Social Cognition: Thinking About The Social World
Social Cognition: Ways in which we interpret, analyze, remember and use information about the social world, in other words how we think about other people. They are definite limits on our capacity to think about other people. For this reason we often adopt shortcuts designed to save mental effort and to preserve our precious cognitive capacity Jonas et al (2001). While these shortcuts succeed in reducing such effort, they do so at a cost, sometimes they lead us into serious errors in our thinking about others. The link between cognition and affect ( our current feelings and moods) works both ways; our thinking can affect our emotions and feelings and our feelings in turn can shape our thoughts.
Schemas: Mental Frameworks for Organizing and Using Social Information
Schemas: mental structures that help us to organize social information, and that guide the processing of it. Schemas generally center around a particular subject or theme. Once schemas are formed, they exert powerful effects on several aspects of social cognition and therefore on our social behaviour.
The Impact of Schemas on Social Cognition
Attention, Encoding, Retrieval
Schemas influence social cognition by exerting strong effects on three basic processes; attention, encoding and retrieval. Attention refers to what information we notice, encoding refers to the processes through which information we notice gets stored in memory. Retrieval refers to the processes through which we recover information from memory in order to use it in some manner e.g. in making judgements about other people schemas have been found to influence all of the basic aspects of social cognition. (Wyer & Srull 1994).
With respect to attention, schemas often act as a kind of filter; information consistent with them is more likely to be noticed and to enter our consciousness. Information that does not fit with out schemas is often ignored. Fiske (1993).
Encoding: what information is entered into memory.
It is a basic fact that information that becomes the center of our attention is much more likely to be stored in long-term memory. Information that is consistent with out schema is encoded. However information that is sharply inconsistent with our schema may sometimes be encoded into a separate memory location marked with a unique ‘tag’. After all it is so unexpected that it literally seizes our attention and almost forces us to place it in long-term memory. Stronger & mc Millan (1992)
Retrieval from memory: research suggest that people tend to report remembering and using information that is consistent with schemas to a greater extent but, in-fact information inconsistent with schemas may be strongly present in memory too. Schemas have some negative sides as well. By influencing what we notice entering into memory and later remembering, schemas can produce distortions in our understanding of the social world. For example schemas play an important role in prejudice, forming one basic component of stereotypes about specific social groups. Once they are formed schemas are often very resistant to change, they show a strong perseverance effect, remaining unchanged even in the face of contradictory information (e.g. Kunda & Oleson 1995).
Schemas can sometimes be self-fulfilling; they influence the social world in ways that make it consistent with the schema.
Evidence for the Self-Confirming Nature of Schemas
When-and-Why-beliefs Shape Reality
Sometimes schemas produce self-fulfilling prophecy- predictions that, in a sense, make themselves come true. A classic example for such effects was provided by Robert Rosenthal & Lenore Jacobson (1968) during the turbulent 1960s. During that period there was growing concern over the possibilities that teachers’ beliefs about minority students – their schema for such youngsters- were causing them to treat such children differently than majority group students and that as a result the minority group students were falling further and further behind. No the teachers weren’t overtly prejudiced; rather, their behaviour was shaped by their expectations and beliefs – their schemas for different racial and ethnic groups.
To gather evidence on the possible occurrence of such effects Rosenthal and Jacobson conducted an ingenious study. They went to an elementary school in San Francisco and administered an IQ tests to all students. They then told the teachers that some of the students had scored very high and were about to bloom academically. In-fact this was not true. The researchers chose the names of those students randomly. But Rosenthal and Jacobson predicted that this information might change teachers expectations and schemas about these children, and hence their behaviour towards them. Teachers were not given such information about other students who constituted the control group.
To find out whether this was true Rosenthal and Jacobson returned eight months later and tested both groups of children once again. Results were clear and dramatic. Those who had been described as ‘bloomers’ to their teachers showed significantly larger gains on the IQ test than those in the control group. In short teachers beliefs about the students had operated in a self-fulfilling manner, the students that teachers believed would bloom academically actually did.
How did such effects occur? In part through impact of schemas on the teachers’ behaviour. Further research Rosenthal (1994) indicated that teachers gave bloomers more attention, more challenging tasks, more and better feedback and more opportunities to respond in class. The teachers acted in ways that benefited the students they expected to bloom as a result, these youngsters really did.
Heuristics and Automatic Processing
How we Reduce our Effort in Social Cognition
In life we become overwhelmed with information and experience information overload, instances in which our ability to process information is exceeded. Because of this we adopt various strategies designed to stretch our cognitive resources – to let us do more with less effort that would otherwise be the case. To be successful such strategies must meet two requirements;
1. They must provide a quick a simple way of dealing with large amounts of social information.
2. They must work; they must be reasonably accurate much of the time.
One of the most useful mental shortcut is heuristics – simple rules for making complex decisions or drawing inferences in a rapid and seemingly effortless manner.
