
their cognitions, because they find inconsistency unpleasant

Naive psychologist: model of social cognition that characterises people as using rational, scientific-like,
cause–effect analyses to understand their world

Cognitive miser: a model of social cognition that characterises people as using the least complex and
demanding cognitions that are able to produce generally adaptive behaviours

Motivated tactician: a model of social cognition that characterises people as having multiple cognitive
strategies available, which they choose among on the basis of personal goals, motives and needs
Forming impressions
Forming impressions of other people

Perception: the cognitive process by which information is gathered and interpreted

Social perception: the process by which we form an impression of another person or

persons, as well as of the different social events and scenarios, which serve to
contextualise and develop our interactions with them
Forming impressions of other people

We form impressions of the people we meet, have described to us or encounter in the

media

We communicate these impressions to others, and we use them as bases for deciding
how we will feel and act

Impression formation and person perception are important aspects of social cognition
● Intelligent
Generous Ungenerous
● Skilful
● Industrious
Happy Unhappy
● Warm
● Determined
Reliable Unreliable
● Practical
● Cautious
● Intelligent
Generous Ungenerous
● Skilful
● Industrious
Happy Unhappy
● Cold
● Determined
Reliable Unreliable
● Practical
● Cautious
Forming impressions of other people

What information is important?

Solomon Asch’s (1946) configural model, in forming first impressions we latch on to

certain pieces of information:

● Central traits: traits that have a disproportionate influence on the configuration of

final impressions
● Peripheral traits: traits that have an insignificant influence on the configuration of
final impressions
Forming impressions of other people

What information is important?

Solomon Asch’s (1946) configural model

● The centrality of a trait rests on its intrinsic degree of correlation with other traits
● The centrality is a function of context
But do only people’s traits really matter?

What about their behavior?

What about the context?

Forming impressions of other people

Social perception has three components:

● Persons
● Behaviour
● Situations
Who is more outgoing?
What is your first impression?
And now?
What is your first impression?
And now?
Who is more naive and honest?
What are the students in
this room like?
 Is the lecturer playing tricks on you
or is your brain playing tricks on you?
Forming impressions of other people

Perceptions of other people begin with visible cues, including the person’s physical
appearance, nonverbal communication, environments, and behavior

Familiarity also affects impressions, leading to increased liking

Cues that stand out and attract attention in the particular context in which they occur
are particularly influential
Forming impressions of other people

Biases in forming impressions:

● Primacy and recency

● Positivity and negativity
● Implicit personality theories
● Physical appearance counts
● Stereotypes
● Social judgeability
Forming impressions of other people

Primacy and recency

Primacy: an order of presentation effect in which earlier presented information has a

disproportionate influence on social cognition

Recency: an order of presentation effect in which later presented information has a

disproportionate influence on social cognition; this might happen when you are
distracted or when you have little motivation to attend to someone
Forming impressions of other people

Positivity and negativity

In the absence of information to the contrary, people tend to assume the best of others and
form a positive impression
However, any negative information attracts our attention and looms large in our subsequent
impression
Furthermore, once formed, a negative impression is much more difficult to change
We may be particularly sensitive to negative information for two reasons:
● The information is unusual and distinctive
● The information indirectly signifies potential danger
Forming impressions of other people

Implicit personality theories

We develop our own implicit personality theories: general principles concerning what
sorts of characteristics go together to form certain types of personality

For instance, intelligent people are also friendly but not self-centred
Forming impressions of other people

Physical appearance

Physical beauty, particularly a beautiful face, calls up a variety of positive expectations:

what is beautiful is good

We expect highly attractive people to be more interesting, warm, outgoing and socially
skilled than less attractive people

People are more likely to imitate the behavior of an attractive stranger seen in a
photograph, someone they never expect to meet, than a less attractive one
Forming impressions of other people

Physical appearance

Certain patterns of facial features also work this way

● People have baby-faced features: large, round eyes, high eyebrows, and a small
chin
● Baby-faced adult males were viewed as more naive, honest, kind, and warm than
males of more mature facial appearance
Forming impressions of other people

