Social Psychology

1
Social Psychology
6th edition

• Elliot Aronson
• University of California, Santa Cruz
• Timothy D. Wilson
• University of Virginia
• Robin M. Akert
• Wellesley College
• slides by Travis Langley
• Henderson State University

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Chapter 3

• Social Cognition
• How We Think about the Social World

The greatest of all faults, I should say, is to
become conscious of none. Thomas Carlyle
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Social Cognition

• Social Cognition
• How people think about themselves and the social
  world, or more specifically, how people select,
  interpret, remember, and use social information
  to make judgments and decisions.

Source of images Microsoft Office Online.
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Social Cognition

• The study of social cognition is a central topic
  in social psychology.
• The assumption is that people are generally
  trying to form accurate impressions of the world
  and do so much of the time.
• Because of the nature of social thinking,
  however, people sometimes form erroneous
  impressions.

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2 Kinds of Social Cognition

1. Quick and automatic without thinking, without
   consciously deliberately ones own thoughts,
   perceptions, assumptions.
2. Controlled thinking that is effortful and
   deliberate, pausing to think about self and
   environment, carefully selecting the right course
   of action.

Source of image Microsoft Office Online.
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ON AUTOMATIC PILOT LOW-EFFORT THINKING

• People often size up a new situation very
  quickly they figure out who is there, what is
  happening, and what might happen next.
• Often these quick conclusions are correct.

• You can tell the difference between a college
  classroom and a frat party without having to
  think about it.

Source of image Microsoft Office Online.
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• Imagine a different approach Every time you
  encounter a new situation you stop and think
  about it slowly and deliberately, like Rodins
  statue The Thinker .

• Imagine driving down the road and stopping
  repeatedly to analyze every twist and turn.
• Imagine meeting new person and excuse yourself
  for 15 minutes to analyze what you learned from
  them.
• Sounds exhausting, right?

Source of image Microsoft Office Online.
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• Automatic Thinking
• Thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional,
  involuntary, and effortless.

We form impressions of people quickly and
effortlessly and navigate new roads without much
conscious analysis of what we are doing. We
engage in an automatic analysis of our
environments, based on past experiences and
knowledge of the world.
Source of image Microsoft Office Online.
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People as Everyday Theorists Automatic Thinking
with Schemas

• Schemas
• Mental structures people use to organize their
  knowledge about the social world around themes or
  subjects and that influence the information
  people notice, think about, and remember.

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People as Everyday Theorists Automatic Thinking
with Schemas

• The term schema encompasses our knowledge about
  many things
• Other people,
• Ourselves,
• Social roles (e.g., what a librarian or engineer
  is like),
• Specific events (e.g., what usually happens when
  people eat a meal in a restaurant).
• In each case, our schemas contain our basic
  knowledge and impressions that we use to organize
  what we know about the social world and interpret
  new situations.

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Stereotypes about Race and Weapons 

• When applied to members of a social group such as
  a fraternity or gender or race, schemas are
  commonly referred to as stereotypes.
• Stereotypes can be applied rapidly and
  automatically when we encounter other people.

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Stereotypes about Race and Weapons

• Payne and colleagues rapidly showed college
  students pairs of pictures.
• Participants were told to pay attention to press
  one key if certain pictures showed a tool and
  another key if it was a gun, in only ½ second.

• People were significantly more likely to
  misidentify a tool as a gun when it was preceded
  by a black face than when it was preceded by a
  white face.

Source of images Microsoft Office Online.
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Stereotypes about Race and Weapons

• Another study involved awarding video game
  players points for shooting characters holding
  weapons but subtracted points for shooting
  characters holding tools.
• Results showed they made the most errors,
  shooting an unarmed person, when a black person
  was not holding a gun.

• When the men in the picture were white,
  participants made about the same number of errors
  whether the men were armed or unarmed.

Source of images Microsoft Office Online.
15
The Function of SchemasWhy Do We Have Them?