Representative Heuristic: Judging By Resemblance
Representative Heuristics is a strategy for making judgments based on the extent to which current stimuli or events resemble other stimuli or categories. Are such judgments accurate? Often they are because belonging to one group does affect the behaviour and style of persons in them but sometimes judgments based on representativeness are wrong mainly because decisions made on the basis of this rule tend to ignore base rates – the frequency with which given events or patterns occur in the total population. (Tversky & Kahneman 1973)
Availability: ‘If I can think it, it must be important’
Which are more common: words that start with ‘k’ (e.g. king) or words with ‘k’ as the third letter (e.g. awkward)?
In English there are more than twice as many words with ‘k’ in the third position. When asked this question most people guess incorrectly why, in part because of the availability heuristic suggest it the easier it is to bring to mind, the greater its impact on subsequent judgments or decisions .
This heuristic too makes good sense after all the fact that we can bring some information to mind quite easily suggest that it must be important and should influence as judgments and decisions but relying on availability in making social judgments can also lead to errors .For instance, it can lead us to overestimate the likelihood of events that are dramatic but rare because they are easy to mind
-Consistent in this principle and people fear traveling in airplanes than in cars,
Even though the chance of dying in a car accident is hundred times higher this difference may stem from the fact that airplanes crashes are much more dramatic and receive much attention from the media than do car accidents .As a result ,airplane crashes are brought to mind more easily and so have stronger impact on individual judgments and thoughts
Priming: some effects of increased availability
Priming is increased availability of information in memory or consciousness, resulting from exposure to specific stimuli or events an example of priming .During the 1st year of medical school
Many students experience the ‘medical student syndrome’ they begin to suspect that they have many serious illnesses. An ordinary headache may lead them to wonder if they have a brain tumor, while a mild sore throat may lead to anxiety over the possibility of some rare but fatal type of infection. What causes this? Social pdychologists have said the students are exposed to to descriptions of diseases day after day in their classes and assigned readings this in turn leads them to imagine the worst when confronted with mild symptoms.
Priming also occurs in many other contexts:
· Out magnified fears after watching a horror movie.
· Increased romantic feelings after watching love scenes
Thus they appear to be an important aspect of social thought. ( e.g. Higgins and King 1981)
Automatic Processing In Social Thought
How We Manage To Do Two Things At Once.
Another means of dealing with the fact that the social world is complex yet our information processing capacity is limited is to many activities- including some aspects of social thought and social behaviour on automatic. Automatic processing occurs when after extensive with a task or type of information we reach the stage where we can perform the task or process the information in a seemingly effortless, automatic and non-conscious manner. The shift from controlled processing to ( which is effortful and conscious) to automatic processing is something we want to happen.
Potential Sources of error in Social cognition.
Why Total Rationality Is Rarer Than You Think
1. Negative Bias: The tendency to pay extra attention to negative information
Negativity bias refers to the fact that we show greater sensitivity to negative information than to positive information. From the evolutionary perspective, it makes sense. Negative information reflects features of the external world that may be threatening to our safety and well-being. For this reason it is especially important that we be sensitive to such stimuli and thus able to respond to them quickly.
N.B Read on: Social cognitive and neuroscience: The neural basis of the negative bias.
2. The Optimistic Bias: Our tendency to see the world through rose colored glasses
Optimistic bias is a predisposition to expect things to turn out well overall. People believe that they are more likely than others to experience positive events and less likely to experience negative events (e.g. Shepperd et al 1996). This tendency is seen in many contexts; most people believe they are more likely than others to get a good job, have a happy marriage and live to ripe old age, but less likely to experience negative outcomes such as being fired, getting seriously ill or being divorced (e.g. Schwarzer 1994)
Another illustration is that of the planning fallacy our tendency to believe that we can get more done in a given period of time than we actually can. Because of this aspect of the optimistic bias, governments frequently announce overly optimistic schedules for public works (e.g. new roads, new airports, new bridges and individuals adopt unrealistically optimistic schedules for their own work.
Why does this happen? According to Buehler Griffin and Ross (1994) Social Psychologists who have studied this tendency in detail, several factors play a role.
i) When Individuals make predictions about how long it will take them to complete a given task, they enter a planning or narrative mode of thought in which they focus primarily on the future and how they will perform the task. This in turn prevents them from looking backwards in time and remembering how long it took them to complete similar tasks. One important aspect that might help them avoid them being overly optimistic is removed.
ii) Another factor is motivation to complete a task. When predicting what will happen individuals often guess that what will happen is what they want to happen (e.g. Johnson and Sherman 1990)
Bracing for loss: An exception to the optimistic rule
Although optimism seems to be the general rule to social thought, there is an important exception to this pattern. When individuals expect to receive feedback or important information that may be negative in nature and that has important consequences for them, they seem to brace for loss (or for the worst) and show a reversal of the usual optimistic pattern. In fact they tend to be pessimistic, showing an enhanced tendency to anticipate negative outcomes (e.g. Taylor and Shepperd 1998) why does this occur? Research by Shepperd and his colleagues in 2000 suggests that it is in fact due to the desire to be ready – braced – for the worst.
3. The Potential Cost Of Thinking Too Much
When individuals think too deeply about some topic they may become confused about the factors that actually play a role in their behaviour, with the result that they make less accurate judgments or decisions.