Advanced cognitive psychology: Sensation and Perception

Sensation and Perception

Perceptual process_ Perception doesn’t just happen but is a end result of complex “behind the scenes processes which many don’t realize, this process is a sequence of processes that work together to determine our experience of and reaction to stimuli in the environment, the process is in four categories.
Stimulus Refers to what is out there in the environment and what we actually pay attention to and stimulates our receptors.
Electricity refers to the electrical signals that are created by the receptors and sent to the brain.
Experience and action Refers to our goal-to perceive, recognize and react to the stimuli

Knowledge refers to the knowledge we bring to the perceptual situation

The Stimulus- It can exist external and internal to a person

Environmental stimuli and attended stimuli: Environmental stimulus is all the things in ur environment that we can potentially perceive. If someone is walking through the woods there is far too much happening at once for someone to take in so they look place to place scanning the environment for something to catch their interest, for example a certain tree, she doesn’t notice the pattern of the trunk first and realise the patch of moss it actually a moth, this becomes the attended stimulus and this changes moment to moment as the person shifts their attention place to place.

The stimulus on the receptors:  When the attention is directly on the moth, she looks directly at it, this creates an image of the moth on the retina of the eye and this counts as a representation of the moth as it’s not the actual moth.

Electricity

Transduction- this is the transformation of one form of energy into another form of energy, this occurs in the nervous system when energy in the environment such as light energy is transformed into electrical energy such as the image of the moth in the retina is transformed into electrical signals in thousands of the visual receptors.

Transmission- After the moth’s image has been transformed into electrical signals in the receptors, these signals activate other neurons which in turn activate more neurons and eventually these signals leave the eye and transmit to the brain and this is crucial because if it doesn’t reach the brain there is no perception.

Processing- AS the signals are transmitted they undergo Neural processing  Which involves interactions between neurons. The image of the moth is changed into electrical signals in the receptors, which eventually are sent out the back of the eye. This signal which represents the moth , is relayed through a series of neurons to the brain, which transforms this signal into a perception of the moth, the signal that reaches the brain is transformed so that it represents the original stimulus however it can be very different from the original signal, this transformation between receptors and brain is achieved by neural processing, which happens as the signals that originate in the receptors travel through a maze of interconnected pathways between the receptors and the brain  and within the brain.

Experience and action- This is where the unaware things going on transform into things we are aware of-perceiving, recognizing, and acting on objects in the environment.

Perception is conscious sensory experience. It occurs when the electrical signals that represent the moth are transformed by the brain into her experience of seeing the moth. She has perceived the moth but other things have happened as well such as recognizing the form of the moth. There are two addition steps,

Recognition this is the ability to place the object in question into a category such as a ‘moth’ , that gives it a meaning. Although we might be tempted the group perception and recognition together researchers have shown they are two separate things such as the Dr P study where he could perceive the object such as a glove he described it as a container showing he has perceived the object however unable to attach the meaning of a glove to it.

Action This includes motor activities such as moving the head or eyes and scanning the environment such as looking at the moth and moving directly towards it and researchers see this is an important outcome because of its importance for survival. David Milner and Melvyn Goodale (1995) say that early in evolution the main goal of visual processing was not to create a conscious picture but to help animal control navigation. Perception often leads to action such as a animal increasing its vigilance when hearing a twig snap or a person’s deciding to look more closely at something that’s interesting shows that perception is a continuously changing process.

Knowledge: is any information that the perceiver brings to the situation, it can affect a number of steps in the perceptual process, it can be things learned from years ago such as learning the difference between a moth and a butterfly and events that have just happened such as perceiving as picture –mouse or a guy test-.

There is another way to describe the effect of information is by distinguishing between bottom-up processing and top-down processing, bottom up processing  is processing that is based on incoming data, this always provides a starting point for perception because without incoming data there is no perception. The incoming data are the patterns of light and dark on her retina created by light reflected from the moth and the tree. Top-down processing refers to processing that is based on knowledge such as what they know about moths. Knowledge isn’t always involved in perception but it often is and sometimes without even being aware of it.

