Revision
■ Define Social Psychology.
■ Why is it important to adopt a scientific approach to draw
conclusions in social psychology and not just rely on
common sense to understand the social world?
■ How do social class and group membership affect our selfidentity?
■ What are the different ways you can do research? What
are the advantages of the survey method?
■ What is meant by external validity?
■ What is meant by hypothesis?
■ Why do theories play a crucial role in social psychology?
What is the procedure involved in building a theory?
SOCIAL
COGNITION: HOW WE
THINK ABOUT THE SOCIAL WORLD
Social cognition and Information
Processing
■ What is social cognition?
¨ Social cognition refers to the different
psychological processes that influence how
people process, interpret, and respond to social
signals. These processes allow people to
understand social behavior and respond in
ways that are appropriate and beneficial.
Disorders that impact social
cognition
Autism, Bipolar disorder, Borderline
personality disorder (BPD), Dementia,
Depression, Post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD), Schizophrenia, Traumatic
brain injury.
Example of social cognition
¨ Imagine that you are getting ready to go
on an interview. Not only do you worry
about the impression and signals that you
are sending to the interviewer, but you
are also concerned with interpreting the
signals given by them.
■ Questions you might ask include:
– How will they form an impression of
you?
– What meaning do you read into the
interviewer's behavior?
Social Cognition: Key Points
■ Cognitive processes for understanding how
people construct own social world = social
cognition (Bless et al, 2004; Fisk & Taylor,
1991).
■ Applies theories and methods from cognitive
psychology e.g. memory, attention, inference
and concept formation for understanding
perceptions of others
Experience and Categorisation
■ World provides too much information
■ Parts of perception recorded from
environment - attention
■ People devise short-cut strategies to
simplify nature of the incoming
information
■ Categorisation - way of simplifying
perceptions
Categorisation
■ Grouping of objects - treated in similar way e.g.
square is a square, lecturer is a lecturer
– Promotes cognitive economy
■ Object either belongs to a category or does not
(Bruner et al, 1956)
■ But: Categories not all or none
■ Prototypical approach (Barsalou, 1991)
– Members share something in common - not
completely identical for membership
Schema
■ They help us to to organize social information
guide our actionssm process information relevant
to particular contexts.
■ Once evoked or ‘activated’ schemas tend to bias
all aspects of information processing and inference
■ Schemas can be implicitly activated and affect
judgement and behaviour very easily beyond our
conscious awareness
■ Guides how we encode (attend, interpret),
remember and respond (judge and interact)
How Schemas Work: Sagar & Schofield’s
(1980) Racial Bias Study
■ Purpose: Demonstrate that stereotypes bias
intepretation of ambiguous events
■ Participants: 40 African American (AA), 40 White (W)
■ Method: Participants presented with ambiguous
drawings (e.g. bumps, asks for cake, pokes, takes
pencil) with ‘actors’ depicted as W or AA, participants
rated behaviour as mean, threatening, playful, friendly
■ Results: Both AA and W participants rated behaviour
as more threatening when the actor was AA
■ Conclusion: Schemas influence the interpretation of
ambiguous events
Remembering
■ Schemas represented in memory as:
– lists of linked features - associative memory
model
■ doctor®caring
– prototype or ideal instances model
– central examples clustered around
prototype
– peripheral examples of the prototype
further away in mental space
The Cognitive Miser
■ Social perception as a problem solving task
■ Cognitive ‘laziness’ - cognitive miser (Fisk & Taylor, 1991)
■ Rely on heuristics for decision making and interpersonal
perception
■ Process salient information - that which stands out
Heuristics
■ Availability of information - judging frequency of
event based on number of instances brought to
‘mind’ of that event
■ Anchoring and adjustment - using information
about a similar event to infer causes
■ Representativeness - whether person is an
example of a particular stored schema
(Stereotype).
Stereotypes
■ “.....widely shared assumptions of the personalities,
attitudes and behaviour of people based on group
membership....” (Hogg & Vaughan, 1995, p. 56).
■ “.....inclination to place a person in categories
according to some..... characteristics.... and then to
attribute... qualities believed to be typical to
members of that category...” (Tagiuri, 1969)
Stereotypes
■ Overall impressions (attitudes) of other people,
sets of information, characteristics, first
impressions, and their behaviour tends to be
dominated by stereotypes
■ When people rely on stereotypes, they may treat
individuals from the stereotyped group unfairly.
This can manifest as discrimination, stigmatization,
and inequality in various forms, such as unequal
job opportunities, biased evaluations, or prejudiced
social interactions.
■ Recognizing and challenging stereotypes is
essential for promoting fairness, equity, and
inclusivity in society.
Stereotyping Process
■ Assign individual to a group - categorise
– Based on accessible characteristic
e.g. gender, race, age.
■ Activate belief that all members of this
group behave in the same way
■ Infer that individual must possess
stereotypical characteristics
■ Respond to individual on this basis
Stereotyping Process
■ Automaticity in stereotyping (Macrae &
Bodenhausen, 2000)
– fast acting, difficult to change, no intentional control
of operations, no conscious awareness
– Encountering stimulus in environment (or even
internally generated) categories are activated
automatically (Lepore & Brown, 1997; Bargh, 1999;
Banaji & Greenwald, 1995)
– Heightened accessibility of material following prime
e.g. “hospital” primes “nurse”, “caring” etc.
Attribution
Attribution is the process of assigning causes for
our own behaviour to that of others
Hogg & Vaughan (2005)
Attribution examples
■ Interpersonal Attribution: When telling
a story to a group of friends or
acquaintances, you are likely to tell the
story in a way that places you in the best
possible light.
■ Scenario: Sarah and Alex have been
close friends for several years. Recently,
they had a disagreement over a weekend
trip they had planned together.
