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Introduction to Social Cognition
 We are always trying to make sense of our social world
 Social Cognition is:
 How people think about themselves
and the social world
 How people select, interpret,
remember, and use social
information to make judgments
and decisions
How Do We Make Sense of the
World?
 When we try to make sense of our social world, are we
rational?
 One view is that we are completely rational; we do our
best to be right and hold correct opinions or beliefs
 Most of us tend to consider ourselves as being highly
rational
 Another view (supported by the research) is that we
take shortcuts whenever we can
How do we make sense of the
world?
 Bentham (18th century) thought we were purely
rational
 He thought people consider all of the options, then
make the choice that will result in the most happiness
(felicific calculus)
 Kelly (1960s) also thought we are purely rational
 He believed that people act as naïve scientists:
essentially gathering data before we come to a decision
such as whether others act in a certain way
 However, accurate data are not always available, and
we don’t usually have the time to weigh all possible
evidence before making decisions
How do we make sense of the
world?
 Fiske and Taylor (1991) realized that we are actually not
so rational!
 Cognitive misers: people are always trying to conserve
our cognitive energy by ignoring some information,
overusing other information, and being willing to accept
a less than perfect alternative that is good enough
 This strategy allows us to make decisions efficiently, but
it can also lead to serious errors and biases, especially
when we select an inappropriate shortcut or ignore
important information when we’re in a rush
Effects of Context on Social
Judgment
 Because we are cognitive misers, we use the social
situation as shortcuts to making decisions
 Thus, how we think about people and things depends on
the social context (i.e., the way things are presented and
described)
 4 aspects of the social context affect our judgment:
 Comparison of alternatives (reference points and
contrast effects)
 The thoughts brought to mind by a situation (priming
and construct accessibility)
 How the decision is framed or posed
 The way information is presented (order and amount of
information)
Effects of Context on Social Judgment:
Reference Points and Contrast Effects
 Contrast effect = when an object is
contrasted with something similar but not
as good, that particular object is judged to
be better than would normally be the case
 For example, when a realtor takes you to an over-
priced crappy apartment, the next apartment
will look better to you than it would have had
you not seen the crappy apartment first
 Kenrick & Gutierres (1980):
 When men watched Charlie’s Angels before
going out on a blind date, they rated their dates
as less attractive than when they watched the
show after going on the date!
Effects of Context on Social Judgment:
Reference Points and Contrast Effects
 Can judgments we make about ourselves be influenced by
contrast effects? Yes!
 High school valedictorians experience a dip in self-esteem
after starting at an elite college where everyone was the
valedictorian – now they are average (Marsh et al., 2000)
 People rate themselves as less attractive
after seeing images of attractive people
(Thornton & Maurice, 1997)
Effects of Context on Social Judgment:
Priming and Construct Accessibility
 Our interpretation can depend on what happens to be
prominent in the situation
 What is prominent can be induced through priming:
exposing someone to a concept or an idea before the
situation that you are interested in
 Priming = a procedure based on the notion that ideas that
have been recently encountered or frequently activated are
more likely to come to mind and thus will be used in
interpreting social events
 See the next slide for an example of how this works!
Effects of Context on Social Judgment:
Priming and Construct Accessibility
 Priming plays a role in the formation of impressions about
other people
 Participants were told they were in two separate studies, and
in the first one, they had to remember either positive (e.g.,
adventurous, self-confident) or negative trait words (e.g.,
reckless, conceited) – in reality, this was to prime them to
think about these traits!
 In the “second study,” participants read an ambiguous
paragraph about Donald
 Then participants described Donald in their own words and
rated how desirable they considered him to be
 Results: how they were primed influenced their impressions
of Donald – those who had memorized positive words
described him more positively, and those who had
memorized negative words described him negatively
(Higgins, Rholes, & Jones, 1977)
Effects of Context on Social Judgment:
Priming and Construct Accessibility
 Priming also affects our own behavior
 Participants had to unscramble jumbled up words that were
associated with rudeness or were neutral words (thus, they
were primed to think of rudeness or not)
 Then, they were told to get the experimenter in the next
room when they finished
 They found the experimenter deeply engaged in a
conversation
 Those participants who were primed with words associated
with rudeness were far more likely to interrupt the
experimenter’s conversation!
(Bargh et al., 1996)
Effects of Context on Social Judgment:
Framing of the Decision
 Framing = whether a problem or decision is presented (framed) in
such a way that it appears to represent the potential for a loss or for a
gain
 People dislike losses and seek to avoid them (e.g., it’s more painful to
give up $20 than it is pleasurable to gain $20)
 Gonzales et al. (1988)
 Energy experts gave homeowners a detailed, individualized description
of how much money they could save (condition 1) or how much money
they had lost (condition 2) on their heating bill due to poor insulation
 Homeowners in the loss condition were twice as
likely to invest the money to insulate their homes as
those in the save condition
Effects of Context on Social Judgment:
Presentation of Information
 The order of information matters!
 Primacy effect = the things we learn first about a person have
a decisive impact on our judgment of that person