Bottom up processing is essential for perception because the PP usually begins with a stimulus of the receptors. Such as a pharmacist reads a unreadable scribble on a doctors prescription she starts with the patterns that the doctors handwriting creates on her retina, top-down processing can also work as well such as past experience with this particular handwriting therefore both approaches work together to create perception.

Usually very simple stimuli don’t use TD processing.

How to approach the study of perception
The Psychophysical approach  Was in introduced by Gustav Fechner who coined the term psychophysics to explain the relationship between the stimuli and perception, and these methods are still used today.an example to measure the stimulus-perception relationship would be asking a observer to decide whether two very similar patches of colour was the same or different

The physiological approach involves measuring the relationship between stimuli and PP and PP and perception and these psychological responses are often studied by measuring electrical responses in the nervous system but can also involve studying anatomy or chemical processes an example would be measuring how different coloured lights result in electrical activity generated in neurons in a cat’s cortex and basic brain activity.

Both approaches work toward a common goal-to explain the mechanisms responsible for perception, every time we measure physiological responses the aim is to see how neurons and the brain create perceptions, the knowledge and top down processing part of this is known as the cognitive influences on perception. Both approaches provide information about different aspects of the process and to truly understand it we have to use both.

Measuring perception;

Description: When a researcher asks a person to describe what they perceive they are using a phenomenological method. This is the first step because it describes what we perceive; this is where the study of perception begins because these are the basic properties that we are seeking to explain

Recognition:  When we categorize a stimulus by naming it, we are measuring recognition, often for treating people with brain damage such as Dr P with the glove etc.

Detection: in Gustavs Fechner’s book he described a number of quantitive methods and these were known as classical psychophysical methods because they were the original methods used to measure the P-S relationship

The absolute threshold is the smallest amount of S energy necessary to detect a stimulus e.g. the smallest amount of light that makes a person detect it would be the AT for that.

The difference threshold is the smallest difference between two stimuli that a person can detect, Weber found that when the difference between the standard and comparison weights are small the observers found it difficult to detect a difference in the weights but large differences easier, also as the magnitude of the stimulus increases so does the size of the DL, the relationship based on Webers research but stated mathematically by Fechner was DL/S _ K and was called Webers law. K is a constant called Weber fraction, S is the value of the standard stimulus. Numerous tests have shown this law to be true in most cases if the stimulus intensity is not too low. The weber fraction remains relatively constant for a particular sense. His proposal of 3 psychophysical methods of measuring and the law were important events because it showed mental activity could be observed quantitively however did not measure things about threshold perceptions.

Magnitude Estimation: If we double the intensity of a tone, does it sound twice as loud? In 1957 S.S. Stevens developed a technique called scaling or magnitude estimation that accurately measured this relationship. The results from the test show that doubling it does not double the perceived brightness, e.g. when intensity is 20 the perceived is 28 and when we double intensity to 40 the perceived only increases to 36, this is called response compression, they both increases but not at the same rate. The results for the sensation for electric shock presented to the finger and for the perception length of a line. The electric shock curve bends up indicating that doubling the strength of a shock more than doubles the sensation of being shocked, increasing the intensity from 20 to 40 made the shock sensation from 6 to 49, this is called response expansion and for the line test the things matched identically. The relationship between intensity of a stimulus and our perception of its magnitude follows the same general equation for each sense. These functions are called Power functions and are described by the equation P _ KSn. and is known as Stevens power law.

Search: This method is where participants are asked to find one stimulus amongst other quickly as possible, we will see that measuring reaction time, the time between presentation of the stimulus and the observer’s response to the stimulus has provided important information about mechanisms responsible for perception

Advanced Social Psychology: Attitudes

Attitudes

An attitude is a set of beliefs that we hold in relation to an attitude object such as a person, thing, event or issue. They can be positive or negative or we can have opinions on things without having any strong emotional commitment.

