Social Cognition
Social Cognition
• How we judge and evaluate other people
“You never get a second chance to
make a first impression”
Why?
Impression Formation
• Schema (Schemata is plural)
– Set of beliefs or expectations based on prior
experience
– Presumed to apply to all members of the category
– Primacy effect
• Earlier impressions are more impactful than later
knowledge
– Self-fulfilling prophecy
• Expectation elicits behavior from another that confirms
the expectation
Piaget
• Cognitive development as a process
– Cognitive changes
– Social cognition
– Social behavior
– Socialization
Attribution
• Attribution Theory
– Heider (1958) – Behavior attributed to internal or
external causes, not both
• Laziness or traffic (not lazy + traffic)
– Kelley (1967) – we consider three types of
information about behavior to determine its cause
• Distinctive – behavior of the other towards third party
• Consistent – behavior of the other towards you
• Consensus – behavior of the other similar to others’
behavior
Attribution
• Biases of Attributions
– Fundamental attribution error
• Tendency to attribute the behavior of others to causes
within themselves
– Schindler helped Jews escape Nazi concentration camps
because he cared (internal); Schindler believed he was simply
doing what needed to be done (external)
• Efficacy
– One’s belief in one’s ability to accomplish a particular task
Self-Efficacy
• Efficacy
• One’s belief in one’s ability to accomplish a particular
task
• Behavior (performance) influenced greatly by
perception of control over a circumstance.
– “Mom” tells you success is based on hard work.
VS
– “Mom” tells you success is based on luck.
Self-Efficacy
• Learned Helplessness
– Seligman (1965)
Attribution
• Biases of Attribution
– Defensive attribution
• We are motivated to present ourselves well
– Impress others
– Feel good about ourselves
• Self-serving bias
– Tendency to attribute personal failure to external factors and
personal success with internal factors
» I failed the test because Mr. Willis is a jerk.
» I aced the test and didn’t even study! (AKA I’m really
smart!)
– Just-world hypothesis
• People get what they deserve
– ‘Protects’ us from those things happening to us.
Attribution
• Attributions across cultures
– Most studies of attribution have been done on
Western societies
– Eastern collectivist societies attribute more
personal successes and others’ failures to external
factors
– Self-serving bias seems to be common to all
groups
Social Identity Theory
• Tajfel & Turner (1979)
• No one “personal self”, but several selves of widening
circles of group membership.
• Different social contexts may trigger an individual to think,
feel and act on basis of his personal, family or national
“level of self.”
• Social identity is the individual’s self-concept derived from
perceived membership of social groups (Hogg & Vaughan,
2002)
– individual-based perception of what defines the “us” associated
with any internalized group membership. This can be
distinguished from the notion of personal identity which refers
to self-knowledge that derives from the individual’s unique
attributes.
Social Identity Theory
• Group membership creates ingroup/ self-categorization and
enhancement in ways that favor the in-group at the expense of the
out-group.
• Categorizing as group members leads them to display ingroup
favoritism.
– Seek positive self-esteem by separating ingroup from an outgroup
• Positive distinctiveness of ‘us’
– People’s sense of who they are is defined in terms of ‘we’ rather than
‘I’.
• Three main variables of ingroup favoritism
– Extent to which individuals identify with ingroup to internalize group
membership as aspect of self-concept.
– Extent to which prevailing context provides ground for comparison
between groups.
– Perceived relevance of comparison group,
• Shaped by relative and absolute status of the ingroup.
• Individuals are likely to display favoritism when an ingroup is central
to their self-definition and a given comparison is meaningful or the
outcome is contestable.
Social Identity Theory
• Schoolboys were assigned to groups, which were
intended as meaningless as possible.
• Assigned randomly, excluding roles of interpersonal
discrimination such as history of conflict, personal
animosity or interdependence.
• Assigned points to anonymous members of both their
own group and the other group.
• Conclusions
– even the most minimal conditions were sufficient to
encourage ingroup-favoring responses.
