Chapter 5 SOCIAL COGNITION PART 1 Mental Shortcuts reliance on automatic system when the brain is preoccupied with something else Ex the jumbled word paragraph reluctance to do much extra thinking Because people are lazy and have limited resources 1970 s movement in social psychology that focused on thoughts and social relationships Cognitive Misers Automatic System Knowledge Structures Don t need to be aware of it Not guided by intention Not deliberately controlled Not effortful Very efficient fast mental groupings of information used by the automatic system schemas about certain kinds of events information about a concept its attributed and its relationships to other concepts Ex Class arrive at specific time sit in regular seat get out notes listen and pay attention during lecture take notes based on lecture leave at specific time activating a concept in the mind so that related ideas are more accessible influences Schemas Scripts Priming thinking is automatic Happens when you encounter stimuli Some are subliminal Below consciousness Ex Pop Quiz will evoke anxiety alertness stress etc Ex Hot coffee vs cold cup test Holland Hendricks and Aarts 2005 Some participants are in a room with the scent of cleaning product some are in a room with no scent They are all given a pastry to eat People in the room that smells like a cleaning product are more likely to clean up crumbs This demonstrated priming in that the experimenters are priming the participants with a scent that makes them subliminally think about cleaning making the idea to clean up their crumbs after eating the pastry more accessible Framing information presented as positive or negative Partially depends on amount of attention paid or level of processing Ex saying something works 90 of the time instead of saying it fails 10 of the time is framing it in a positive way People prefer to conserve effort by relying on automatic modes of thought when they can Develops shortcuts rough estimates and guesses Not very good at logical reasoning for mathematics SOCIAL COGNITION PART 2 Attribution an explanation for why we or others engage in certain behavior Two Dimension Attribution Theory Internal disposition or mental state or External situation Factors Stable or Unstable Factors Explaining success and failure Self serving bias Jones Harris 1967 Participants read a pro or anti Castro Essay Some participants were told that that the students were assigned the position by a professor and other participants were told that the students freely chose that position Participants were then asked to estimate the students true attitude tendency to make dispositional attributions for others behavior Fundamental Attribution Error even when plausible situational explanations exist Actor Observer Bias Dispositional related to personality and internal traits Heuristic Tendency to make internal attributions for others behaviors My neighbor did not say hi to me because she s a bitch Tendency to make external attributions for our own behaviors I did not say hi to my neighbor because I was distracted by a loud noise mental shortcuts that provide quick estimates about the likelihood of events Representativeness Heuristic Availability Heuristic Simulation Heuristic Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic Efficient and often lead to correct answer Prone to predictable types of errors judge the likelihood by the extent it resembles the typical case tendency to estimate the likelihood of event by how easily instances of it come Representativeness Heuristic Availability Heuristic to mind Instances of plane crashed are easier to remember or hear about than car accidents Ex having a larger fear of airplane crashed than of car wrecks Ex plane crash vs cigarettes Ex shark attack vs coconuts A shark attack is much scarier but coconuts kill more people A plane crash is much scarier but cigarettes kill way more people tendency to judge the frequency or likelihood of an event by the ease with Simulation Heuristic which you can imagine or mentally simulate it Ex if you missed your flight to Munich by two hours you would be more upset if you missed it by five minutes Counterfactual Thinking thinking about alternative possibilities tendency to be influenced by a starting point anchor when Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic making decisions Why Jacowitz and Kahneman 1995 2 Conditions Starting from the anchor people adjust only slightly because they are forced to think about that value and whether or not it is in the range of possibility Participants were asked Is the distance between San Francisco and New York City in miles greater or lower than 1 500 Participants were asked Is the distance between San Francisco and New York City in miles greater or lower than 6 000 Participants in both conditions regardless of their answer were then asked to estimate what they thought the actual distance between the two cities was On average people in the first condition with 1 500 miles as their anchor estimated the distance between the two cities being about 2 500 miles On average people in the second condition with 6 000 miles as their anchor estimated the distance between the two cities being about 4 000 miles As we can see when given a higher anchor the average estimated distance is higher and when given a lower anchor the average estimated distance in lower tendency to notice and search for info that confirms beliefs and ignore tendency to overestimate that link between variables that are related only SOCIAL COGNITION PART 3 more attention paid to confirming evidence Confirmation Bias information that disconfirms beliefs Illusory Correlation slightly or even not related at all Rare events are more noticeable or memorable Ex Psychic link phone calls You are thinking about someone and they Call you Don t call you Hamilton and Gifford 1976 2 3 involved a member of Group A majority The ratio of desirable to undesirable behaviors was the same for both groups Participants read a series of sentences describing a desirable or undesirable behavior from a person belonging to either Group A or B Participants estimated the number of desirable and undesirable behaviors performed by members of each group Participants on average thought Group A performed more desirable behaviors and Group B performed more undesirable behaviors belief that a particular chance event is affected by previous events and that tendency for gamblers who get lucky to think they have a hot hand and that their luck Gambler s
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