Social Cognition
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Social Cognition
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Social Cognition
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Social Cognition
Questions
1.
Explain the theory of naïve psychology?
2.
Define Dispositional attributions.
3.
OUTLINE the Correspondent inference theory.
4.
Describe the Covariation Model.
5.
What is the actor-observer effect?
6.
Name the different reasons for Self-serving bias.
7.
Expand on ‘Impression Formation’.
8.
What are Schema and heuristics?
9.
OUTLINE social representations.
10. What is Self-regulation?
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Social Cognition
Answers
1. Theory of naïve psychology:
This target article argues that the Turing test implicitly rests on a "naive psychology," a naturally evolved psychological
faculty which is used to predict and understand the behaviour of others in complex societies. This natural faculty is an
important and implicit bias in the observer's tendency to ascribe mentality to the system in the test. The paper analyses the
effects of this naive psychology on the Turing test, both from the side of the system and the side of the observer, and then
proposes and justifies an inverted version of the test which allows the processes of ascription to be analysed more directly
than in the standard version.
Source: http://www.cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/ptopic?topic=turing-test
2. Dispositional attributions: these are made when an individual decides that another person’s behaviour is entirely up to their
personality.
3. Correspondent inference theory when we are making attributions about other people, we compare their actions with
alternative actions, evaluating the choices they have made. It is easier for us to make internal attributions when there fewer
non-common effects between these choices. That is, when both choices have a lot in common and there are thus fewer
things which differentiate them. When the behavior is not what we would have forecast, we assume that it is due to their
internal preferences or character traits.
Information about five factors is sought to make these inferences:
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Whether the behavior being considered is voluntary and freely chosen.
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What is unexpected about the behavior (‘non-common effects’).
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Whether the behavior is socially desirable.
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Whether the behavior impacts the person doing the inferring (‘hedonic relevance’).
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Whether the behavior is of personal interest to the person doing the inferring (‘personalism’).
Source: http://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/correspondent_inference.htm
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Social Cognition
4. When explaining other people’s behaviors, we look for similarities (covariation) across a range of situations to help us narrow
down specific attributions. There are three particular types of information we look for to help us decide, each of which can be
high or low:

Consensus: how similarly other people act, given the same stimulus, as the person in question.

Distinctiveness: how similarly the person acts in different situations, towards other stimuli.

Consistency: how often the same stimulus and response in the same situation are perceived.
People tend to make internal attributions when consensus and distinctiveness are low but consistency are high. They will
make external attributions when consensus and distinctiveness are both high and consistency is still high. When consistency
is low, they will make situational attributions. People are often less sensitive to consensus information.
Source: http://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/covariation_model.htm
5. The actor-observer effect is simply the tendency to attribute personal behavior to situational causes, but the behaviour of
other people is attributed to dispositional causes.
6. The different factors for Self-serving Bias are:

Intentions

Motivation
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Depression
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Social Cognition
7. Impression Formation: An important dimension of forming an impression of someone is what that person looks like. If he or
she dresses sloppily, is clumsy, and is physically unattractive, we are inclined to dislike him or her, or in general think
negatively about him or her. However, to many people, an attractive person can do no wrong. This is due partly to the halo
effect.
Karen Dion (1972) reported that physical attractiveness does indeed influence other people's impressions. She had
women read reports of severe classroom disruptions by elementary schoolchildren. In some cases the report was
accompanied by a photograph of a very attractive child, while in other cases the photo was of an unattractive boy or girl. The
subjects tended to blame the disruptive behavior on the ugly children, saying that it was easy to see that they were "brats."
On the other hand, when the photo was of a beautiful child, the women tended to excuse him or her.
Do adults make judgments on the basis of attractiveness? They certainly do, according to a study by Dion and her
colleagues, Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Walster (1972). They showed college students photographs of attractive students,
average students, and unattractive students, and asked them to rate the people in the photos on 27 personality traits. As
expected, the attractive people received the most positive ratings.
Cunningham (1986) had male college students rate photographs of beauty contest finalists and ordinary-looking college
women, and then analyzed the differences in facial features between the two groups. One way that they differed was that
the beauty contest women tended to have "widely spaced eyes, small noses, small chins, wide pupils, high eyebrows, and a
big smile." These features were associated with positive personality ratings, such as intelligent, sociable, and assertive. Thus,
overall, research supports the claim that beautiful people are perceived as having excellent personalities.
Source: http://www.dushkin.com/connectext/psy/ch15/attract.mhtml
8. Schemas: can be referred to storage of information about past experiences which are used to evaluate up coming experiences.
With this it will allow a individual to formulate decisions. Although in Piagetian theory it is an organised structure of knowledge or
abilities which will modify dependant on age or experience.
Heuristic pertains to the process of gaining knowledge or some desired result by intelligent guesswork rather than by following
some pre-established formula.
The term seems to have two usages:
1) Describing an approach to learning by trying without necessarily having an organized hypothesis or way of proving that the
results proved or disproved the hypothesis. That is, "seat-of-the-pants" or "trial-by-error" learning.
2) Pertaining to the use of the general knowledge gained by experience, sometimes expressed as "using a rule-of-thumb."
(However, heuristic knowledge can be applied to complex as well as simple everyday problems. Human chess players use a
heuristic approach.)
Source: http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci212246_top1,00.htm
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9.
Social psychology postulates that:
1. normal individuals react to phenomenon like scientists do
2. Understanding consists in information processing
yet we are often unaware of things before our eyes. Some of our perceptions are illusions. We also make similar conclusions of
reality based on our social information. Our reality is based on social representations. Perceiving representations is as important as
perceiving objects. All objects have included a social representation.
The last thing viewed is only part of chain of perceptions, opinions, and notions.
Social representations conventionalize objects, persons, and events we encounter. Even new things are categorized into some
representation. Each experience is added to a reality predetermined by conventions. Lewin stated that "Reality for the individual is ,
to a high degree, determined by what is socially accepted as reality".
Representations are also prescriptive based on the collectivity of past social conventions. Changing the definition of words can
change our collective thoughts. Asch said that social interactions are happenings... psycholically represented in each of the
participants". Individuals and groups create representations in the course of communication and co-operation. Representations are
born, change, and change other representations.
Social representations should be seen as a specific way of understanding and communicating what we know already. They are
connectors between image and meaning. In society there is a continual need to reconstitute "common sense" that makes sense of
images and meaning.
"The use of a language of images and of words that have become common property through the diffusion of reported ideas enlivens
and fertilizes those aspects of society and nature with which we are here concerned".
Social representations are the "environment" in relation to the individual or group, and are specific to our society.
The actuality of something absent, the "not quite rightness" of an object, are what characterize unfamiliarity. Representations help
make the unfamiliar familiar. Social thinking owes more to convention and memory than to reason. Our tendency is to confirm what
is familiar. One anchors the unfamiliar in the current conventions of reality. Objects are threatening until named.
Source: http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/soc_psych/moscovici_soc_rep.html
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10. Self-regulation
A review of self-regulation examined basic volitional factors of:
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goal setting
self-monitoring
activation
use of goals
discrepancy detection
implementation
self-evaluation
self-cons equation
self-efficacy
meta-skills
boundary conditions
And self-regulation failure that revealed self-monitoring as fundamental to self-regulation. There is no consensus in the
literature concerning definitions, methods and procedures of self-monitoring that may cause validity and reliability issues in
research. It was indicated that future research should explore the various phenomenological aspects of psychosomatic
function if methodological approaches to self-monitoring are to be more clearly defined.
Source: http://www.athleticinsight.com/Vol4Iss1/SelfRegulation.htm
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