[Social Psychology Course Note] Ch 3

Social Cognition: How We Think About the Social World

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What is automatic thinking, and how are schemas an example of that kind of thought ? What are the advantages and disadvantages of schemas ?

Social cognition

• How people think about themselves and the social world
• How people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments and decisions

Two kinds of Social cognition

• Automatic thinking
  • Quick
  • No conscious deliberation of thoughts, perceptions, assumptions
    • We often size up a new situation very quickly
    • 大部分的時候是 correct 的
    • Thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless
    • How ?
      • Relate new situations to past experiences
      • Schemas
        • Mental structures that organize our knowledge of the social world
        • Influences the information people notice, think about, and remember
• Controlled thinking
  • Effortful and deliberate
  • Thinking about self and environment
  • Carefully selecting the right course of action

People as everyday theorists: automatic thinking with schemas

Schemas and stereotypes

• When applied to members of a social group such as a fraternity, gender, or race, schemas are commonly referred to as stereotypes

Function of schemas

• Schemas used to
  • Organize what we know
  • Interpret new situations
• Korsakov’s syndrome
  • Neurological disorder
    • Can’t form memories

Schemas as memory guides

• Helps fill in the blanks when trying to remember
  • Remember some information that was there
  • Also remember other information that was never there

How schemas affect perception

Which schemas do we use ? Accessibility and priming

• Accessibility 浮現速度
  • The extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people’s minds and are therefore likely to be used when we are making judgments about the social world
• Priming 促發
  • The process by which recent experience increase the accessibility of a schema, trait, or concept

Accessibility and priming

• Something can become accessible for three reasons
  • Chronically(長期的) accessible due to past experience
  • Accessible because it is related to a current goal
  • Temporarily accessible because of our recent experience

Making our schemas come true

• The self-fulfilling prophecy 自證預言
  • 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 people’s original expectation, making the expectations come true

What are other types of automatic thinking are how do they operate ?

Automatic goal pursuit

Prime goals in subtle way to see if it influences behavior

• Example: 看句子、單字然後分硬幣的那個實驗

Automatic decision making

• Distracting oneself prior to making decision
• Ensuring distraction improves decision making
  • Have a conscious goal to make a good choice
  • Decision requires integration of complex information

Automatic thinking and metaphors about the body and the mind

• Physical sensations can prime metaphors
  • e.g., cleanliness associated with morality; dirtiness with immorality
• Metaphors can influence decisions
  • Holding hot coffee or iced coffee
  • Encounter a stranger
    • Hot coffee: primes “warm & friendly” metaphor
    • Iced coffee: primes “unfriendly people are cold”

Mental strategies and shortcuts

• Mental shortcuts 心智捷徑
  • Efficient: don’t usually have time to fully search all options
  • Usually lead to good decisions quickly
• Schemas are a shortcut people use
  • But we don’t have a ready-made schema for every judgment or decision
  • Sometimes there are too many schemas available
• So what do we do ?
  • Judgmental heuristics 捷思
    • Mental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently

Availability heuristic 便利捷思

• A mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind
• Trouble: sometimes what is easiest to remember is not typical of the overall picture, leading to faulty conclusions
• Physicians have been found to use the availability heuristic when making diagnoses. Their diagnoses are influenced by how easily they can bring different diseases to mind
• 醫生問診一直問 -> 避免誤診，要把破原先的 availability heuristic

Availability heuristic and self-judgments

• People were asked to remember either 6 or 12 examples of their own past assertive behaviors
  • People who thought of 6 examples
    • Rated themselves as relatively assertive
    • It was easy to think of this many examples -> “Hey, this is easy, I guess I’m a pretty assertive person”
  • People who thought of 12 examples
    • Rated themselves as relatively unassertive
    • It was difficult to think of this any examples -> “Hmm, this is hard, I must not be a very assertive person”

How similar is A to B, the representativeness heuristic

• Representativeness heuristic 代表性捷思
  • A mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case
• Base rate information 基底比例資訊
  • Information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population

Personality tests and the represnetativeness heuristic

• We tend to perceive personality tests as uncannily accurate, known as the “Barnum effect” 巴南效應
• Why does this happen ?
  • Representative heuristic - statements are so vague that everyone can find a past behavior similar to the feedback
  • We do not go beyond representative examples that come to mind

How does culture influence social thinking ?

Cultural determinants of schemas

• Culturally universal
  • All people have schemas
• Culture differences
  • Content of schemas

Culture and social cognition

• Analytic thinking style
  • Focus on objects without consdering surrounding context
  • Associated with Western cultures
• Holistic thinking style 整體式思考風格
  • Focus on the overall context, relation between objects
  • Assocaited with Eastern cultures

What are some of the drawbacks of controlled thinking, and how can we improve its effectiveness ?

Controlled thinking

• Thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful

Controlled thinking and free will

• Association between conscious thought and behavior creates perception of free will 自由意志的知覺
  • But, forces outside of awarenes may influence behavior and conscious thoughts
    • May overestimate or underestimate amount of control
  • Belief in free will predicts behavior
    • Cheating
    • Helping

Mentally undoing the past

• Counterfactual reasoning 虛擬式理解
  • Mentally changing some aspect of the past in imagining what might have been
    • 如果我那時候…，現在就不會…
  • 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

Emotional consequences of counterfactual reasoning

• Positive consequences
  • Motivation to improve in future
• Negative consequences
  • If it leads to rumination(沉思) - repetitive focus on negative things -> depression

Improving human thinking

• Make people more humble
  • Ask people to consider the point of view opposite to their own
• Teach basic statistical principles
  • Facilitated application of principles to everyday life