This is why first impressions matter a great deal
 Asch (1946) had participants read one of the following two
sentences:



Steve is intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, and
envious
Steve is envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious, and
intelligent
They rated Steve more positively when they read the first sentence,
even though the sentences contain the same information!
 2 explanations for the primacy effect:
 Attention decrement = items presented later in the list receive less
attention as we tire and our minds wander
 Interpretive set = first items create an initial impression that is then
used to interpret subsequent information
Effects of Context on Social Judgment:
Presentation of Information
 The amount of information given also matters
 Dilution effect = the tendency for neutral and irrelevant
information to weaken a judgment or impression
 Zukier (1982) had participants read one of these sentences:



On average, Tim spends about 31 hours studying per week
Tom spends about 31 hours studying outside of class in an average
week. Tom has one brother and two sisters. He visits his
grandparents about once every 3 months. He once went on a blind
date and shoots pool about once every 2 months.
Those who read the first sentence thought Tim was smarter!
 Advertisers know that including a weak/irrelevant claim can
reduce the impact of a strong sales appeal

Disliked politicians can reduce the impact of their negative image by
including irrelevant information in campaign ads
Judgmental Heuristics
 Judgmental heuristics = mental shortcuts; they are simple, often
only approximate, rules or strategies for solving a problem
(remember: we are cognitive misers)
 Heuristics require little thought; they can be contrasted with
more systematic thinking in which we look at a problem from a
number of angles, evaluate as much information as possible, and
work out the implications of various solutions
 Examples:
 If a particular food is found in a health food store, it must be good
for you
 If a person is from a rural town in Arkansas, he or she must be
intellectually backward
 Three most common judgmental heuristics:
 Representative heuristic
 Availability heuristic
 Attitude heuristic
Judgmental Heuristics: The
Representative Heuristic
 When we use the representative heuristic, we focus on the
similarity of one object to another to infer that the first
object acts like the second one (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973)
 Example:
 We’d assume Quaker’s 100% Natural Granola is more
nutritious than Lucky Charms because we use the package as
a representative heuristic
 Quaker’s 100% Natural Granola box looks natural, which we
equate with good and wholesome, so the cereal must be
nutritious
 Lucky Charms box looks childish and, since kids like junk
food, the cereal must be junk
Judgmental Heuristics: The
Representative Heuristic
VS.
Judgmental Heuristics: The
Representative Heuristic
If you look closely at the article above, you can see that it is the Lucky Charms
that actually have less fat and sugar as well as fewer calories and carbohydrates!
Granola has more fiber and protein, but overall, Lucky Charms is actually
healthier! This has been demonstrated in studies of rats – they do better on
Lucky Charms!
Judgmental Heuristics: The Availability
Heuristic
 Availability heuristic = judgments based on how easy it
is for us to bring specific examples to mind
 If you ask people to estimate the number of violent
crimes committed each year in the US, people who
watch prime-time TV news believe violent crimes are
far more common than people who don’t watch primetime TV news
 It’s easier to bring to mind examples of deaths from
sharks and fires because these events are more likely to
be covered in a vivid manner on the news and thus are
more available in people’s memories (Plous, 1993)
 So people think these events are more common than
they actually are!
Judgmental Heuristics: The Attitude
Heuristic
 Attitude = an enduring evaluation of people, objects, and ideas
that contains both an:
 Evaluative/emotional component
 Cognitive component
 Attitudes can be positive, negative, or mixed evaluations
expressed at some level of intensity; Like, love, dislike, hate,
admire, and detest are some words people use to describe their
attitudes
 Attitude heuristic = making decisions based on a preexisting
attitude about a certain issue or situation