• Schemas are typically very useful for helping us
  organize and make sense of the world and to fill
  in the gaps of our knowledge.
• Schemas are particularly important when we
  encounter information that can be interpreted in
  a number of ways, because they help us reduce
  ambiguity.
• Students told that a speaker is warm will
  interpret his lecture more favorably even though
  people who were told he is a cold person do not
  receive his lecture as favorably, even though
  both groups hear the same lecture.

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Schemas as Memory Guides

• Schemas also help people fill in the blanks when
  they are trying to remember things.
• We dont remember exactly as if our minds were
  cameras.
• Instead, we remember some information that was
  there (particularly information our schemas lead
  us to pay attention to), and we remember other
  information that was never there but that we have
  unknowingly added.

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Schemas as Memory Guides

• Examples
• Ask people what is the most famous line of
  dialogue in the classic movie Casablanca, and
  they will probably say, Play it again, Sam.
• Ask them what is the most famous line from the
  original Star Trek TV series, and they will
  probably say, Beam me up, Scotty.
• Here is a piece of trivia that might surprise
  you Both of these lines are reconstructions. The
  characters never said them.

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Schemas as Memory Guides

• Memory reconstructions tend to be consistent with
  ones schemas.
• People who read a story about a marriage proposal
  can later insert incorrect details that had not
  been in the story (e.g., future plans, roses) but
  were consistent with a marriage proposal schema.
• The fact that people filled in the blanks in
  their memory with schema-consistent details
  suggests that schemas become stronger and more
  resistant to change over time.

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Which Schemas Are Applied? Accessibility and
Priming  

• Accessibility
• The extent to which schemas and concepts are at
  the forefront of peoples minds and are therefore
  likely to be used when we are making judgments
  about the social world.

Priming The process by which recent experiences
increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, or
concept.
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Which Schemas Are Applied? Accessibility

• Something can become accessible for three
  reasons
• Some schemas are chronically accessible due to
  past experience.

This means that these schemas are constantly
active and ready to use to interpret ambiguous
situations.
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Which Schemas Are Applied? Accessibility

• Something can become accessible for three
  reasons
• Some schemas are chronically accessible due to
  past experience.
• Something can become accessible because it is
  related to a current goal.

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Which Schemas Are Applied? Accessibility

• Something can become accessible for three
  reasons
• Some schemas are chronically accessible due to
  past experience.
• Something can become accessible because it is
  related to a current goal.
• Schemas can become temporarily accessible because
  of our recent experiences.

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Which Schemas Are Applied?Priming

• Suppose you read about a man named Donald whose
  actions are ambiguous, interpretable in either a
  positive or negative manner.
• People who previously memorize words like
  adventurous tend to form positive impressions of
  him.
• People primed with words like reckless and
  stubborn form negative impressions.

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Priming is a good example of automatic thinking
because it occurs quickly, unintentionally, and
unconsciously.
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The Persistence of Schemas After They Are
Discredited  

• Even though a judge may instruct the jurors to
  disregard inadmissible evidence, because of the
  way schemas work, the jurors beliefs can persist
  even after the evidence for them proves to be
  false.
• Schemas can take on a life of their own, even
  after the evidence for them has been completely
  discredited.

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Making Our Schemas Come True The Self-Fulfilling
Prophecy  

• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
• The case whereby people
• Have an expectation about what another person is
  like, which
• influences how they act toward that person, which
  
• causes that person to behave consistently with
  peoples original expectations, making the
  expectations come true.

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Making Our Schemas Come True The Self-Fulfilling
Prophecy  

• Teachers led to believe particular students will
  bloom
• Create a warmer emotional climate for those
  students, giving them more personal attention,
  encouragement, and support,
• Give bloomers more challenging material,
• Give bloomers more and better feedback,
• Give bloomers more opportunities to respond in
  class and give them longer to respond.

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Making Our Schemas Come True The Self-Fulfilling
Prophecy  

• Teachers led to believe particular students will
  bloom
• create a warmer emotional climate for those
  students, giving them more personal attention,
  encouragement, and support
• give bloomers more challenging material
• give bloomers more and better feedback
• give bloomers more opportunities to respond in
  class and give them longer to respond.

