Chapter 3: Social Cognition: Understanding Ourselves And Others

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The Social Thinker



Four Core Processes of Social Cognition

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People's actions are critically affected by their social cognition--by how they think about the social events and people they encounter.

Social Cognition - The process of thinking about oneself and others

Four social-cognitive processes are fundamental:

Attention - The process of consciously focusing on features of the environment or oneself.
Attention is limited, and different people may focus on different features of the same situation.

Interpretation - The process through which we give meaning to the events we experience.
Many social situations can be interpreted in more than one way.

Judgment - The process of using information to form impressions and make decisions.
Because we often have limited information, many social judgments are “best guesses.”

Memory - Storing and retrieving information for future use.
Memory can influence our decisions by affecting what we pay attention to, and how we interpret it.

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GOAL: Conserving Mental Effort

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The social environment is amazingly complex, and humans have only a limited attentional capacity. As a result, people often use simplifying strategies that require few cognitive resources and that provide judgments that are generally "good enough."

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Conserving Mental Effort

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Expectation Confirmation Strategies

When we enter a new social situation, we often rely upon our expectations.

For example, if we see a woman with glasses reading a philosophy book, we may expect her to be intelligent.

When our expectations are accurate, using them leads to good judgments at little cost.

When they are inaccurate, they may lead to erroneous judgments and self-fulfilling prophecies.

Self-fulfilling prophecy - When an initially inaccurate expectation leads to actions that cause the expectation to come true.

For example, if a teacher thinks Albert is more intelligent than his classmate Gomer, she may call on Albert more frequently, and encourage his scholarly efforts, while ignoring poor Gomer.

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Conserving Mental Effort

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Dispositional Inferences

Judgments that a person's behavior was caused by his or her personality.

For example, if we hear that Joe broke his leg, we assume he's clumsy.

Correspondence bias (or Fundamental attribution error) - The tendency for observers to overestimate the causal influence of personality factors on behavior and to underestimate the causal role of situational influences.

For example, if the law teacher assigns John to argue a case for releasing Charles Manson, other students may assume John likes Charles Manson, even though he did not choose the assignment.

Actor-Observer Difference - The tendency for individuals to judge their own behaviors as caused by situational forces but the behavior of another as caused by his or her personality.

For example, Ayn assumes that her friend Thorstein majored in business because he is competitive, but that she majored in business because her parents wanted it.

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Conserving Mental Effort

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Other Cognitive Shortcuts

Heuristics - Mental shortcuts used to make judgments.

Representativeness Heuristic - A mental shortcut - classifying something as belonging to a certain category to the extent that it is similar to a typical case from that category.

For example, Sally judges another student to be a member of a punk band because he has a nose ring and purple hair.

Availability Heuristic - A mental shortcut - estimating the likelihood of an event by the ease with which instances of that event come to mind.

Rob finds it easy to think of friends who major in business, and difficult to think of friends who major in physics, so judges that there are more business majors at his college.

False Consensus - The tendency to overestimate the extent to which others agree with us.

Ayn opposes gun control, so she thinks the majority of the population opposes it. Thorstein favors gun-control, so he thinks most people favor it.

Anchoring and adjustment heuristic - A mental shortcut - using a rough estimation as a starting point, and then adjusting this estimate to take into account unique characteristics of the current situation.

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Conserving Mental Effort

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People high in the need for structure agree with items like: “I don’t like situations that are uncertain.”

These people are more likely to use cognitive short-cuts.

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Conserving Mental Effort

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Complex Situations

Complex situations drain more cognitive energy, thus leading us to rely on cognitive short-cuts.

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Conserving Mental Effort

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Complex Situations

Complex situations drain more cognitive energy, thus leading us to rely on cognitive short-cuts.

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Conserving Mental Effort

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Time Pressure

Because it takes time to fully interpret a social situation, we are more likely to use cognitive short-cuts when we are racing against the clock

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Conserving Mental Effort

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When the World Doesn’t Fit Our Expectations

When something happens that we don’t expect, we are less likely to use cognitive short-cuts, and more likely to think carefully about our situation.

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GOAL: Managing Self-Image

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Positive self-regard is important because it equips us with the confidence needed to meet challenges and suggests that our social relationships are going well.

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Managing Self-Image

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Cognitive Strategies for Enhancing and Protecting the Self

Downward Social Comparison - The process of comparing ourselves with those who are less well off.

Example: Breast cancer patients compared themselves to those who had more serious surgery.

Upward Social Comparison - The process of comparing ourselves with those who are better off than ourselves.

Example: Comparing yourself to an “A” student in order to inspire yourself to study more.

Self-serving bias - The tendency to take credit for our successes and to blame external factors for our failures.

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Managing Self-Image

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Self-Esteem

People with high self esteem are more likely to inflate their self-importance and exaggerate their sense of control.

People with low self esteem are more cautious, and focus on protecting rather than inflating their self-images.

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Managing Self-Image

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Threats to Self Esteem

People rate standardized tests (like the SAT)as less valid when they perform poorly.

Mortality salience (thinking about death) causes people to derogate others who challenge their values.

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Managing Self-Image

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When Self Esteem is Fragile

Compared to people with stable self-esteem, those with unstable self-esteem are more likely to generate excuses for poor performances (e.g. "I didn't care enough to study for this exam).

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GOAL: Managing Self-Image

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How Universal is the Need for Positive Self-Regard?

The desire for personal self esteem and the use of enhancement strategies are more characteristic of members of individualistic (as opposed to collectivist) societies.

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GOAL: Seeking Accuracy

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When people have a special desire to have control over their lives, or when they want to avoid making mistakes, they sometimes put aside their simplifying and self-enhancing strategies in the hope of gaining more accurate understanding of themselves and others.

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Seeking Accuracy

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Unbiased Information Gathering

Desire for accuracy causes people to pay special attention to new information (that may go against what they previously suspected).

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Seeking Accuracy

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Being One’s Own “Devil’s Advocate”

With difficult decisions, it is often helpful to play the Devil’s Advocate - i.e., to consider the opposite side of the argument.

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Seeking Accuracy

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Attributional Logic

Discounting principle - as the number of possible causes for an event increases, our confidence that any particular cause is the true one decreases.

Example: If a student gives an apple to the professor, we are less likely to attribute the gift to altruistic motives if the gift might improve the student’s grade.

Augmenting principle - if an event occurs despite the presence of strong opposing forces, we give more weight to factors that lead towards the event.

Example: If a girl gives a guy flowers, we are more likely to think she really likes him if she had to walk through a rainstorm to get them.

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Seeking Accuracy

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Sadness

People who are mildly depressed are more thorough when thinking about social events.

But severely depressed people are less likely to engage in careful analysis of anything unrelated to their present worries.

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Seeking Accuracy

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Need for Cognition

People who are high in the need for cognition view thinking as fun, enjoy solving puzzles, and enjoy analyzing arguments.

These people are less likely to use simplifying heuristics and more likely to carefully assess their social situations.

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Seeking Accuracy

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Unexpected Events

In one experiment, participants read about how a student did in high school, and then in college.

Unexpected outcomes (e.g. a student who did poorly in high school but well in college) led participants to consider many more causal attributions.

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Seeking Accuracy

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Social Interdependence

We think carefully about other people when their actions have important implications for us, and when we are accountable to others.

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Seeking Accuracy

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The Crucial Role of Cognitive Resources

Because accuracy strategies are relatively thoughtful, people are less able to use them when they are under a high cognitive load (e.g. when they are trying to remember something complicated)

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