 Pratkanis (1988) found that if you liked President Reagan, you
were more likely to believe that he had an A average in college
than if you disliked him, in which case you were more likely to
believe he had a C average in college
 (He really had a C average, but study participants did not know
that)
Judgmental Heuristics: The Attitude
Heuristic
 Halo effect = a general bias in which a favorable or
unfavorable general impression of a person affects our
inferences and future expectations about that person
 Example: once people found out that a woman ate healthy
food, they rated her as more feminine, more attractive, and
more likable than junk food eaters (Stein et al., 1995)
 We also tend to think that more attractive women are also
smart and have a lot of other positive qualities
 False-consensus effect = a tendency to overestimate the
percentage of people who agree with us on any issue
 If I believe something, I leap to the conclusion that other
people feel the same way
 Example: college students who agreed to wear an “Eat at Joe’s”
sign around campus thought that others would too
Judgmental Heuristics: When Do We
Use Them?
 We don’t always rely on heuristics to guide our
decisions
 Heuristics are most likely to be used when:
 We don’t have time to think carefully about an issue
 We are too overloaded with information to process the
information fully
 The issues at stake are not very important (we don’t care
to spend much time thinking about it)
 We have little solid knowledge or information to use in
making a decision
Categorization and Social Stereotypes
 We categorize persons and events all the time; the consequences of how we
interpret and define events can be significant
 A major consequence of categorization: it can invoke
specific data or stereotypes that then guide our
expectations
 Examples:
 Once we categorize a person as a “party girl,” we base our expectations about
future interactions on that stereotype
 If I go into a café that a friend categorized as a “bar” as opposed to a “fine dining
establishment,” I’ll think of the place in a certain way and act in a certain way
 Self-fulfilling prophecy = the process by which expectations or stereotypes lead
people to treat others in a way that makes them confirm their expectations
 If a teacher is told a student is not smart at the beginning of the school year, this
student is likely to underperform, probably in part due to the teacher’s treating
them as if they are not smart
Categorization and Social Stereotypes
 Another consequence of categorization: illusory
correlation
 Illusory correlation = we frequently perceive a relationship
between 2 entities that we think should be related, but in
fact they are not
 Example:
 People consistently overestimate the extent to which lesbians
are likely to contract the AIDS virus
 In fact, lesbians have a lower rate of HIV infection than male
homosexuals and male and female heterosexuals
 This is an example of the illusory correlation (see next slide)
Categorization and Social Stereotypes
High rates of
HIV among
male
homosexuals
Mistaken
judgment that
lesbians are
more likely to
have AIDS
Lesbians are
homosexuals
Categorization and Social Stereotypes
 In clinical judgments, categorizing an individual into a
certain diagnostic category (e.g., schizophrenic) can lead to
the perception of a relationship (even when none exists)
between the individual and behavior associated with the
diagnosis
 The illusory correlation does much to confirm our original
stereotypes
 Our stereotype leads us to see a relationship that then
seems to provide evidence that the original stereotype is
true
Categorization and Social Stereotypes
 One of the most common ways of categorizing people is to divide them
into 2 groups:
 Those in “my” group (ingroup)
 Those in the “outgroup”
 Examples:
 My school vs. yours
 Us vs. them
 My sports team vs. the opponent
 Americans vs. foreigners
 My ethnic group vs. yours
 Consequences:
 Homogeneity effect
 Ingroup favoritism
Categorization and Social Stereotypes
 Homogeneity effect = we tend to see members of outgroups as more similar to
one another than to the members of our own group (the ingroup)
 We might think they all look alike, think alike, act alike
 Example:

Women perceived more similarly between members in other sororities than within
their own (Park & Rothbart, 1982)
 Ingroup favoritism = we tend to see our own group as better on any number of
dimensions and to allocate more rewards to our own group