Stereotypes

Stereotypes: widely shared and simplified evaluative image of a social group and its
members

One of the salient characteristics of people we first meet is their category membership
(e.g. ethnicity, nationality, sex, race and class), and this information generates a stereo-
type-consistent impression
Forming impressions of other people

Social judgeability

People form impressions to make judgements about other people

People are unlikely to form impressions and make judgements if the target is deemed
not to be socially judgeable in the specific context

People will not make stereotype-based judgements if conventions or legislation

proscribe such behaviour as politically incorrect, but they will readily do so if
conventions encourage and legitimise such behaviour
Forming impressions of other people

We seem to leap effortlessly from the cues of appearance, body language, familiarity,
environments and behaviour to liking or disliking a person, and to conclusions about his
or her inner characteristics

They operate efficiently and they often operate without our awareness of them
occurring at all

It is an automatic interpretation of the cues

Forming impressions of other people

Normally, impressions are formed from several characteristics, how do we integrate

them all?

Cognitive algebra: approach to the study of impression formation that focuses on how
people combine attributes that have valence into an overall positive or negative
impression
Forming impressions of other people

There are three principal models of cognitive algebra:

● Summation
● Averaging
● Weighted averaging
Forming impressions of other people
Summation: the final impression is the result of the sum of the values of each of the traits separately

Juan Antonio

Friendly +5 Friendly +5

Honest +6 Honest +6

Attractive +7 Attractive +7

Unpunctual -2 Unpunctual -2

Tall +2

TOTAL +16 TOTAL +18

Forming impressions of other people
Averaging: the resulting final printout would be the arithmetic mean of the values of each of the traits separately

Juan Antonio

Friendly +5 Friendly +5

Honest +6 Honest +6

Attractive +7 Attractive +7

Unpunctual -2 Unpunctual -2

Tall +2

AVERAGE 16 / 4 = 4 AVERAGE 18 / 5 = 3.6

Forming impressions of other people

Weighted averaging

Each information element has a certain value (V); this value is the same in any context

In addition to this value, each element has a specific weight that varies according to the
moment/circumstance (P)

Impression = ∑((V) x (P))

Forming impressions of other people
Nightclub V P Work V P

Friendly +6 8 48 Friendly +6 6 36

Hardworking +5 2 10 Hardworking +5 9 45

Attractive +7 9 63 Attractive +7 3 21

TOTAL 121 TOTAL 102

Social schemas and
categories
Social schemas and categories

A schema is a cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept or type of

stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among those attributes

It is a set of interrelated cognitions (e.g. thoughts, beliefs, attitudes) that allows us

quickly to make sense of a person, situation, event or location on the basis of limited
information

Certain cues activate a schema

The schema then ‘fills in’ missing details

Social schemas and categories

There are different types of schemas:

● Person schemas: knowledge structures about specific individuals

● Role schemas: knowledge structures about role occupants
● Scripts: schemas about events
● Content-free schemas: schemas that do not contain rich information about a
specific category but rather a limited number of rules for processing information
● Self-schemas: schemas about ourselves
Social schemas and categories

To apply schematic knowledge, you first need to categorise a person, event or situation
as fitting a particular schema

People cognitively represent categories as fuzzy sets of attributes called prototypes and
instances of the category

They have a family resemblance to one another and to the category

Instances within a category are not identical but differ in varying degree from one
another and from the prototype
Social schemas and categories

Although prototypes can represent the average/typical category member, this may not
always be the case

Under some circumstances, the prototype may be the typical member, while under
other circumstances, the prototype may be an extreme member

Extreme prototypes may prevail when social categories are in competition

Social schemas and categories

In addition to representing categories as abstractions (i.e. prototypes), people may

represent categories in terms of specific concrete instances they have encountered

Exemplars: specific instances of a member of a category

Americans are like…

Social schemas and categories

In addition to representing categories as abstractions (i.e. prototypes), people may

represent categories in terms of specific concrete instances they have encountered

