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What is Social Cognition

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Past experience provides a filter to help us interpret and evaluate ... consistent (stapler, filing cabinets, book shelves) and schema inconsistent (exercise ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: What is Social Cognition


1
What is Social Cognition?
  • How people think about themselves and the social
    world

2
Key Points
  • All of the information in our environment is too
    much to process. Need filter.
  • Past experience provides a filter to help us
    interpret and evaluate new people and events.

3
Social Cognition
  • Do we generally use all of the available
    information about a person when forming
    impressions of him/her?
  • Why not?
  • Impractical or impossible too much information
  • Time constraints

4
What information do we use?
  • Categories, schemas

5
Schemas
  • Mental structures that help organize knowledge
    about the social world and guide the selection,
    interpretation, and recall of information.

6
What do schemas do?The human mind must think
with the aid of categoriesorderly living depends
upon it. --Allport, 1954
  • Help us organize information
  • Help us remember certain things
  • Help us to fill in details when our information
    is incomplete
  • Can influence behavior
  • Help us to interpret ambiguous behavior
  • Influence what information we attend to

7
Examples
  • Read story
  • Demonstration

8
Schemas influence attention
  • Study
  • IV Grad student office included schema
    consistent (stapler, filing cabinets, book
    shelves) and schema inconsistent (exercise
    equipment) objects.
  • DV Leave room and recall what was in the room.
  • What were the findings?

9
Schemas help us to interpret ambiguous information
  • Donald example
  • IV Priming pos or neg
  • DV Positivity of impression
  • Priming the process by which recent experiences
    increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, or
    concept.
  • What were the findings?

10
Schemas influence behavior
  • Bargh and colleagues
  • IV Primed polite or rude words
  • DV How long participant waited to interrupt the
    experimenter
  • What were the findings?

11
How do we decide which schema to use?
  • Depends on schema accessibility
  • Situational cues
  • Recency of schema activation
  • Priming
  • Bargh studies
  • The Donald Study
  • Do not need conscious awareness (Bargh
    Pietromonaco, 1982, in text)
  • Personal chronic constructs

12
Sometimes schemas can get us into trouble
  • Confirmation biases Tendencies to interpret,
    seek, and create information that verifies our
    preexisting beliefs or schemas.
  • Examples of confirmation biases
  • Belief perseverance The tendency to maintain
    beliefs, even after they have been discredited.

13
Perseverance Effect
  • Ross et al. (1975)
  • IV Success, failure, or average feedback about
    ability to detect real or fake suicide notes
  • Intervention E explained feedback was randomly
    assigned (discredited belief)
  • DV Estimated how well would actually do at task
  • Results?

14
Confirming Prior Expectations
  • Snyder Swann, 1978
  • IV Expectations about person to be interviewed
    introverted vs. extraverted
  • DV Selection of interview questions. Slanted
    toward extraverted, introverted, or neutral.
  • Results?
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