Social Cognition

1
Social Cognition

• Next few days well focus on social cognition and
  self justification.
• Tonight overview of concepts
• health care social cognition
• Monday film analysis 12 Angry Men
• Wednesday article seminar and self
  justification

2
Making sense of the world

• People are constantly trying to make sense of our
  social world
• Our brains are powerful and efficient, but
  imperfect
• We try to be rational, but we arent always

3
Cognitive misers

• We try to conserve our cognitive energy
• We adopt strategies to simplify complex problems
• We ignore some information to reduce our
  cognitive load
• This leads to biases in our thinking

4
Effects of Context on Social Judgment

• Reference points and contrast effects
• Good compared to what?
• Priming
• What are we thinking about?
• Framing
• Gain or loss? Positive or negative?
• Ordering
• Primacy effect and impression formation
• Amount of information
• Dilution effect

5
Judgmental heuristics(definition)

• A mental shortcut
• Simple rules that guide our judgment and problem
  solving

6
When do we use heuristics?

• When we dont have time to think carefully
• When we are overloaded with information
• When the issues at stake arent very important
• When we have insufficient information to use in
  making a decision

7
Judgmental heuristics

• Representative heuristic its like this in one
  way, must be like it in other ways
• Availability heuristic specific examples come
  easily to mind
• Attitude heuristic our positive or negative
  attitudes affect our judgment
• Halo effect
• False consensus

8
Availability heuristic

• http//www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-july-15-2002
  /i-know-what-you-did-last-summer-of-the-shark

9
Stereotyping and Categorization

• Self-fulfilling prophecy Our stereotypes lead
  us to treat people in ways that make them conform
  to expectations
• Illusory Correlation we see a relationship we
  expect but were none exists
• Ingroup/outgroup effects all of them are the
  same and my group is better

10
Human cognition is conservative

• We try to preserve that which is already
  established
• We maintain our existing knowledge, beliefs,
  attitudes and stereotypes
• Confirmation bias
• Hindsight bias

11
Attribution Biases

• Three general biases we use when we are
  interpreting and explaining the world
• Fundamental Attribution Error
• Actor Observer Bias
• Self Biases

12
Biases in social explanation

• Fundamental attribution error
• Actor-observer bias
• Self-bias

13
Fundamental attribution error

• The tendency to overestimate the importance of
  personality factors rather than situational
  factors when describing and explaining the causes
  of social behavior

14
Actor-observer bias

• The tendency for actors to attribute their
  actions to situational factors while observers
  attribute the same actions to personality factors

15
Self Biases - Egocentric thought

• The tendency to perceive ourselves as more
  central to events than is actually the case
• We tend to think we influence events and people
  more than we do

16
Self-serving bias

• The tendency make dispositional (personality)
  attributions for our successes and to make
  situational attributions for our failures

17
Some views of the debate

• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vCWIW3ueUjSo
  Justin/criminal
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vRe-2IB6l debate
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vZKBa9K_vAm8  town
  hall
•  
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vDPfHOacDhGE - for
  florida rep
•  
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?v-usmvYOPfco 
  grayson on republican health care plan
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vxCAPX0RKwDU 
  grayson apology