• Some Limits of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies 
• Peoples true nature can win out in social
  interaction.
• Self-fulfilling prophecies are most likely to
  occur when people are distracted.

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Which Schemas Are Applied?Priming

• Priming is a good example of automatic thinking
  because it occurs quickly, unintentionally, and
  unconsciously.

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Cultural Determinants of Schemas  

• An important source of our schemas is the culture
  in which we grow up.
• In fact, schemas are an important way cultures
  exert their influence by instilling mental
  structures that influence how we understand and
  interpret the world.

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Mental Strategies and Shortcuts

• When deciding which job to accept, what car to
  buy, or whom to marry, we usually do not conduct
  a thorough search of every option (OK, its time
  for me to get married I think Ill consult the
  Census Bureaus lists of unmarried adults in my
  town and begin my interviews tomorrow).

Source of images Microsoft Office Online.
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Mental Strategies and Shortcuts

• When deciding which job to accept, what car to
  buy, or whom to marry, we usually do not conduct
  a thorough search of every option (OK, its time
  for me to get married I think Ill consult the
  Census Bureaus lists of unmarried adults in my
  town and begin my interviews tomorrow).

Mental shortcuts are efficient, however, and
usually lead to good decisions in a reasonable
amount of time.
Source of images Microsoft Office Online.
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Mental Strategies and Shortcuts

• What shortcuts do people use?
• One way is to use schemas to understand new
  situations.
• When making specific kinds of judgments and
  decisions, however, we do not always have a
  ready-made schema to apply.
• At other times, there are too many schemas that
  could apply, and it is not clear which one to
  use. What do we do?

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Mental Strategies and Shortcuts

• Judgmental Heuristics
• Mental shortcuts people use to make judgments
  quickly and efficiently.

Source of image Microsoft Office Online.
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Mental Strategies and Shortcuts

• Judgmental Heuristics
• Mental shortcuts people use to make judgments
  quickly and efficiently.

• Heuristics do not guarantee that people will
  make accurate inferences about the world.
• Sometimes heuristics are inadequate for the job
  at hand or are misapplied, leading to faulty
  judgments.

Source of image Microsoft Office Online.
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Mental Strategies and Shortcuts

• Judgmental Heuristics
• Mental shortcuts people use to make judgments
  quickly and efficiently.

• Heuristics do not guarantee that people will
  make accurate inferences about the world.
• Sometimes heuristics are inadequate for the job
  at hand or are misapplied, leading to faulty
  judgments.

As we discuss the mental strategies that
sometimes lead to errors, however, keep in mind
that people use heuristics for a reason Most of
the time, they are highly functional and serve us
well.
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How Easily Does It Come to Mind? The Availability
Heuristic  

• Availability Heuristic
• A mental rule of thumb whereby people base a
  judgment on the ease with which they can bring
  something to mind.

The trouble with the availability heuristic is
that sometimes what is easiest to remember is not
typical of the overall picture, leading to faulty
conclusions.
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How Easily Does It Come to Mind? The Availability
Heuristic 

• Example When physicians are diagnosing diseases,
  it might seem straightforward for them to observe
  peoples symptoms and figure out what disease, if
  any, they have.
• Sometimes, though, symptoms might be a sign of
  several different disorders.
• Do doctors use the availability heuristic,
  whereby they are more likely to consider
  diagnoses that come to mind easily?
• Several studies of medical diagnoses suggest that
  the answer is yes.

Source of image Microsoft Office Online.
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How Easily Does It Come to Mind? The Availability
Heuristic 

• Do people use the availability heuristic to make
  judgments about themselves?
• To find out, researchers had people remember
  examples of their own past assertive behaviors.
• People asked to think of six examples rated
  themselves as relatively assertive because it was
  easy to think of this many examples (Hey, this
  is easyI guess Im a pretty assertive person).
• People asked to think of twelve examples rated
  themselves as relatively unassertive because it
  was difficult to think of this many examples
  (Hmm, this is hardI must not be a very
  assertive person).