Attitude formation
There are four main ways in which attitudes can form towards some issue event or person etc, these four ways apply mostly when there is no prior existing attitude or knowledge about the thing in question.
Mere exposure- The MEE (zajonc,1968) is the tendency to develop more positive feelings towards a objects and individuals the more we are exposed to them. No action or interaction is required and we don’t need to possess or develop any explicit beliefs about the object. Zejonc experiment included showing participants 10 Chinese people on screen for 2 seconds each, the characters varied in how many times they were presented, some 10 times and other 25, in phase two they were asked to rate the Chinese people and guess whether they were positive or negative in connotation and the people were shown one more time to them and the Chinese people who were shown more were rated more positively than those shown less times, he found a positive linear correlation. This shows that mere exposure had a significant impact on attitudes. There has been many replications of this experiment and the results confirmed this theory. The effect is not limited to visual stimuli but also observed with auditory (Heingartner and hall, 1974) and even food stimuli (Crandall,1970) .Overall the MEE appears to be an important way in which attitudes can form.

Associative learning: 2 ways we learn by association, classical or operant conditioning. Classical conditioning is a learning process that occurs when a neutral stimulus is parted with a stimulus that naturally evokes an emotional response (Pavlov dogs). The previous neutral stimulus after enough pairings with the positive or negative object will acquire a a positivity or negativity of its own.  Staats and Staats(1958)  found that it has a similar effect with social groups as well, they paired the national social category (Dutch) with negative words and ‘Sweden’ with positive words. And they found that the subsequent evaluation of Dutch people was more negative than Swedish and when the Dutch was paired with positive traits they was seen to be more positive. It appeared that the repeated association of Dutch with positive lead to a more positive evaluation of this group-a case of associative learning. Different effect from zajonc’s theory because this shows that a paring with a positive or negative stimulus is required. However the magnitude of the conditioned effect was not great therefore there must be other things helping to form the attitude. A stronger effect is found when an aversive stimuli is placed with a a nonsense word, this is because there is little knowledge known about the nonsense word where people may already have knowledge about different nationality’s forming attitudes so this shows that AL may be a more powerful determinant when there is little knowledge available about the attitude object.  This shows that if we don’t know much about  acertainissue we are going to be more influenced by exposure to certain attitude relevant information, this could explain racism as there is little inter racial contact therefore meeting people with these negative attitudes will influence your own.

The second way is Operant conditioning, this is where behaviour is strengthened following rewards and weakened following punishments (Skinner 1938), this is behavioural in nature: participants must carry out some action that is either rewarded or punished and the same would go for attitudes, if your rewarded for having a specific attitude towards someone your more likely to keep that attitude.
Self perception- The idea behind SPT (Bem 1965) is that we form attitudes from observations of our own behaviour (opinions we openly express on issues) then attributing them to either internal or external causes. Internal causes are more likely when the behaviour was freely chosen just like the attribution theory. Inference of an attitude is more likely to occur when someone has little or no knowledge about the issue at hand or does not hold a strong prior attitude towards it. A study shows this by Chaiten and Baldwin (1981), pps were first pre-screened to assess their attitude towards pro environmental practises-whether attitudes were strong and coherent or weak and inconsistent. This was to test the idea that self-perception of one’s attitude from behaviours would only occur when people had little prior knowledge or opinions at the subject at hand, then they were put into 2 conditions. They asked questions relating to either pro or anti-environmental practises they engaged in getting them to excilit answers in specific ways. After this participants were asked to indicate their own attitude towards environmental practises. Results were consistent with the SPT that those who were induced into reporting behaviours they carried out that were pro environmental in nature were more likely to rate themselves as having pro environmental attitudes and vice vers but for the other only when they had a weak prior attitude, if they had a strong this had no effect.

The idea that people attend to their own behaviour, even facial expression is known as Facial feedback hypothesis, The study by Strack, Martin and stepper (1988) where holding a pen between your teeth gives a expression that your smiling and holding it in your lips makes you frown, they had 2 groups one for each and they were asked to rate how funny the cartoons were and they one between their teeth rated them more funny showing facial expression can effect a attitude. The results form this study seem to suggest that these facial ‘behaviours;, just like any other behaviour can inform subsequent attitudes. Although SPH gives a good explanation for Strack et al’s  findings there is a alternative, Zajonc (1993) argued for a physiological explanation called the vascular theory of emotion, he argued that smiling causes the facial muscles to increase with blood flow to the brain which then creates a positive mood by lowering the brains temperature and the opposite for frowning.