Example (Tajfel, 1981):



Randomly assigned students to Group X or Group Y
Subjects are strangers; they never interact with each other; and their actions are
anonymous
Results:




Subjects behave as if those who share their meaningless group label (X or Y) are their
good friends or close kin
Subjects report liking those who share their label, rating them as likely to have a more
pleasant personality and to produce better work than those in the other group
Subjects even allocate more money and rewards to those who share their label
So even when the groups are completely random, we tend to like our group better than
another group
Constructive Predictions and
Reconstructive Memory
 2 thinking processes play an important role in social cognition:
 Predicting our reactions to future events
 Remembering past events
 Both of these are subject to considerable error
 Research shows that we overestimate the emotional impact of events and the
durability of our reactions to these events
 Example:
 How good would you feel if you won the lottery, and how long would the good
feeling last?
 How bad would you feel if you got a D on your term paper and how long would
the bad feeling last?
 Winning the lottery would not make you feel as good as you’d predict or for as
long as you’d predict, and getting a D would not make you feel as bad as you’d
predict or for as long as you’d predict
Constructive Predictions and
Reconstructive Memory
 Why do we make these errors in prediction?
 We fail to recognize our powers of adjustment to happy
and sad events
 When we imagine the future, we focus on only the event
in question (e.g., winning the lottery, getting a D) to the
exclusion of all other things that will occur at the same
time to take the sting out of failure or dilute happiness
Constructive Predictions and
Reconstructive Memory
 Like imagining the future, recalling the past plays an
important role in our social interactions, and is also subject
to bias
 Remembering is a reconstructive process
 Our memories are not a literal translation of past events
 Instead, we recreate our memories from bits and pieces of
actual events filtered through and modified by our notions of
what might have been, what should have been, and what we
would have liked it to have been
 Our memories are also influenced by what people told us
about the specific events
Constructive Predictions and
Reconstructive Memory
 Suggestive questioning can influence memory and
subsequent eyewitness testimony (Loftus, 1974)
 Reconstructive memory study (Loftus, 1974)
 Subjects watched a film depicting a multiple-car accident
 After the film, subjects were either asked:


“About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each
other?” OR
“About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?”
 Subjects who were asked about smashing cars estimated that
the cars were going significantly faster
 A week later, they were also more likely to state (erroneously)
that there was broken glass at the scene
Autobiographical Memory
 It’s important to realize that we don’t remember our past as
accurately as we would like to believe; revisions and distortions
occur over time
 We have a strong tendency to organize our personal history in
terms of self-schemas (Markus, 1977)
 Self-schemas = coherent memories, feelings, and beliefs about
ourselves that hang together and form an integrated whole
 In other words, we distort our memories in such a way that they
fit the general picture we have of ourselves
 For example, if I believe I had an unhappy childhood, I will have a
harder time remembering happy events, and it will be easier to call
to mind distressing events
Autobiographical Memory
 Loftus (1993) shows how easy it is to plant false memories of childhood
in the minds of young adults merely by instructing a close relative to
talk about these events as fact
 She had an older sibling “remind” a younger sibling about a time they
got lost in a mall, and an old man helped them