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How Easily Does It Come to Mind? The Availability
Heuristic 
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How Similar Is A to B? The Representativeness
Heuristic  

• Representativeness Heuristic
• A mental shortcut whereby people classify
  something according to how similar it is to a
  typical case.

Base Rate Information Information about the
frequency of members of different categories in
the population.
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Taking Things at Face Value  

• Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic
• A mental shortcut whereby people use a number or
  value as a starting point and then adjust
  insufficiently from this anchor.

Source of image Microsoft Office Online.
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Taking Things at Face Value  

• Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic
• Suppose youre a judge sentencing a felon after
  your friend had his 75th birthday.

Without realizing why the number 75 came to your
mind, you might think, 75 is too high. Ill
sentence this person to 60 years. What if your
granddaughter just had her 5th birthday? You
might impose a lower sentence.
Source of image Microsoft Office Online.
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Taking Things at Face Value  

• Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic
• Suppose youre a judge sentencing a felon after
  your friend had his 75th birthday.

This is, in fact, the kind of thinking judges
showed in a recent study.
Without realizing why the number 75 came to your
mind, you might think, 75 is too high. Ill
sentence this person to 60 years. What if your
granddaughter just had her 5th birthday? You
might impose a lower sentence.
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Taking Things at Face Value  

• Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic
• The problem with this is that completely
  arbitrary values can influence judgments.

Tversky and Kahneman (1974), spun a wheel of
fortune and asked people to consider whether the
number that came up was higher or lower than the
percentage of African nations in the United
Nations. People gave a higher estimate when the
wheel of fortune stopped on a high number than
when it stopped on a low number.
Source of image Microsoft Office Online.
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The Power of Unconscious Thinking

• Part of the definition of automatic thinking is
  that it occurs unconsciously.
• Although unconscious processes can sometimes lead
  to tragic errors, unconscious thinking is
  frequently critical to navigating our way through
  the world.

Source of image Microsoft Office Online.
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The Power of Unconscious Thinking

• Have you ever been chatting with someone at a
  party and suddenly realized that someone across
  the room had mentioned your name?
• The only way this could happen is if, while you
  were engrossed in conversation, you were
  unconsciously monitoring other conversations to
  see if something important came up (such as your
  name).

• This so-called "cocktail party" effect has been
  demonstrated under controlled experimental
  conditions.

Source of image Microsoft Office Online.
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The Power of Unconscious Thinking

• There is even evidence that our unconscious minds
  can do better at some tasks than our conscious
  minds do.
• Suppose you were shopping for an apartment and
  after looking at several places you narrowed your
  choice to four possibilities.
• Each one has pros and cons, making it difficult
  to decide which apartment to rent. How should
  you go about making up your mind?
• Given the importance of this decision, most of us
  would spend a lot of time thinking about it,
  consciously analyzing the alternatives to
  determine what our best option is.

Source of image Microsoft Office Online.
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The Power of Unconscious Thinking

• Dijksterhuis (2004) gave people a lot of
  information about four apartments in a short
  amount of time.
• Immediate choice condition He asked people to
  choose the apartment they thought was the best
  right way.
• Conscious thought condition He had people in
  this condition think carefully about the
  apartments for three minutes and then choose the
  best one.
• Unconscious thought condition He gave people a
  distracting task for three minutes so that they
  could not think about the apartments consciously,
  with the assumption that they would continue to
  think about the apartments unconsciously.

Source of image Microsoft Office Online.
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The Power of Unconscious Thinking

• People in the unconscious thought condition most
  accurately identified which apartment was best.

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CONTROLLED SOCIAL COGNITION HIGH-EFFORT THINKING

• Racial profiling has received much attention
  since the events of September 11, 2001.

