CHAPTER TWO : SOCIAL

COGNITION

 Key Areas of Study.

1. Concepts of Heuristics and its types.

2. Schemas – mental frameworks that organize
Social information.
3. In-depth research of Automatic Processing.
4.Errors/tilts of social cognition
5. Affect V/S Cognition.

 WHAT IS SOCIAL COGNITION?

“Social Cognition” is defined as the process

in which we can ‘analyze’, ‘interpret’, ‘use’
and ‘retrieve’ information in social
situations.
It particularly deals with all cognitive
processes involved in social situations.

 CONCEPT OF HEURISTICS AND ITS

TYPES.

1. There are only ascertain limit of

information to which an individual can
withstand, and if to this an additional
input of information is added, then the
person is in a state of “Information
 overload”, thereby resulting in the
decrease of the producing capacity.
Thus it is safe to conclude that more
the information stored less is the
production capacity.

2. In order to deal with an excessive load

of information, there are many
techniques man can implement or rely
on, one of them happens to be that of
Heuristics.
3. Heuristics is defined as the “simple
rules or strategies that tend to help
deal with a lot of information by
making important
decisions/judgements or valid
inferences in a ‘quick’, ‘rapid’, and an
‘effortless’ manner. There are various
types that come under these as well
and they are as follows –
- REPRESENTIVENESS
- It is a type of heuristic which allows us to
make important judgements/decisions and
valid out inferences of a particular stimuli or
a set of events with close resemblance to
other events or stimuli.
- It not only allows us to make judgements of
people, but also makes judgements on the
 causes of these judgements and whether
they produce the same effects in terms of
magnitude.
- Decisions or judgements made by this
heuristic can be accurate or incorrect. If
accurate, it is because due to this heuristic
the style and behavior of people is seen to
change in respect to the people that are
already a part of the social group. If
incorrect, it is only because the judgements
are made only on the basis of ‘ignoring the
base rates’ by which we mean to say that the
individual attributes or traits. Stereotyping
is seen to be prevalent.
- In this particular heuristic, we do have a
great deal of cultural differences that take
place, such as there is a great deal of
cultural difference between Asians and
Americans.
- Eg : Judging people on the basis of their
occupations.

- AVAILABILITY
- It is that particular heuristic which is clearly
responsible enough to make judgements on
the basis of how quickly does the thoughts
come to the mind.
- Certainly, this particular heuristic has a
good sense of time, but making judgments on
the basis of previously made thoughts causes
 severe errors and its overestimates the
likelihood of events that are rare to take
place but come easily to the mind.
- Apart from the ease in bringing in the
information into the mind, there is more to
this particular heuristic and that is, the more
the information stored in the minds of the
people, the greater impact it has on our
judgements.
- Mass Media is one of the strongest mediums
for the arousal of this particular heuristic.
- Eg : People tend to fear travelling by
airplanes over automobiles, without actually
realizing that the number of accidents in
automobiles is comparatively more in
airplanes. It is mass media that acts as a
medium to overestimate this fact in the
minds of people.
- ACHORING & ADJUSTMENT
- It is that particular type of heuristic which
allows people to make judgements
considering a numerical point as the starting
point which later can be adjusted.
- Judgements on the basis of this particular
heuristic could be insufficient as it allows to
make a great deal of influences for future
assessments.
- Eg : An experienced lawyer can with his
expertise tend to either prepone or postpone
 the original date of punishment or sentence
of the prosecutor of the crime.

 ERRORS/TILTS OF SOCIAL COGNITION

- There are at times when some individuals
while understanding others or making sense
out of the social world, tend to deviate from
rationality thereby causing “massive errors
or tilts” in social cognition which tend to
reduce the value of navigation of the social
world.
- These errors and tilts are listed and
explained below.
 NEGATIVITY BIAS
 OPTIMISTIC BIAS – Optimism at work,
Planning Fallacy and Overconfidence Barrier.
 THOUGHT SUPRESSION
 COUNTERFACTUAL THINKING
 MAGICAL THINKING AND TERROR
MANAGEMENT AND BELIEF IN THE
SUPERNATURALS.
- NEGATIVITY BIAS
- Negativity Bias is also called as the
“negativity effect.”
- It is defined as that bias or tendency in
which individuals to cloud their sense of
social thought with a series of negative
events over positive ones.
- Individuals high on this particular bias
generally tend to think that negative events
 are more likely to take place over positive
ones.
- The domains that the negative bias studies
are as follows –
1. Learning & Memory
2. Attention
3. Interpretation OF Influences
4.Risk Generation
5. Decision Making
- Negativity Bias has 4 main dimensions it
studies and they are –
1. Negative Potency
2. Steep inclination of negative gradients
3. Negative Difference
4.Negative Dis balance

- OPTIMISTIC BIAS
- Optimistic Bias is the ‘opposite’ of negative
bias.
- It is a tendency of people to have look at
things from that of a vision of a “rose
colored glasses” that is having a sort of a
predisposition of having all events go well in
a positive manner.
- People high on this particular bias tend to
think that positive events are likely to occur
and negative events are less likely to occur
in the same.
- 3 concepts that optimistic bias also deals
with is
1. Overconfidence Barrier
2. Planning Fallacy
3. Optimism at work.
- OVERCONFIDENCE BARRIER
- Optimism to a very large extent is seen in
what we call as “overconfidence barrier” It
is that bias or error or tilt of social cognition
which describes the tendency of being
“overly optimistic” and “confident” towards
events that are likely to occur.
- Researchers believe that people who are
generally more confident are in fact less
competent in nature.
- They also include that people who are high
on this bias in specific tend to be missing out
on some crucial information, and that
overconfidence stems from the “errors of
omission”
- They finally conclude that people who face
this barrier of overconfidence tend to not
have proper feedbacks to give for the
information they missed and thus use the
medium of confidence for marking the same.

- PLANNING FALLANCY
- Optimism has a large effect on help us plan
our work effectively, this could be seen in
the perspective of “PLANNING FALLACY”.
The term Planning Fallacy would be
 described as the tendency of prediction of
getting more work done, in a given time
period that is not possible enough.
- Researches