Although this did not actually happen, the majority of participants would claim
to remember it happening
 False memory syndrome = a memory of a past traumatic experience
that is objectively false but that people believe occurred
 Recovered Memory Phenomenon = recollections of a past event (e.g.,
sexual abuse) that had been forgotten or repressed
 A great deal of controversy surrounds the accuracy of such memories
 Research suggests repeated experience of trauma is not typically
forgotten
 Many recovered memories are really unintentionally planted false
memories
 However, it is possible for abuse victims to put the abuse out of their
minds and have difficulty remembering it years later
Cognitive Conservatism
 People tend to be conservative: we try to preserve beliefs
that are already established in our minds
 Confirmation bias = when we initially develop an impression,
we selectively look for evidence to support our initial beliefs
 Hindsight bias (the “I-knew-it-all-along” effect) = once we
know the outcome of an event, we have a strong tendency to
believe that we could have predicted it in advance (this is why
some social psychology research seems obvious!)
 Benefit of cognitive conservatism: it allows us to perceive
the social world as coherent and stable
 Cost of cognitive conservatism: we may distort or miss
important information; we could be led to make poor
decisions; we may have a mistaken picture of reality
Cognitive Conservatism
 4 ways to avoid the negative consequences of cognitive
conservatism:
 Be wary of those who try to shape the way you view and
define a situation
 Try to use more than one way to categorize and describe
a person or event
 Try to think of persons and important events as unique
 When forming an impression, consider the possibility
that you might be mistaken
How Do Attitudes and Beliefs
Guide Behavior?
 Intuition tells us that attitudes would predict behavior
 Example: if I like vanilla ice cream, you can predict that I’d
choose it over other flavors
 However, research tells us that this is not always the case
 Example: even though 90% hotels and restaurants contacted
in the 1930s said they would not serve Chinese people
(attitude), only 1 refused service when a Chinese couple made
an appearance at their establishment (LaPiere, 1934)
 So our attitudes often are not good predictors of our actual
behavior
Biases in Social Explanation
 There are 3 general cognitive biases that affect how we
understand social situations:
 Fundamental attribution error
 Actor-observer bias
 Self-biases
Biases in Social Explanation
 Fundamental attribution error = we tend to attribute events mostly to a person’s
personality or disposition and underestimate how much the situation/environmental
factors influenced their behavior
 We lose sight of the fact that each individual plays many different social roles and that all
of our behavior can be strongly influenced by various situations
 Examples:
 If you walk into an unlocked public bathroom and find someone in there, you might
think “idiot!” rather than “maybe the lock is broken”
 Quiz show study (Ross et al., 1977)




Participants were randomly assigned to be a questioner, contestant, or spectators
The questioner wrote challenging questions; contests answered 40% correctly
Results: spectators rated the questioner as above average in general knowledge
and the contestants as below average; contestants rated themselves as inferior
Everyone fell into the trap of attributing what they saw to personal
dispositions and lost sight of the fact that the roles had been
randomly assigned
Biases in Social Explanation
 Actor-observer bias = the tendency for individuals to believe that their own
actions are caused mostly by situational factors, whereas we tend to believe that
others behave in certain ways due to their stable personality characteristics
 Examples:
 “I failed the test because of stresses in my life. However, my friend failed the test
because she’s not very bright.”
 Jones (1971):

College students are likely to explain the poor performance of others on an IQ test in terms of their
ability (dispositional)

They’ll explain their own poor performance in terms of the difficulty of the test (situational)
 Saulpier & Perlman (1981):

Prison counselors gave enduring personal characteristics as the reason the inmates were in prison
(dispositional)

Inmates cited transient situational factors as the reasons for their imprisonment (situational)
Biases in Social Explanation
 Self-biases = attitudes and biases that preserve and enhance our view of ourself
 Egocentric thought = the tendency to perceive yourself as more central to
events than you actually are
 Examples:


A teenager may dread going to school with a pimple on his forehead because “everyone will
notice;” however, such worries are often exaggerated
College students who wore attention-arousing shirts in front of a room of students thought
50% of the people in the room noticed; in reality, only 20% had noticed (Gilovich et al.,
2000)
 Self-serving bias = a tendency for individuals to attribute their success to stable,
personal qualities and attribute their failures to the situation
 Examples:


In a basketball game, if I make a difficult shot, I’ll attribute it to my great talent; if I miss the
shot, I might attribute it to how hard the shot was or that someone fouled me
Gamblers attribute their successes to great skill and their failures as a fluke
 Self-serving biases help preserve our self-concept and self-esteem
Biases in Social Explanation
 Benefits of self-biases:
 If an individual believes he is the cause of good things, he will
try harder and persist longer to achieve difficult goals
 Believing that a defeat is due to bad luck and can be overcome
by effort and ability leads to more achievement, better health,
and an improved mental outlook (Seligman, 1991)
 Costs of self-biases:
 A distorted picture of the self and the world in general
 The need to serve the self often leads directly and indirectly to
negative consequences
 However, overall, people who are more optimistic tend to
be less depressed, even though they are not always the
most realistic!