Functional Approach: the three ways discusses so far all operate outside of people’s awareness therefore passive things. However its self-evident that not all attitudes are formed outside of our awareness, sometimes we engage in deliberate thought about a issue to form an opinion. The previous three ways can be the cognitive miser approach however this is the naïve scientist approach. Attitudes are sometimes formed based on the degree to which they satisfy different psychological needs; there are four basic psychological needs that adopting different attitudes can address

Utilitarian function: sometimes attitudes are formed to gain approval from others,, this function created instrumental attitudes, these help us along and make our lives better  e.g. create a positive attitude to parent because the child is totally dependent on them.

Knowledge function: Holding particular attitudes can help us organise and predict our social qorlds, providing a sense of meaning and coherence to our lives, attitudes can be thought of as cognitive schemes, stereotypes for instance can be thought of as attitudes that define our expectations about different social groups.

Ego defensive function: Attitudes formed to satisfy ego defensive psychological needs help people protect themselves from acknowledging threatening self-truths, enabling them to maintain a positive view of themselves e.g. we may develop a a unfavourable attitude towards a co-worker who is enjoying more success than us. These attitudes serve to protect us from acknowledging a potentially damaging social comparison.

Value-expressive function- Finally, sometimes we may develop an attitude that expresses values that are important to us. E.g. we may develop a taste for coffee that we know to have been grown under conditions that allow fair trade of 3^rd world workers, we might come to actually like this taste of coffee because it helps us to express more general beliefs and values that we hold.

Attitudes and behaviours

 In 1934 Richard Lapierre travelled around united states with an Asian couple and at that time there was a widespread prejudice of Asians and he wanted to understand the nature of this negative attitude and whether it predicted discrimination, first he went around US visiting restaurants and hotels to see if they would refuse the Asian couples and only 1 out of 250 did showing low levels of discrimination however these findings were inconsistent with the frequent reports of racial prejudice.  He sent a letter to the same hotel managers and restaurants and asked them if they would serve the Asian couple and of the 128 replies 90 percent said they would not serve the Asian couple. The results from this study show the attitudes does not reflect behaviour.

Determinants of the attitude-behaviour relationship

There are several reasons why there was a discrepancy between the attitudes and actual behaviours performed.

Specificity- In order for attitudes to reflect behaviour they must be on the same level of specificity ( Fishbein &Ajzen 1975) In the study the behaviour assessed was specific (this certain couple) however the attitude was in general (serve Chinese in general). This shows that general attitudes may not reflect specific behaviours.

Time-How much time between attitude measurement and the measurement of behaviour as attitudes can change rather fast so the comparison may become mismatched. Fishbein and Coombs (1974)  Observed that the correlation between attitudes and voting behaviour was stronger one week before voting than one month before election.
Self Awareness- People are capable of experiencing different kinds of self-awareness before carrying out a behaviour and this can affect the relationship between attitudes and behaviour (Echabe & Garate (1994)). People who are privately self aware behave in line with their own attitude maybe because its their own person attitude whereas people with a public self awareness behave in line with the attitude they perceive the majority of other people to hold. Basically act in line when there are alone so behaviours can be predicted however in public people can be acting different. Attitude-behaviour consistency is dependent upon social context-whether private or public are more accessible.
Attitude Accessibility- Private or public awareness is the extent to either private or public attitudes are more accessible and this is affected by the availability heuristic, the easier it is for something to come to mind, the more likely it is that it will affect our behaviour (Fazio 1995). Priming with a a specific type of attitude can have a significant impact on people’s behaviour –stereotype-. The accessibility of attitudes can be measured using response times to answering questions relating to the attitude object: The speed of these responses predicts later behaviour (Look at Fazio and Williams 1986)
Attitude strength:  The stronger someone's attitude is the more likely it will have an effect on behaviour. Attitudes can be held whether they are either strong or weakly held. Irrespective of whether they can be brought easily to mind, for instance a case in the news, suddenly bring issues of euthanasia to the fore, sparking public debates in the media and in friend groups. Attitudes to this subject have therefore become contextually accessible, but people can still vary to which they have either strong opinion on the subject or have little interest. 3 things can affect attitude strength and attitude/behaviour consistency: information, personal involvement and direct experience with the attitude object. Having more information or knowledge about a attitude object means it has a greater attitude strength and behaviour consistency (Chaiken et al 1995). The more personally involved someone is with a issue the more likely it will be that they will act in line with their attitudes (Lieberman and Chaiken 1996). The third reas0j is where people who have creates attitudes via direct experience are more likely to have a stronger attitude and show greater consistencies with behaviour. Important to remember there are other things that effect whether attitudes affect behaviour and see how attitudes affect it in conjunction to other factors

