Social Psychology Test 2 Study Guide What is Social Cognition Social cognition encompasses a broad movement to study any sort of thinking ay people about people and about social relationships The processes by which people think about and make sense of their social environments Humans like to think of themselves as rational We try to find o Ex behavioral economics advancements in science and reason in everything technology o Why People Think and Why They Don t Researchers have found that often people seem lazy or careless about their thinking Social psychologists use the term cognitive miser to describe people s reluctance to do much extra thinking Thinking takes effort and people s capacity to think is limited so people must conserve their thinking In cognitive terms reasoning is costly Not all thinking is equally difficult As the theory of the duplex mind indicates conscious thinking requires a lot more effort than automatic thinking Since we have limited cognitive resources to perform tasks such as solve problems as well as direct attention an behavior we try to conserve cognitive resources as much as possible by using automatic thinking Since people are cognitive misers they rely on mental shortcuts which can lead to incorrect assumptions These mental shortcuts however are usually a good enough answer and are more efficient It is too effortful to take into account all of the information that we are proved with so we are biased toward certain types of information The Stroop test is a standard measure of effortful control over responses requiring participants to identify the color of a word which may name a different color The Stroop effect in the Stroop test the finding that people have difficulty overriding the automatic tendency to read the word rather than name the ink color At lease five elements distinguish automatic from controlled processes awareness intention control effort and efficiency Automatic thoughts do not involve effort whereas controlled thoughts often involve mental exertion and can feel taxing and tiring Automatic thinking involved little effort because it relies on knowledge structures which are organized packets of information that are stored in memory There knowledge structures form when a set of related concepts is frequently brought to mind or activated o Automatic and Controlled Thinking When people think about a concept it becomes active in memory Related concepts also become activated Schemas knowledge structures that represent substantial information about a concept its attributes and its relationships to other concepts Schemas make the complex world much easier to understand They help organize information by connecting beliefs that are related to each other One type of event that sparks conscious thinking is a violation of expectancies Scripts knowledge structures that contain information about how people or other objects behave under varying circumstance In sense scripts are schemas about certain kinds of events Scripts include many types of information such s motives intentions goals situations that enable or inhibit certain behaviors and the causal sequence of events as well as the specific behaviors themselves Priming planting or activating an idea in someone s mind Memory is filled with concepts When one concept becomes activated in memory by thinking about Related concepts are linked together in memory it related concepts become activated too A prime is stimulus that activated further processing of the same or related stimuli The prime doesn t have to be conscious Framing whether messages stress potential gains positively framed or potential losses negatively framed Refers to how information is presented to others Gain framed appeal focuses on how doing something will make you healthier Loss framed appeal focuses on the downside such as the potential for greater sickness o Thought Suppression and Ironic Processes One process keeps a lookout for anything that might remind the person of the unwanted thought It is an automatic process that checks all the incoming information for danger The other is a controlled process that redirects attention away from the unpleasant thought Attributions Why Did That Happen o Attributions the causal explanations people give for their own and others behavior and for events in general Another way to save cognitive energy Trying to explain people s behavior Unexpected events Dispositional internal attribution explain a behavior in terms of person s disposition Situational external attribution explain a behavior as influenced by the situation The inferences people make about events in their lives o Most explanations fall into one of two major categories Internal factors such as ability attitudes personality mood and effort External factors such as the task other people or luck o Explaining Success and Failure A two dimensional theory of attributions for success and failure The first dimension was internal vs external the second dimension was stable vs unstable Internal stable attributions involve ability Internal unstable attributions involve effort External stable attributions involve task difficulty External unstable attributions involve luck Self serving bias the tendency to take credit for success but deny blame for failure People want to maximize their credit for success while avoiding having their failures reflect badly on themselves o The Actor Observer Bias Actor observer bias the tendency for actors to make external situational attributions and observers to make internal dispositional attributions People make situational attributions for their own behavior People make dispositional attributions for others behavior o In others it is easier to see behavior than causes o Cognitive misers dispositional attribution is easier It is relevant to any situation in which one person the observer is watching someone else s the actor s behavior Actors tend to attribute their own behavior to the situation external whereas observers tend to attribute actors behavior to the actors internal Difference in perceptions of at least 2 people Ex Imagine while driving to school someone cuts you off and takes your parking spot How do you explain their actions What about when you cut someone off How do you explain your actions Some psychologists have focused on the observer side of the actor observer bias when people explain the behavior of others Fundamental attribution error correspondence bias the tendency for observers to
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