SOCIAL BELIEFS AND JUDGEMENTS

Social Cognition: The manner in which we interpret, analyse, remember and use
information about the social world

Schemas
- Mental frameworks that help us organise social information, and that guide our
actions and processing of information relevant to those context
- Can be self-fulfilling, help make sense of the social world, and result in inaccurate
processing of information

Impact of Schemas on Social Cognition

- Attention: what we notice
o Acts as fillers; information consistent with schemas are more likely to be
noticed and to enter our consciousness
o Likely to be relied on when experiencing cognitive load (trying to handle a lot
of information at once)
- Encoding: processes through which information we notice gets stored in memory
o The information that becomes the focus of our attention is much more likely
to be stored in LTM
o Information inconsistent with one’s schemas may be encoded into a separate
memory location and marked with a unique “tag”
- Retrieval: processes through which we recover information from memory in order to
use it in some manner

Priming
- A situation that occurs when stimuli or events increase the availability in memory or
consciousness of specific types of information held in memory
- After watching a violent movie, you assume the driver that cuts into your lane as
aggressive as the violent movie has activated your schema for “aggression”
- Unpriming: effects of the schemas tend to persist until they are somehow expressed
in thought/behaviour and only then do their effects decrease

Schema Persistence
- Perseverance effect: The tendency for beliefs and schemas to remain unchanged
even in the face of contradictory information
- Self-fulfilling  influence our responses to the social world in ways that MAKE it
consistent with the schema
- Plays an influential role in prejudice

Heuristics
How We Reduce Our Effort in Social Cognition
- Simple rules (rule of thumb) for making complex decisions or drawing inferences in a
rapid and efficient manner
- Information overload: Instances in which our ability to process information is
exceeded
Types of Heuristics
1. Representativeness heuristic – Judging by resemblance
- The more an individual seems to resemble/match a given group, the more likely
he/she is to belong to that group
2. Availability heuristic – “If I can retrieve instances, they must be frequent”
- Making judgements on the basis of how easily specific kinds of information can be
brought to mind
3. Anchoring & adjustment heuristics – Where you begin makes a difference
- Tendency to use a number of value as a starting point to which we then make
adjustments

Basic Modes of Social Thought

- Controlled processing
o Systematic, logical, and highly effortful manner
- Automatic processing
o Fast, relatively effortless, and intuitive manner
o Occurs after extensive experience with a task/type of information; reach the
stage where we can perform the task/process the information in a seemingly
effortless, automatic and nonconscious manner
o Eg. Activation of stereotypes
 Automatic activation of schemas can lead to automatic effects on
social behaviour

Potential Sources of Error in Social Cognition

Negativity bias Pay extra attention to negative information (sensitive to
negative information than to positive information)
Optimistic bias Tendency to see the world through rose-coloured glasses
(expect most things to turn out well)
Overconfidence barrier Tendency to have more confidence in the accuracy of our
own judgement than is reasonable
Planning fallacy Tendency to make optimistic predictions concerning how
long a given task will take for completion (believe that we
can get more done in a given period of time than we
actually can)
Counterfactual thinking Tendency to imagine other outcomes in situation than the
ones that actually occurred (“what might have been”)
Thought suppression Efforts to prevent certain thoughts from entering
consciousness
Magical thinking Thinking involving irrational assumptions

Affect & Cognition: How Feelings Shape Thought and Thought Shapes Feelings
- Moods affect how new stimuli are perceived
 - Information that evokes emotional reactions may be processed differently than
other kinds of information
- Two-factor theory of emotion
o The perception of situations can determine emotional reactions
o Often, we don’t know our own feelings/attitudes directly. Rather, since the
internal reactions are often somewhat ambiguous, we infer their nature from
the kinds of situations in which we experience these reactions
o Arousal when meet someone  in love, arousal when in traffic  anger

The Influence of Affect on Cognition (Impact on Memory)

- Mood congruence effects
o The fact that we are more likely to store or remember positive information
when in a positive mood and negative information when in a negative mood
o Current moods serve as a kind of filter, permitting primarily information
consistent with these moods to enter into long-term storage
- Mood dependent memory
o The fact that what we remember while in a given mood may be determined,
in part, by what we learned when previously in that mood
o Current moods serve as a kind of retravel cue, prompting recall of
information consistent with these moods
o Eg. You meet 2 people in 2 different moods; you will probably notice and
store in memory mainly positive information about the first person and
negative information about the second person

Cognition & Regulation of Affective States

- Regulation of emotions is important; coping strategies
o Distressed; produce/yield temptations  engage in temporary pleasures
(retail therapy, substance abuse)

Affect & Cognition: Social Neuroscience Evidence for Two Separate System
- One system, “reason” – logical thought; one system  deals with affect/emotion

Attribution
- Process of thought which we seek information and draw inferences to understand
the causes of other’s behavior
- To understand why people did what they did  help us understand them better &
predict their future actions

Theories of Attribution
- Theory of correspondent inferences (Jones & Davis, 1965)
o Describes how we use others’ behaviour as a basis for inferring their stable
disposition
o Complicated; often individuals act in certain ways not because doing so
reflects their own preferences/traits, but rather because external factors
leave them little choice
o To overcome;
  Consider only behaviour that seems to have been freely chosen, while
largely ignoring ones that were somehow forced onto the person
 Pay careful attention to action that shows noncommon effects
 Noncommon effects: effects that can be caused by one
specific factor but not by others
 Pay greater attention to actions by others that are low in social
desirability than actions that are high (learn more about others’ traits
from actions they perform that are somehow out of the ordinary than
from actions that are much like those of most other people)
- Theory of casual attributions (Kelley, 1972)
o How we answer the question “why?”
o People attribute the cause of others’ behaviour to internal (caused by
person’s trait) or external (caused by situation) factors
o 3 major types of information to answer “why?”
 Consensus
 The extent to which other people react to a given
stimulus/event in the same manner as the person we are
considering
 The higher the proportion of people who react in the same
way, the higher the consensus
 Consistency
 The extent to which the person in question reacts to the
stimulus/event in the same way on other occasions (across
time)
 Distinctiveness
 The extent to which this person reacts in the same manner to
other, different stimuli/events
- Action identification paradigm
o Basic aspect of attribution
o Level of interpretation used on the action
 Low-level: focuses on action itself and involves little planning or long-
ranged goals to the person involved
 High-level: attributes such plans, intentions and goals to the person
- Attribution error
o Correspondence bias/fundamental attribution error
 Overestimating the role of dispositional causes
 Tendency to explain others’ action as stemming from (corresponding
to) dispositions even in the presence of clear situational causes
o Cultural factors in the fundamental attribution error
 More common/stronger in individualist cultures (Western Europe,
America, Canada)
o Actor-observer effect
 Tendency to attribute own behaviour mainly to external (situational)
causes but the behaviour of others mainly to internal (dispositional)
causes
 “I was pushed, you fell”
o Self-serving bias
  Tendency to attribute positive outcomes to internal causes (one’s
own traits/characteristics) but negative outcomes/events to external
causes (chance, task difficulty)
 “I’m good, you’re lucky”
- Attribution & depression
o Self-defeating patterns of attributions
 Attribute negative outcomes to lasting, internal causes such as their
own traits or lack of ability, but attribute positive outcomes to
temporary, external causes such as good luck or special favours from
others