The theory of planned behaviour Ajzen

Developed to account doe the processes by which people consciously decide to engage in specific actions, it states that behavioural intentions are the most proximal determinant of behaviour and that 3 factors converge to predict behavioural intentions. The first is attitudes and these are determined by ones beliefs about the consequences of performing the behaviour and ones evaluation of the possible consequences of performing the behaviour. The second is subjective norms and these are determined by the perceived expectations of significant others and ones motivation to conform to these expectations. The third factor is Perceived control which is determined by ones perception of how easy or difficult it is to perform the behaviour.

According to the model these three factors combine in a interactive way to determine behavioural intention which in turn determines behaviour. We need BI in the model because an important underlying component of the theory is that neither attitudes or norms by themselves can determine behaviour, it is a interaction of these factors with perceived control which predicts attitudes. The link between these three factors and actual behaviour would imply that the particular antecedent could exert some effect on behaviour independent of the other factors, but this isn't the case. Perceived control is the only behaviour that can directly affect behaviour because although knowing how possible it is for you to perform behaviour or not affects intention, it could ultimately reduce the likelihood of actually performing that behaviour, even if intention is strong. The effect of the three factors is not additive, because if one of the three components is strongly anti the behaviour intention will be low and the behaviour will not be carried out.

Reasoned action versus spontaneity

While theory of planned behaviour accounts well for thought out rational decision making it appears less useful in predicting spontaneous, unintentional and habitual types of behaviour. This is linked to the idea of attitude accessibility and linked to the notion that there are many social behaviours we carry out that are automatic, not open to conscious control, and which certainly do not entail much deliberative thought. In many ways we can therefore think of theory of planned behaviour as a model of behavioural predictions for the naïve scientists, with spontaneous behaviours carried out due to habit or gut feeling which is more cognitive misers approach.

Attitude change

Cognitive Dissonance-One of the way attitudes could form was from observations of our own behaviour. Bem's (1965) Self-perception theory  argues that when we have no prior existing attitude in the issue we can infer our attitudes from observing our own behaviour.

Cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957) argues that behaving in a way that contradicts existing attitudes creates a feeling of discomfort- a behaviour which is inconsistent with a attitude, when this happens it creates a internal imbalance or known as a dissonance, and he suggested people will try and resolve this dissonance, they will look for a way to justify it and if it doesn’t happen they will be forced to change their attitude about it to match the behaviour, like the SP theory this predicts behaviour affect attitudes and not the other way round however unlike SP dissonance will not occur unless there is a prior attitude that is quite strong otherwise there won't be a discrepancy. Festinger and carlsmith (1959) did an experiment to show this, participants have to complete two boring tasks, emptying and refilling a tray with spools and then repeatedly turning 49 wooden pegs on a board, after the hour long task the experimenter explained that it was really about the effects of prior knowledge on perceptions of the task and that they had been allocated to the control condition and in the other condition they were told the participants were told the task was very enjoyable, after the experiment or asked if the pp’s could help out and tell the next participant that they had jsut taken part in it and it was fun and enjoyable, this was key because they were asked to do something which was not in line with their attitudes. Three manipulations took place at this part, some of the participants were asked to lie about the task being enjoyable but were offered different amounts of money for doing so, some from 1 dollar to 20 and some not told to lie and no money, after it was all done participant were then asked to rate how fun and interesting they really found the task to be.

Results varied a lot as a function of lie instruction and payment, control condition (no payment rated the least favourable and this confirms it was really boring, the ones who were given $1 rated it significantly more favourable whereas the $20 did not. These findings are opposite to what would of been predicted by the Operant conditioning theory. By this theory the 20 dollar would of been the best because of the highest positive reward and have the attitude of it being fun reinforced. The pattern of the $1 can be explained by cognitive dissonance. Festinger and carlssmith (1959)  carrying out a behaviour that is inconsistent with an attitude causes discomfort and people are motivated to change it and if no cognitive thing explains it they will change their attitude, with this in mind $1 and $20 represents different levels of justification. In the 20 dollar one people had enough justification to explain why they lied to the participant however in the $1 it was a insufficient justification so the only option they was left was to change their actual attitude towards it.

