Social cognition

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  Understand the concept of social cognition
 Describe the five elements that distinguish
automatic from deliberate processes
 Explain how attributes affect our thinking and
Learning our behaviour
objectives  Describe how the four main heuristics affect
the way we think
 Identify the biases and fallacies that cause
errors in thinking
 Explain why the shortcuts and styles of
thinking are called biases and errors

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 Vaccine hesitancy
 Caused by lack of information
or false beliefs
Introduction  Misinformation is ‘sticky’
Rejecting information requires
cognitive effort
 Accepting messages is easier

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  Social psychology: study of how
people think and feel
 Began in the 1970s
 Attitudes and motivations were the first
What is to be studied
social
cognition?  Social cognition: thinking by people
about people and social relationships

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 Why people think, and why they don’t

 Human brain: size of a grapefruit

 Research shows people are lazy about
What is thinking
social  Cognitive misers: reluctance to do extra
cognition? thinking
(cont’d.)  People do think at great length about things
that are interesting to them
 Deliberate thinking requires more effort
than automatic thinking

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Brain mass versus
body mass:
Figure 5.1 A plot of brain mass versus
body mass for a variety of animals.The
open circles represent reptiles
(including some fish and dinosaurs), the
filled circles represent mammals
(including many birds), and the x’s
represent primates (including humans
and their immediate ancestors).

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Automatic and deliberate thinking

 Stroop effect: people have difficulty overriding

the automatic tendency to read the word rather
than name the ink color
 Illustrates automatic versus deliberate thought
 How do we know if a thought is automatic?
 Requires no awareness, not guided by intention, not
subject to deliberate control, requires no effort, and is
highly efficient
 https://youtu.be/gjesfzWozo4
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 Knowledge structures

Schemas
a. Knowledge structures that represent substantial
information about a concept, its attributes, and its
relationships to other concepts.
Automatic b. Schemas simplify a complex world by helping us form
and expectancies.
c. When what we expect from our schema is violated,
deliberate deliberate thinking results.
thinking Scripts
(cont’d.) 1) Knowledge structures that define situations and guide
behaviour.
2) Include information about motives, intentions, goals and
situations, and the causal sequence of events.
3) Scripts are learned.
4) If encountered frequently enough, extremely complex
knowledge structures can become automatic.

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a. Priming
a. Refers to planting or activating an idea in someone’s mind.
b. When one concept is activated (cradle) a related concept is activated as
well (baby).
c. Example of a study where participants were primed and later judged a
man described in a paragraph differently.
d. Priming can trigger automatic processes.
b. Framing
a. Refers to how information is presented to others.
b. Health-related information has been studied using two possible
frames.
a. A gain-framed appeal focuses on how doing something will make you
more healthy.
b. A loss-framed appeal focuses on how a health behaviour (or lack thereof)
will result in loss of health.
c. Gain-framed appeals tend to be more effective at promoting prevention
behaviours, but loss-framed appeals tend to be more effective at targeting
behaviours that detect diseases people may already have without knowing
it.

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  Process of thought suppression
 Lookout for reminders of unwanted thought
 Redirect attention away from an unpleasant
Thought thought
suppression
and ironic  Distraction and rumination (or
processes contemplation) are more effective than
suppression
 Mental control is a form of self-regulation
 E.g Not thinking about your upcoming test

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 Conscious and unconscious thought
 Both processes have important and
valuable functions
Trade-offs  Unconscious thought: helps sort through
information and come to good decisions
 Conscious thought: vital to logical
reasoning

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  Attributions: inferences people make
Attributions about events in their lives
and  Help determine behaviour
explanations:  ‘It’s not my fault’
Why did that  Two-dimensional attribution theory
happen?  Possible attributions types: internal–
external and stable–unstable

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External
versus
Insert Calvin Comic
internal
attributions

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Two-dimensional
attribution theory
 With this theory there are four
main types of attributions.
 Internal stable combination
involves ability.
 Internal unstable combination
involves effort.
 External stable combination
involves task difficulty (the task is
hard, so most will have difficulty).
 External unstable combination
involves luck.

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Self-serving 1.People prefer to attribute success to ability
bias is the and failure to task difficulty or luck.
tendency to 2.This self-serving bias makes people feel
take credit good and is important for self-presentation
for success – it occurs more when explaining behaviour
but deny to others than to self.
blame for
failure.

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 1. Actor/observer bias is the tendency for actors to
make external attributions and observers to make
Attributions internal attributions.
 Handsome man to be a good leader/ high self-
and esteem
explanations: 2.Fundamental attribution error (or correspondence
‘You know bias) is the tendency for observers to attribute
other people’s behaviour to internal or
I’m right’ dispositional causes and to downplay situational
causes.
 Soccer fans blaming the player’s emotional state
for the loss
3. The fundamental attribution error is more
common in individualist than collectivist cultures.

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 A.Bertram Malle has recently combined information
from many studies to suggest there is no consistent
tendency for observers to favour dispositional
Attributions explanations.
and A.Actors do tend to state more reasons for their
explanations: behaviours than observers do to explain observed
behaviour.
Challenging B.Actors are more likely to incite beliefs as a driver
attribution of their own behaviour, while observers point to
the actor’s desires.
theory B.Other differences between actors and observers:
A.People judge others by their actions, but
themselves by their (good) intentions.
B.People can see conformity in others, but not
themselves because they rely on introspection.

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Heuristics:
Mental
shortcuts

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  Standard view
 People think in order to find the truth
 Thinking suffers from mistakes and
shortcomings (e.g., laziness and motivated
Flawed or biases)
clever
 Alternate view
thinking?  People think to argue with others and
convince them of their side, rather than
figure out the truth alone
 Shortcuts and heuristics actually work well

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  Two types of information
 Statistical information and case history
 Confirmation bias: tendency to search
(So-called) for information that confirms one’s
beliefs
errors and  Ignore information that disconfirms it
biases
 Illusory correlation: tendency to
overestimate link between variables that
are related only slightly or not at all

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  Base rate fallacy: ignore or underuse base rate
information
(So-called)  Be influenced by distinctive features of the case
being judges
errors and
 Gambler’s fallacy and the hot hand
biases  Hot hand: luck will continue
(cont’d.)  Gambler’s fallacy: chance event is affected by
previous events and will ‘even out’

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  False consensus effect
 Overestimate the number of people
who share one’s opinions, attitudes,
(So-called) values, and beliefs
errors and
biases  False uniqueness effect
 Underestimate the number of
(cont’d.) people who share one’s prized
characteristics or abilities

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  Perseverance of theories
(So-called)  Theory perseverance: once a conclusion is
drawn, it is only changed by overwhelming
errors and evidence
biases  Statistical regression
(cont’d.)  Tendency for extreme scores or behaviour
to be followed by others closer to average

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  Illusion of control
(So-called)  A false belief that one can influence events

errors and  Counterfactual thinking

biases  Imagining alternatives to past or present
events or circumstances
(cont’d.)  First instinct fallacy
 Upward and downward counterfactuals

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Common
cognitive
errors

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Common
cognitive
errors
(cont’d.)

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  Social cognition examines how people think about
other people and about relationships
 Much thinking is done by the automatic mind, as
Summary opposed to deliberately thinking through things
 What were traditionally thought of as errors in thinking
may have advantages for human life

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