– Participants picked a reward pair that awarded more
points to people who were identified as ingroup members.
In other words, they displayed ingroup favoritism.
Stereotypes
• A set of characteristics believed to be shared
by all members of a social category
– Most common
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Sex
Race
Occupation
Physical appearance
Place of residence
Group or organization membership
Stereotypes
• Can easily become self-fulfilling prophecies
• Snyder, Tanke, & Berscheid (1977)
– College-aged men & women paired to have a
phone conversation
• Given a snapshot of their phone-mate
• Was actually a randomly selected picture (attractive or
unattractive)
• Men responded more warmly to ‘attractive’ phonemates; coldly to ‘unattractive’ phone-mates, which
altered the pleasure of the conversations for both.
Stereotypes
• Macrae & Bodenhausen (2000)
– More likely to apply stereotyped schemata in
chance encounter than in structured, taskoriented situation
– Goal pursuit results in more attention to individual
signals
– People consciously or unconsciously suppress
stereotypes that violate social norms
Prejudice & Discrimination
• Prejudice
• An intolerant, unfavorable and rigid view of a
group of people (Attitude)
• Discrimination
– An act or series of acts that denies opportunities
and esteem to an entire group of people
(Behavior)
Prejudice
• Sources of Prejudice
– Frustration-aggression theory (Allport, 1954)
• Displacement of hostility by exploited, oppressed, or
disenfranchised away from proper target and toward lower
social groups
– Authoritarian personality theory (Adorno et al, 1950)
• Rigidly conventional, rule-following individuals hostile to
those that deviate from the norms
– Cognitive misers
• Too much cognitive simplification, creates overgeneralizations and stereotypes
– Racism
• Members of certain racial/ ethnic groups are innately
inferior
Interpersonal Attraction
• Harry Harlow
Interpersonal Attraction
• The tendency to be attracted to and like someone
else
• Proximity
– Usually the most important factor
– The closer they live/work, the more frequently they
interact
– The more they interact, the more they tend to like
each other
– Less to do with convenience than the security &
comfort of the familiar (Borstein, 1989)
Interpersonal Attraction
• Physical attractiveness
– Generally assume attractive people are more:
• Intelligent, interesting, happy, kind, sensitive, moral and
successful
• Better traits = better mates = like them more
– Harvey & Pauwells (1999): We like extreme
attractiveness in the abstract, we typically chose
those similar to our own level of attractiveness
Physical Attractiveness
• How is it
determined?
– Many elements
culturally specific
• Weight, tan, hair color
– More universal
stereotypes
• Feature Symmetry
• Physical markers of
good genes
Symmetry
Symmetry
Physical Attractiveness
• What are the dangers?
– Attractive people shown more attention and
valued more highly by:
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Mothers (Langlois et al, 1995)
Nurses (Badr & Abdallah, 2001)
Teachers (McCall, 1997)
Employers (Hosoda, Stone & Coats, 2003)
– Gives unfair advantages and creates self-fulfilling
prophecy of superior moral value
Interpersonal Attraction
• Similarity
– Shared attitudes, interests, values, backgrounds,
and beliefs
– Quist & Crano (2003): Voters are more likely to
vote for a candidate with whom they share similar
viewpoints
– Opposites attract?
• Dissimilarities are complementary traits
– Needs or skills that complete or balance each other
Interpersonal Attraction
• Exchange
– People exchange various goods and resources
with each other involving both rewards and costs
• We equally ‘get something out of it’
– Reward theory of attraction
• We like people who make us feel rewarded and
appreciated
– Aronson (1994): gain-loss theory of attraction
• Increases in rewarding behavior more attractive than
constant rewarding
Interpersonal Attraction
• Intimacy
– Quality of genuine closeness and trust in another
person
– Created and maintained through continuing
reciprocal pattern of trying to know the other and
allowing the other to know them (Harvey &
Pauwells, 1999)
– ‘Safe’ topics (weather, sports, shared activities) >
personal topics (memories, hopes, failures)
– Pacing is important
• Too much, too soon is unattractive