Factors affecting Dissonance

Justification-Whether people feel they have justification for having behaved in a way that is counter to their attitudes such as the 20 dollar thing.

Freedom of choice-If we are forced to do something this is an explanation for why we did this in contradiction to our attitudes so no dissonance will happen.

Investment: The more invested someone is in their point of view; the more important it is for their self concept and so stronger effects of any dissonance.

SO when there is no justification, we freely choose behaviour and its important to us cognitive dissonances is likely to occur and we are more likely to change our attitudes to fit that behaviour.

Dissonance or self perception

Both say attitudes are formed from behaviours but which is correct? Likely both are but in different situations. Aronson (1969) argues that cognitive dissonance will occur when discrepancies are clear and distinct, the attitude in question is important for the self concept, and when it is not possible to explain away the discrepancy. When the discrepancy are mild and/or attitudes not important to the person then the SP processes are more likely and this consistent with how SP is more likely to operate when people don’t have strong existing attitudes.

Persuasion
This refers to attitude change via external ways and not internal.
Dual Process models of persuasion: To understand how people react and take in persuasive messages go back to the idea of naive scientist and cognitive misers, this dual approach is more successful in explaining when people are or are not persuaded by others. Two models characterize this approach, the elaboration-likelihood model and the heuristic-systematic model (chaiken 1980). They are both slightly different in their emphasis they both argue there are two ways that a persuasive message can cause a attitude change, each differing in the amount of cognitive effort or elaboration they require: The central (systematic) route and the peripheral (heuristic) route. The central route is taken when people are motivated and able to think carefully about the content of the message. Here people are influenced by the strength and quality of the arguments. In contrast the peripheral route is taken when people cant or unwilling to read the message content. Instead people pay attention to the cues that are irrelevant to the content or quality of the communication, such as the attractiveness of the communicator or amount of information presented. Attitudes can change by both routes however attitudes formed via the peripheral route is a lot weaker as there is a lot less personal involvement and less predictive of behaviour (Petty, Haugtvedt and smith 1995) . The two routes capture the definition of the dual process approach to social information processing.

Processing route determinants

As well as the general conditions for the heuristic use e.g. cognitive overload, little information and low self relevance and time pressure there are a number of factors which affect which route will be taken when people process persuasive messages.
Speed of speech:  Rapid speech make it hard to process the content so people abandon the central route and take the peripheral route, relying on just the number of arguments as a heuristic for deciding whether to accept the message.
Mood: in general happy people use the peripheral route while unhappy use the central route this is because negative moods can signal that something is ‘wrong’ which triggers an increase in attention to identify the problem(Bohner, Crow, Erb, and Schwartz 1992). The implication is that happy people are therefore more susceptible to weak cues like attractiveness.
Involvement:  How much the source means to you can have a impact, If the outcome of the argument directly affects the person then they will pay more attention and the central route will be taken. Martin and Hewstone did a study on this (2003) Minorities and Majorities change attitudes in different ways
Individual differences:  Need for cognition (Haugtvedt and Perry 1992)  is the degree to which someone is oriented to engaging in effortful thought. People who are higher in this take the central route and lower take the peripheral route. Similar effects for the need for closure (Kruglanski et al) and need to evaluate (Jarvis and petty 1995).  Differences in self-monitoring (Synder and debono 1985)  can also have an impact. This is the degree to which someone is concerned with what other people think of them. People who are higher in self monitoring will be more likely to take the central route.
Humour:  Relevant humour leads to the central route and irrelevant humour leads to peripheral route (Smith, Haugtvedt and Perry 1994)

Peripheral cues
Once a route is taken it may be persuasive or not depending upon the characteristics of the context. Central route the key determinant is argument quality but if the peripheral route is taken there are 7 characteristics

Physical attractiveness: Chaiken did a experiment that undergraduates to sign a petition a petition to stop university serving meat and those who were attractive were more successful

Similarity to self is an important determinant of attraction similarly in terms of shared attitudes, appearance or social categories can all enhance persuasiveness of a message,(Simons et al 1970).