Kelley’s (1967, 1973)
Attributional Bias
■ Built on Heider’s (1958) ideas about
attributions of cause of others behaviour
■ Key point: Attribution of cause to the person
or environment in situations is a major
problem
■ Heider (1958) suggested that if behaviour
seems ’appropriate’ in a given situation, then
people tend to make a situational attribution
■ Kelley (1967) outlined WHEN a situational or
dispositional attribution is made and WHY
Kelley’s (1967, 1973)
Attributional Bias
■ Three key questions in a given situation:
– Does the person regularly behave this way in this
situation? (consistency)
– Do other people regularly behave this way in this
situation? (consensus)
– Does this person behave this way in other situations?
(distinctiveness)
Kelley’s (1967, 1973)
Attributional Bias
Attributional problem: You are in a long queue in a shop with your friend.
He/she is getting increasingly irritated with how long it’s taking. Does your
friend’s frustration tell us something about their personality?
Key
questions
Q1: Does your
Q2: Do other
friend usually get Yes people generally
Consistency?
frustrated
when
getConsensus?
frustrated
standing in long
when standing in
queues?
long queues?
No
Attribution
No basis for
attributing
Attribution
frustration
to
either situation or
personality. May
be a one-off.
Yes
Situational
attribution:
Attribution
People
DO tend
to get frustrated
in long queues
No
Q3: Does your friend
generally get frustrated in
other
situations involving
Distinctiveness?
long waits?
Yes
Personality attribution,
general: Your friend
Attribution
does the
tendency to
get frustrated in these
sorts of situations.
(Stay out of his/her
way!)
No
Personality
attribution,
Attribution
particular:
Your
friend tends to get
frustrated in queues.
(Don’t go shopping
with him/her on
busy days!)
Predictive Attribution
■ We also tend to attribute things in ways
that allow us to make future predictions.
■ Eg. If your car was vandalized, you might
attribute the crime to the fact that you
parked in a particular parking garage. As
a result, you may avoid that parking
garage in the future.
■ Scenario: Mark is a manager at a
software development company, and he's
evaluating the performance of his team
members for the upcoming project. He
has two employees, Sarah and John, with
different past performance records.
Self-Serving Bias
■ Aim to protect our ‘self-esteem’
■ Tendency to ‘serve ourselves’
■ Take credit for success (attribute internally)
■ But not for failure (attribute externally)
■ Scenario: Imagine a student, Alex, who has
just received their grades for a series of
exams in school. Positive/negative outcome.
Self-Serving Bias
■ For instance, student will take credit for
doing well in an exam
■ Student will blame test difficulty or lecturer’s
tough marking policy for failure
■ When something happens, we are more
likely to blame external forces than our
personal characteristics.
■ Examples?
Actor-Observer Effect
Steve
Bob
(Actor)
Joe
(Observer)
Actor-Observer Effect
Steve
Bob
(Actor)
Bob hits Steve. Why?
Joe
(Observer)
Actor-Observer Effect
■ What is salient in the perceptual field?
■ i.e. what INFORMATION is available for
the observer and the actor?
■ For OBSERVER: The actor
■ For ACTOR: Everything but the actor
(i.e., the situational factors)
Actor-Observer Effect
■ The attributions of young drivers for their own
and their friends' risky driving
■ Dispositional attributions e.g., "Showing off,
acting cool" used more for friends than self
■ Situational attributions e.g., "In a hurry, late"
used more for self than friends
■ Participants also rated their friends as taking
more risks than themselves
■ Examples?
■ Scenario: Jane and Mark are co-workers at a
marketing agency. They are both working on a
project that is behind schedule and facing several
challenges.
■ Actor-Observer Effect in This Case Study:
■ Mark's Perspective (The Actor):
– Mark believes that the project's delays are
primarily due to external factors. He thinks, "I've
been working diligently on this project, but the
delays are beyond my control. The client kept
changing their requirements, and there were
technical issues that caused setbacks."
– Mark attributes his own actions to situational
factors, such as the client's demands and
technical difficulties. He sees himself as doing
the best he can under challenging
circumstances.
■ Jane's Perspective (The Observer):
– Jane, who is also part of the project
team, views the situation differently.
She perceives Mark's contributions as
lacking effort and commitment. She
thinks, "Mark doesn't seem to be
putting in enough effort. He's not as
dedicated to the project as he should
be."
– Jane is making an observer's
attribution about Mark's behavior. She
attributes his actions to dispositional
factors, implying that Mark's lack of
dedication is a personal trait.
Powerful tendency to be overly optimistic
■
■
■
■
■
■
Optimism Bias
Positive Illusions
Impact on Decision-Making
Psychological Benefits
Balancing Realism
Case study: Sarah, a diligent college student in
her second year of a demanding engineering
program. Sarah has always been optimistic about
her academic performance and her ability to
balance her coursework, extracurricular activities,
and social life.
Q. Why do people tend to expect that they are more
likely than others to experience positive outcomes
and less likely to experience negative outcomes.
Affect and Cognition: How feelings
shape thoughts and thoughts shape
feelings
■ Interconnectedness of Affect and Cognition
■ Feelings Influence Thoughts
■ Thoughts Influence Feelings
■ Emotional Intelligence
■ Applications
■ Case: Sarah's Exam Anxiety
Case Study: Sarah's Exam Anxiety
■ Introduction:
■ Sarah is a college student preparing for a
crucial final exam. She has always been
an excellent student and takes her
academics seriously. However, as the
exam date approaches, she begins to
experience intense anxiety.
Q. What are the implications of
mood on perception? Are you
more likely to be rated positively
on an assignment if your teacher
is in a good mood?
Q. Describe an instance where
your thoughts were shaped by
your feelings and your feelings
were shaped by your thoughts.