Exemplars: specific instances of a member of a category

Americans are like…

Social schemas and categories

As well as representing categories as prototypes or as exemplars, we can also represent

them as associative networks of attributes such as traits, beliefs or behaviour that are
linked emotionally, causally or by mere association
Social schemas and categories

Categories are organised hierarchically – less inclusive categories (few members and
attributes) are nested beneath/within more inclusive categories (more members and
more attributes)

Generally, people rely on intermediate-level categories more than very inclusive or very
exclusive categories
 Social schemas and categories
More inclusive
European

British Spanish

Zamorano Andalusian
English Scottish Welsh

Less inclusive
 Think in the category “university lecturer”

What is the first thing that comes to your mind?

Now think about MIUC teachers, do they look like your image?
Social schemas and categories

The categorization of stimuli produces a perceptual accentuation of

intra-category similarities and inter-category differences on dimensions
believed to be correlated with the categorization
Social schemas and categories
How do we use the schemas?
People, situations and events possess so many features that it may not be immediately obvious
which features will be used as a basis of categorization and, consequently, which schemas will
apply
● Basic-level categories that are neither too inclusive nor too exclusive
● Sub-types rather than superordinate or subordinate categories
● Social stereotypes and role schemas rather than trait schemas
● Schemas that are cued by easily detected features or features that are distinctive in a
particular context
● Schemas that are habitually used or salient in memory
● Schemas that are relevant to oneself in that context
● Cue mood-congruent schemas
● Schemas that are based on earlier rather than later information
Social schemas and categories

How do we use the schemas?

Social schemas and categories
How do we acquire the schemas?

We can acquire schemas second-hand, construct them or modify them

Schema acquisition and development involve a number of processes:

● Schemas become more abstract, less tied to concrete instances, as more instances are encountered
● Schemas become richer and more complex as more instances are encountered: greater experience with a
particular person or event produces a more complex schema of that person or event
● With increasing complexity, schemas also become more tightly organised: there are more and more
complex links between schematic elements
● Increased organisation produces a more compact schema, one that resembles a single mental construct
that can be activated in an all-or-nothing manner
● Schemas become more resilient: they are better able to incorporate exceptions rather than disregard them
because they might threaten the validity of the schema
● All things being equal, this entire process should make schemas generally more accurate, in the sense of
accurately mapping social reality
Social schemas and categories

How do we change schemas?

Because schemas appear to be accurate, they impart a sense of order, structure and
coherence to a social world that would otherwise be highly complex and unpredictable

Because of this, schemas do not easily change

People are very resistant to information that undermines a schema: they generally
disregard the information or reinterpret it
Social schemas and categories

How do we change schemas?

Three ways in which schemas can change:

● Bookkeeping: slow change in the face of accumulating evidence

● Conversion: sudden and massive change once a critical mass of disconfirming
evidence has accumulated
● Subtyping: schemas morph into a subcategory to accommodate disconfirming
evidence
We have seen that sometimes we form incorrect impressions of people and it is difficult
to change them

Thinking about a trial, do these impressions influence the judges and jury?
What schemas do people with depression have?

Can we change them?

 What schemas do people with depression have?

Can we change them?

Cognitive therapy of depression

by Aaron T. Beck
References
Bar, M., Neta, M. and Linz, H. (2006) ‘Very first impressions’, Emotion, 6(2), pp. 269-278.
Available at: https://doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.6.2.269
Denrell, J. (2005) ‘Why most people disapprove of me: experience sampling in impression
formation’, Psychological Review, 112(4), pp. 951-978. Available at:
https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.112.4.951
Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J. and Glick, P. (2007) ‘Universal dimensions of social cognition: Warmth
and competence’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(2), pp. 77-83. Available at:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2006.11.005
Frith, C. D. and Frith, U. (2012) ‘Mechanisms of social cognition’, Annual Review of Psychology,
63(1), pp. 287-313. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-120710-100449