Social Cognition
- Social Cognition- applying cognitive psychology to social world
- how we process info on the social world; involves other people
- what factors of the situation affect an average person's behavior
- Motivated to Make Sense
- via seeing patterns in the social world
- World loaded with Info
- far more info than you can process; everything = info
- accustomed to process info in specific way
- Limited Capacity
- brains have limits that incoming info cannot be fully processed
- Cognitive Miser
- greatly oversimplify info and process as much as needed
- assumption and empirically based
- Dispositional Inference Biases
- Confirmatory Biases
- Cognitive Heuristics
Dispositional inference biases
- Dispositional inference- behavior seen as caused by persons' personality
- one instance of a person leads you to define that behavior by their personality
- person's sad but you don't know that they failed an exam but you think that that's their personality
- first pass
- Fundamental attribution error- bias toward person-based inferences
- Had to write pro/anti Castro essays
- Received free/forced choice manipulation
- free to write pro- group A
- free to write anti- group B
- forced to write pro- group C
- forced to write anti- group D
- Rated debater's actual attitude toward Castro
- Results: Anti 0-100 Pro
- Group A = 58
- Group B = 22
- Group C = 42
- Group D = 22
- Take-home lesson
- Actor- observer bias
- Actor-observer bias: behavior of others due to personality; my behavior due to situation
- situation affects your behavior but everyone else's behavior is their personality
- represented in language
- Confirmatory Bias: interpret, seek, and create info that verifies existing beliefs
- Interpret
- Seek
- Create
- Darley and Gross (1983)
- Experiment associated with Confirmatory bias
- girl from background (told rich/ told poor) does task on video
- Results:
- high expectation/no watch = grade 4.2
- low expectation/no watch = 3.9
- high expectation/ watch = 4.8
- low expectation/ watch = 3.5
- Take home lesson
- Expectation drives people's perception
- Synder and Swan (1978)
- interviewer/interviewee roles
- select list of possible questions
- before selection, subjects told the other was extrovert/introvert
- Results:
- Extravert: chose extravert-oriented questions ( how do you liven up party?)
- Intravert condition: chose introvert- oriented questions (have you felt left out?)
- Self-fulfilling prophesy: inaccurate expectation leads to expectation-consistent behavior
- you think person's going to act in specific way, you behave in a way that would make them respond that way
- Synder, Tanke, and Bersheid (1977) [self-fulfilling prophesy]
- phone conversation with woman
- shown pic of attractive/unattractive partner
- pics not of subjects
- Females' responses coded for openness and warmth
- Result
- 'attractive' - more open and warm response
- Cognitive heuristic - mental shortcut
- makes impressions and judgments
- Outline
- Anchoring and adjustment heuristic
- Representativeness heuristic
- Availability heuristic
- Straightness heuristic
- Anchoring and Adjustment heuristic- anchor/begin from rough estimate, then adjust
- setting the bar = anchor; working up or down from bar = adjustment
- anchor = often ourselves
- ex: roommate offers blind date with girl who looks like jessica alba
- anchor = jessica alba adjustment = girl's looks
- disappointment with her not comparing then leads to self-fulfilling prophecy
- ex: roommate says ellen is smart
- anchor = my own intelligence adjustment = her actual intelligence
- Representative heuristic- likelihood judgments are based on matching a stereotype
- Conjunction error- combo of two events are thought to be more likely than two independent events
- in reality it is the same probability
- ex: outgoing extravert with love of books
- probability of wanting to become engineering major
- probability of wanting to become engineering major then switching to journalism
- this one seems to have bigger chance even though it really does not
- Gambler's Fallacy- thinking that something is due after not being there when in reality the same probability for the same hand exists every time
- Hot Hand phenomena- "on a roll" basket after basket ; doesn't exist
- ex: HH not present on stats of NBA players
- Availability heuristic- likelihood estimates based on how quickly instances come to mind
- pops to mind quicker = more common
- instance thought about more, perceived to be prevalent
- False Consensus effect- overestimate others' agreeing to our opinions
- Straightness heuristic- tendency to "tidy up" untidy realities to achieve "prettier picture"
- want to make world simpler/more straightforward than is
- Unconscious bias
- people are generally unaware of their biases
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