Chapter 2
Social Cognition: Thinking about
the Social World
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Social Cognition
• Schemas
• Heuristics and Automatic Processing
• Potential Sources of Error in Social
Cognition
• Affect and Cognition
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Social Cognition
• Social Cognition—how people
interpret, analyze, remember, and use
information about the social world
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Schemas
• Schemas—mental frameworks centering
around a specific theme that help organize
social information
– Schemas influence three basic processes:
• Attention (They affect what is noticed.)
• Encoding (They affect what is stored in memory.)
• Retrieval (They affect what is recovered from memory.)
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Schemas
– Schemas have stronger effects on social
cognition when they are strong and cognitive
load is high.
– Schemas can result in distortions in how the
social world is understood.
– Schemas are resistant to change.
• Perseverance Effect—the tendency for beliefs and
schemas to remain unchanged even in the face of
contradictory information
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Schemas
– Schemas can be self-fulfilling.
• Self-fulfilling Prophecy—predictions that, in a
sense, make themselves come true.
– Therefore, schemas help make sense of the
social world, but they can result in inaccurate
processing of information.
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Schemas
• What are your thoughts?
– What are the costs and benefits of schema use?
– What is an example of how the perseverance
effect can lead to serious, negative consequences?
– What is an example of the self-fulfilling
prophecy?
• Have you ever been personally affected by it?
– How? What happened?
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Heuristics and Automatic Processing
• The complexity of the social world and the
limited nature of cognitive processing can
result in information overload.
• A strategy to reduce mental effort is the use
of heuristics—simple rules for making
complex decisions or drawing inferences in
a rapid, seemingly effortless manner.
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Heuristics and Automatic Processing
• Types of Heuristics
– Representativeness—making judgments based
on the extent to which current stimuli or events
resemble other stimuli or categories
• The similarity of an individual to typical members of
a given group results in the judgment that the
individual belongs to that group.
• Judgments based on this rule can be wrong because
base rates are often ignored.
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Heuristics and Automatic Processing
• Types of Heuristics
– Availability—making judgments on the basis of
how easily specific kinds of information can be
brought to mind
• Judgments based on this rule can be wrong because
the likelihood of events that are dramatic, but rare,
can be overestimated.
• This heuristic is related to Priming—which occurs
when stimuli or events increase the availability in
memory or consciousness of specific types of
information held in memory.
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Heuristics and Automatic Processing
• Types of Heuristics
– Anchoring and Adjustment—the tendency to
make judgments using a number or value as a
starting point to which adjustments then are
made
• Judgments based on this rule can be wrong.
– Anchors often are arbitrary.
– Personal experiences do not serve as good anchors since
they are unique and unusual and therefore inapplicable.
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Heuristics and Automatic Processing
• Automatic Processing—after extensive
experience information processing becomes
effortless, involuntary, unintentional, and
nonconscious
– Automatic processing versus controlled processing
(which is effortful and conscious) offers gains in
efficiency that can be offset by inaccurate
processing of social information.
• An example is the automatic activation of stereotypes.
• Automatic activation of schemas can lead to automatic
effects on social behavior.
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Heuristics and Automatic Processing
• Controlled versus Automatic Processing:
Two systems for evaluating social stimuli
– Evidence from social neuroscience
• Different parts of the brain are activated depending
on which type of social evaluation people make.
– The amygdala may be involved in automatic (simple good
versus bad) judgments.
– Portions of the prefrontal cortex appear to be implicated in
controlled evaluative reactions.
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Heuristics and Automatic Processing
• What are your thoughts?
– How do the media play a role in the use of
heuristics, for example the availability heuristic?
• What are examples of how the media lead people to
overestimate the likelihood that certain events will occur?
– As in the case of consumers’ false beliefs that
S.U.V.’s are safer vehicles, what are other examples
of how the availability heuristic has affected
consumer preferences?
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Potential Sources of Error
• Negativity Bias—people show greater
sensitivity to negative information than to
positive information
– People are faster and more accurate at identifying
threatening facial expressions than positive facial
expressions.
