Social Cognition

Social cognition: understanding how people select, interpret, and use information to make judgements about themselves and the social world. Cognition refers to thought processes and memory. 

Social cognition is often automatic - proceeds quickly, effortlessly, without careful reasoning, and can also be unconscious and uncontrolled. It uses mental "short-cuts":

• Heuristics: mental shortcuts allowing people to make judgments quickly and efficiently
• Schemas: mental structures that organise and simplify information

Automatic processing may sometimes lead to better choices. Djiksterhuis & Van Olden (2006): participants presented with many posters and told to indicate which one they liked most and received the poster to take home. 3 conditions: deliberated over the choice, asked to choose immediately, or asked to choose while engaged in another, difficult task. Those prevented from thinking about the poster were more satisfied with it and priced it higher several weeks later than those who were asked to deliberate or make immediate judgements.

Automatic processing:

• Saves time and effort
• Allows people to size up a new situation very quickly - what is happening and what might happen
• Often leads to accurate, correct conclusions
• May be more effective when there's too much information to process
• However, can lead to incorrect and biased conclusions

Heuristics

• Simple rules for making complex decisions
• Allow to conserve time and effort, and deal with information overload or fill in the gaps when information is scarce or ability to process it is limited (stress, time pressures), and allows to deal with uncertainty

Heuristic: approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but is sufficient for the immediate goals.

• Representativeness heuristic: making quick judgements based on comparing stimuli or events with prototypes of categories they may belong to. Classification according to similarity to the "typical case". Ignores base rate information about frequency of members of different categories. Classic Tversky & Kahneman (1982): participants were given a description of a woman named Linda. Based on the description, it was likely Linda was a feminist. 80-90% of participants, choosing from 2 options, chose it was more likely for Linda to be a feminist and a bank teller, rather than only a bank teller. The likelihood of 2 events cannot be greater than that of either of the 2 events individually. Demonstrates conjunction fallacy
• Availability heuristic: people make judgements about the probability of events by the ease with which examples come to mind. Tversky & Kahneman (1973): participants reported that there were more words in the English language that start with the letter K than for which K was the third letter. There are actually twice as many words in the English language that have K as the third letter as those that start with K, but words that start with K are much easier to recall and bring to mind. Also overestimates likelihood of events that are rare but dramatic

• Anchoring and adjustment: describes the common human tendency to rely more heavily on the first piece of information offered (the "anchor") when making decisions. Smith (1999): children had to estimate the number of jellybeans in a jar. Groups of children were given either a high or low "base" number (anchor). Children estimated the number of jellybeans to be close to the anchor number that they were given. People make generalisations from samples of information they know are biased or atypical
• Familiarity heuristic: mental shortcut applied to various situations in which individuals assume that the circumstances underlying the past behaviour still hold true for the present situation and that the past behaviour can thus be correctly applied to the new situation

Counterfactual thinking

• Mentally changing some aspect of the past in imagining what might have been "if only.."
• Counterfactual thinking can be useful if thoughts turn to improvement in the future. However, it is not adaptive to ruminate about the past
• Mcgraw, Mellers & Tetlock (2004): silver medal olympic winners often express greater dissatisfaction than bronze medal winners. They are more likely to be disappointed because their personal expectations are higher than those of bronze medallists

Unrealistic optimism

• Unrealistic absolute optimism: unjustified belief that a personal outcome will be more favourable than the outcomes indicated by a quantitative objective standard (such as epidemiological or base-rate data)
• Unrealistic comparative optimism: the erroneous estimate that one's personal outcomes will be more favourable than the outcome of peers' 

Overconfidence

• Overconfidence barrier: tendency to have more confidence in the accuracy of our own judgements than is reasonable. May be due to an error of omission - lacking critical information; being told of actual rate reduced this bias
• Planning fallacy: tendency to believe that we can get more done in a given period of time than we actually can. Likely to think of what we want to happen rather than base on past success
• False consensus bias: tendency to overestimate the extent to which other people are similar to us

Schemas

• Mental structures used to organise knowledge about the social world around themes or subjects, help to interpret new information and fill in gaps in knowledge when needed
• They encompass our knowledge and impressions of other people, ourselves, social roles and specific events
• Function as filters, screening out inconsistent information and affecting information processing

Stereotypes

• Schemas about social groups and their members
• Rigid knowledge structures organising information about social groups and their representatives where each representative carries exactly the same features attributed to the whole group
• Stereotypes can be applied rapidly and automatically

We rely on schemas and stereotypes because they help us process information effectively, especially relevant under high cognitive load. They allow us to quickly make sense of situations and behaviours so we can respond accordingly. Schemas fill in the gaps in our understanding and remembering. Information incongruent with a schemas becomes salient - we notice and remember it better.

Correll, Park & Judd (2007): stereotypes on decision to shoot. In a videogame, participants told to "shoot" a man if he was holding a gun. Shown either white or black man, holding gun or no gun. Participants "shot" at the unarmed black man more often than the unarmed white man.

Accessibility: the extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people's minds and are therefore likely to be used when we're making judgements about the social world

Priming: process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, or concept

Something can become accessible for three reasons

• Chronically accessible due to past experiences
• Accessible because its related to a current goal
• Temporarily accessible because of a recent experience

Higgins, Rholes, & Jones (1975) participants who previously memorised words like adventurous, self-confident, independent, and persistent formed positive impressions of an ambiguous description of an unknown man. Those primed with words like reckless, conceited, aloof, and stubborn formed negative impressions. Priming is a good example of automatic thinking because it occurs quickly, unintentionally, and unconsciously.

Metaphors when primed affect attitudes, memory, judgment, perception, and behaviour (Landau et al, 2010).

Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth (Williams & Bargh, 2008). Participants who briefly held a cup of hot vs iced coffee judged a target person as having a "warmer" personality (generous, caring). In the 2nd study, participants holding a hot vs cold therapeutic pad were more likely to choose a gift for a friend instead of for themselves

Remembering moral transgressions increases need for physical cleansing (Zhong & Liljenquit, 2006). Imagining using a mobile phone of a gay man increases need to clean one's own hands and mouth (Golec de Zavala et al (2014).

Self-fulfilling prophecy: case whereby people have an expectation about what another person is like which influences how they act toward that person, which then causes that person to behave consistently with people's original expectations, making the expectations come true. Snyder, Tanke & Berschieid (1977): men who'd been told they were talking to an "attractive" female elicited more flirtation.