soc psych chapter 5
what are the differences between automatic thinking AND Controlled/effortful thinking
unconscious, effortless and conscious and intentional
Heuristics
Mental shortcuts used to form judgments or make decisions
Social cognition
How we select, interpret, and use the information to make judgments about ourselves and the world
Availability shortcut
using information that is easiest to get and getting rid of other information…
what are positivity bias and negativity bias?
Positivity bias: our tendency to perceive people we don't know in a positive light…
Negativity bias: anything in the social world we pay attention to and more than the positives.
Cues we rely on to quickly reach decisions can lead to errors in perceiving the world:
-Intuition
-Availability
-Representativeness
-Base-rate fallacy
-Anchoring and adjustment
-Counterfactual thinking/simulation
Embodied cognition-
The location of our bodies, position, and speed of movement, movement affect social cognition.
Moods-
influence and affect our social cognition. Sometimes a happy mood can have an effect that we are more vulnerable to persuasion and stereotypes.
Availability heuristic:
Tendency to estimate the likelihood of an event based on the ease with which instances of it are "available" in memory. Heuristics involve automatic processing.
Advantages of schema
-organizes social information
-simplifying the social world
-fill in the blanks
Disadvanatges of shema
-impeded the processing of information
-can skew and bias opinions/thinking
The social brain:
our brains are obsessed with being social, we may spend more time thinking about other people than everything else combined. Brian puts being social above everything else. Areas of the brain that process social information differently than everything else.
Person schemas:
Beliefs about others, their traits, and their goals.
Self-schemas:
Our memory, inferences, and information about ourselves.
Role schemas:
Behaviours expected of people in particular occupations or social positions.
Event schemas:
Scripts we have for well-known situations; help us prepare for the expected sequence of events.
Content-free schemas:
Rules about processing information.
Implicit personality theory:
Our assumption that certain traits and behavior go together.
Factors that influence how we form impressions:
-The ease of impression formation
-Beliefs about how traits go together
-The impact of mood
We form impressions about other people very quickly, based on very little information…
-Facial expression
-Appearance
-A single action
Primacy effect:
Tendency for the information presented early to have a greater impact on judgments than information presented later.
Trait negativity bias-
We are more strongly influenced by negative traits than we are by positive traits.
Counterfactual thinking-
after we go through an event we may start to think about the scene differently than it actually happened…
what are the two types of counterfactual thinking
Upward counterfactual thinking- imagining something better, if we do have control upwards.
Downward counterfactual thinking- thinking about things worse than they actually are, used if we have 0% control over a situation.
Three distinct ways in which people’s beliefs can create reality:
-Perceptual confirmation (if you believe in something you perceive everything that they do to fit their beliefs…)
-Belief perseverance
-Self-fulfilling prophecy
We see what we cant to see once we have a particular expectation, we:
-Interpret ambiguous events in line with our beliefs
-Look for information to support our view
-Disregard information that contradicts it
Perceptual Confirmation:
Tendency for us to see things in line with their own beliefs.
Rosenhan’s (1973) mental illness study
-Claimed hearing voices; diagnosed with schizophrenia
-Once in the hospital, acted completely normal
-Professional staff continued to see them as "sick" and interpreted their normal behavior as symptoms of schizophrenia.
-Perceptual confirmation helps explain why people can watch the same event but see it in very different ways.
Illusory Correlation:
Tendency to see a correlation between two events when in reality no such association exists.
-We tend to notice events that support our beliefs while ignoring those that do not.
-We tend to see two relatively rare attributes as associated, even if we do not expect that
these things should go together.
Framing-
-how we present information…
Spin Framing
twist information to make it fit with what we want to hear…
Positive framing-
We take information as is either taken pos or neg…
Temporal framing-
wanting to do something but as time gets closer to doing it you do not want it anymore,
Gained frame appeal-
focusing on all the positives that come from doing the behavior.
Loss framed appeal-
using negative things that come if we don't do that behavior.
Unrealistic optimism:
Tend to see ourselves as less likely than others to suffer bad events in the future.
Positive illusions
Our tendency to be positively biased when it comes to our looks and talents.
Illusory superiority:
Unrealistically positive view of the self.
Illusions of control-
thinking we have more control over things than we do.
Belief perseverance:
Tendency to hold onto the beliefs even though they have been proven unreliable.
Behavioral confirmation/self-fulfilling prophecy:
Process by which our expectations about a person leads us to elicit behavior that confirms them.
Behavioral confirmation is less likely to occur if:
-Your goal is to be liked by the target person
-Targets are aware of your expectations
-Your assumptions are highly inaccurate
Positives sides of self-fulfilling prophecies,
-We are better at judging friends and acquaintances than judging strangers.
-We can form more accurate impressions when we are motivated to be accurate and open-minded as well as when we are aware of biases.
-Self-fulfilling prophecies can lead to positive effects.
How does collectivist culture influence social cognition…
Collectivistic cultures focus less on personality traits in their understanding of themselves and
others…
whats the dual mind
most researchers believe we have two minds automatic and deliberate…
Culture influences the availability of different events/concepts…
-Your country of origin influences what is known and easily brought to mind
-Cultures value different things
-Unrealistic optimism is found less in collectivistic cultures
Interdependent self-construal:
Define self in terms of contexts and relationships with others
Field dependent:
Have more difficulty identifying a figure embedded in a larger background; are better able to perceive the whole image as one holistic figure
Field independent:
Have a greater ability to identify a target figure and separate it from its larger background.
A self-fulfilling prophecy is simply...
the physical outcome of a situation being influenced by our thinking, either positively or negatively.