– Bias may be explained by evolutionary factors.
• Negative information reflects features of the external
world that may threaten safety and well-being.
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Potential Sources of Error
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Potential Sources of Error
• Optimistic Bias—predisposition to expect
things to turn out well, overall
– People believe that they are more likely than others
to experience good outcomes, and less likely to
experience bad outcomes.
– Overconfidence Barrier—tendency to have more
confidence in the accuracy of judgments than is
reasonable
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Potential Sources of Error
– Planning Fallacy—tendency to make optimistic
predictions about how long it will take to complete a
task
• It occurs because people tend to focus on the future while
ignoring related past events and they overlook important
potential obstacles.
– Bracing for loss—an exception to the optimistic bias
• When people expect to experience something negative that
has important consequences for them, they tend to become
pessimistic, anticipating a negative outcome.
• The desire to brace for a loss, may be an adaptive tendency
that helps people protect themselves from bad news.
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Potential Sources of Error
• Counterfactual Thinking—tendency to
imagine other outcomes in a situation than
the ones that actually occurred
– Thoughts may occur automatically and require
cognitive effort to dismiss.
– People who have these thoughts can experience
both benefits (hopefulness) and costs (regret).
• Can either boost or depress current moods
• Can mitigate the bitterness of disappointments
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Potential Sources of Error
• Thought Suppression—efforts to prevent
certain thoughts from entering consciousness
– Involves two processes:
• Monitoring—automatic search for unwanted thoughts.
• Operating—controlled, conscious attempt to distract
oneself by thinking about something else.
• Rebound effect—occurs when someone is fatigued or
experiencing information overload; result is only
monitoring process is working.
– Suppressing unwanted thoughts may actually increase them.
– People high in reactance—react very negatively to perceived
threats to freedom—show stronger rebound effect.
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Potential Sources of Error
• Magical Thinking—thinking based on
irrational assumptions
– Examples are thinking that one’s thoughts can
influence the physical world and thinking that
things that resemble each other share basic
properties.
• Failure to take account of moderating variables
– People are not good at acknowledging the roles
that moderating variables (factors that may be
influencing an outcome) play.
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Potential Sources of Error
• What are your thoughts?
– Consider the sources of error in social cognition.
Rank order them in terms of most likely to least
likely to cause problems in one’s personal life.
• How were the ranks determined?
– How might counterfactual thinking lead to a sense
of hopefulness?
– What are the disadvantages of thought
suppression?
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Affect and Cognition
• The Influence of Affect on Cognition
– Moods affect how new stimuli are perceived.
– Happy moods can increase creativity.
– Happy moods can make people more susceptible
to social influence.
– Information that evokes emotional reactions may
be processed differently than other kinds of
information.
• Bad moods lead to more systematic thinking, while
good moods lead to more heuristic thinking.
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Affect and Cognition
• The Influence of Affect on Cognition
– Mood-dependent memory—information
remembered while in a given mood may be
determined, in part, by what was learned when
previously in that mood
– Mood congruence effects—people are more
likely to store or remember positive information
when in a positive mood and negative
information when in a negative mood
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Affect and Cognition
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Affect and Cognition
• The Influence of Cognition on Affect
– Two-factor theory of emotion: the perception of
situations can determine emotional reactions
– Activation of schemas containing a strong affective
component can exert powerful effects on current
feelings and moods.
– Thoughts can regulate emotions.
• The “I never had a chance” effect
– Convincing oneself that “I never had a chance” helps regulate
mood by reducing disappointment.
• Yielding to temptations can reduce negative affect.
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Affect and Cognition
• What are your thoughts?
– What are explanations for the different effects that
good moods versus bad moods have on social
cognition?
• Can the type of bad mood influence the effect that it has
on the processing of social information?
– Why or why not?
– What are important things to remember about the
cognitive effects of being in a good mood?
– What are cognitive strategies people can use to
change their moods?
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