Because the terrorists who flew the planes into
the World Trade Center were of Middle Eastern
descent, some people feel anyone a similar
background should receive special scrutiny when
flying on commercial airlines.
Source of image Microsoft Office Online.
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CONTROLLED SOCIAL COGNITION HIGH-EFFORT THINKING

• On the New Years Eve after the attacks, U.S.
  citizens Michael Dasrath and Edgardo Cureg,
  having passed extensive security checks, were
  removed from a plane when passengers complained
  that their presence made them (and one womans
  dog) nervous.

Neither man posed a threat, but because they had
brown skin, they were singled out and refused
service.
Source of image Microsoft Office Online.
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CONTROLLED SOCIAL COGNITION HIGH-EFFORT THINKING

• Racial prejudice can result from either automatic
  thinking or conscious, deliberative thinking.

Controlled Thinking Thinking that is conscious,
intentional, voluntary, and effortful.
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Mentally Undoing the Past

• Counterfactual Thinking
• Mentally changing some aspect of the past in
  imagining what might have been.
• If only I had answered that one question
  differently,
• I would have passed the test.
• Counterfactual thoughts can have a big influence
  on our emotional reactions to events.
• The easier it is to mentally undo an outcome, the
  stronger the emotional reaction to it.

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Mentally Undoing the Past

• Counterfactual Thinking
• One group of researchers, for example,
  interviewed people who had suffered the loss of a
  spouse or child.
• The more people imagined ways in which the
  tragedy could have been averted, by mentally
  undoing the circumstances preceding it, the more
  distress they reported.

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Mentally Undoing the Past

• Counterfactual Thinking
• Silver medal winners (2nd place) often express
  greater dissatisfaction that bronze medal winners
  (3rd place).
• Silver medal winners may imagine ways events
  could have gone differently to allow them to
  reach first place.

Source of image Microsoft Office Online.
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Mentally Undoing the Past

• Counterfactual Thinking
• Counterfactual thinking can be useful, however,
  if it focuses peoples attention on ways that
  they can cope better in the future.
• It is not so good if counterfactual thinking
  results in rumination, whereby people
  repetitively focus on negative things in their
  lives.

Source of image Microsoft Office Online.
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Thought Suppression and Ironic Processing

• Thought Suppression
• The attempt to avoid thinking about something we
  would prefer to forget.

• The automatic aspect, the monitoring process,
  searches for evidence that the unwanted thought
  is about to intrude on consciousness.
• Then the operating process, comes into play. This
  is the effortful, conscious attempt to distract
  oneself by finding something else to think about.

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Thought Suppression and Ironic Processing

• Thought Suppression
• The attempt to avoid thinking about something we
  would prefer to forget.

The irony is that when people are trying hardest
not to think about something if tired or
preoccupied (under cognitive load), these
thoughts are especially likely to spill out
unchecked.
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Improving Human Thinking

• Overconfidence Barrier
• The fact that people usually have too much
  confidence in the accuracy of their judgments.

• Ways this might improve
• When asked to consider the point of view opposite
  to their own, people can realize there were other
  ways to construe the world than their own way,
  and consequently make fewer judgment errors.
• Teaching people basic statistical and
  methodological principles about how to reason
  correctly may help them apply these principles in
  their everyday lives.

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Improving Human Thinking

• Overconfidence Barrier
• The fact that people usually have too much
  confidence in the accuracy of their judgments.

• Ways this might improve
• When asked to consider the point of view opposite
  to their own, people can realize there were other
  ways to construe the world than their own way,
  and consequently make fewer judgment errors.
• Teaching people basic statistical and
  methodological principles about how to reason
  correctly may help them apply these principles in
  their everyday lives.
• So if you were dreading taking a college
  statistics course, take heart It might not only
  satisfy a requirement for your major but improve
  your reasoning as well!

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Social Psychology
6th edition

• Elliot Aronson
• University of California, Santa Cruz
• Timothy D. Wilson
• University of Virginia
• Robin M. Akert
• Wellesley College
• slides by Travis Langley
• Henderson State University