Source credibility: is a key peripheral cue to determining persuasiveness and likelihood of attitude change, its seen as credible is its expert unbiased and trustworthy. Hovland and weiess (1951) did a study to show this, they found US students who read a article who the author was Robert oppenheimer (( in charge of developing atomic bomb) compared to the same article done by the soviet news agency during the cold war.  However the differences in persuasion caused by credibility tend to diminish over time, this is called the (Sleeper effect). One month after the article was read the test wass done again and the effect of source credibility diminished , the implication is that even non crediable people can influence us...overtime. The explanation is (source memory). The idea is that we don’t only encode information given to us but also who the source of the information is.

Advanced Social psychology: Social cognition

Social Cognition

Social cognition is a broad term that describes the way people encode, process, remember, and use information in social contexts in order to make sense of other people’s behaviour. The way we organise and use social information is important to understanding of intergroup and interpersonal process’s and can lead to big changes such as reduce discrimination etc. We will see how our understanding has developed from seeing people as just cold, computer like processes to a recognition that we are often inclined to go on ‘gut feeling’ and ‘intuition’ when making judgements about others.

The Cognitive miser vs. the Naive Scientist

Attribution is the basic desire to make sense of the world, to understand it and predict what will happen, they try to work out cause and effect, act like what Heider called Naive Scientists. These are rationale and logical in making social inferences, they search for consistency and distinct information and put it in order in a systematic way therefore it’s easier to locate when needed to arrive at a external or internal attribution. However some people do not do this and choose to take mental shortcuts when making social judgements because the processes can be time consuming. The fundamental attribution error shows how we are typically inclined towards making dispositional attributions when thinking about other people’s behaviour but for our own behaviour we make external, situational attributions (actor observer bias). We make these biases because people usually rely on simpler cues for making attributions like perceptual salience (over estimate the information we have available to us). Not all people are Naive scientists sometimes people don’t want are can’t do the long time consuming process which was specified by early attribution models.

Fiske and Taylor  say we are cognitive misers, reluctant to expend cognitive resources and we look for opportunities to avoid heavy thinking etc that attribution models suggested. Our mental processing resources are limited therefore highly valued and we find any we way can to free up as much room as possible to make room for the next problem or situation in the social world.

We save this time and effect by using Heuristics which are the mental shortcuts, quick and easy however can be bias, two main heuristics are Representativeness and availability.

Representative Heuristic- allocate sets of attributes to someone if they match the prototype of a given category-put people into categories basically e.g. if you need help in the street you will look for someone in a uniform with a big black hat on because these attributes will mean he’s a police man. Disadvantage is the Base rate fallacy meaning sometimes your prototype of someone is wrong e.g. if you want help in a shop and you look for someone wearing the same cloths as there uniform you might incorrectly identify a person. It can also lead to gender stereotyping and discrimination, this makes it harder for women to succeed in male occupations and vice versa.

The Availability Heuristic-judge the frequency or probability of an event in terms of how easy it is to think of examples of that event, related to the concept of Accessibility the difference is Availability cxan relate to ones subjective experience of accessibility so taking into account that person themselves whereas accessibility is seen as objective measure of how fast something is brought to mind. E.g. how many reports of plane crash’s a person has heard of or recall will affect how safe they expect the plane to be. Schwarz and colleagues did a experiment which tests this heuristic, they found that if you asked participants to recall 12 examples of unassertive behaviour found themselves to be more assertive than people who were asked to recall 6, this was a unexpected finding and can be explained by the availability heuristic because the task will get more difficult with having to remember more and more examples of unassertive behaviour and is not a day to day thing for most people and after recalling so many they will realize examples were no longer available to them and therefore conclude they must not be particularly assertive or unassertive (depending on the behaviour they were asked to generate) this shows people attend to the difficulty of retrieving instances not the content.

The False Consensus effect

The availability heuristic is responsible for a bias known as False consensus effect (Gross and miller) , this is the tendency to exaggerate how common one’s own opinions are in the general population. Ross green and miller  shows this by asking participants if they would walk around campus with a sandwich board on them, whether they agreed or not they was then asked if everyone one else would do the same as them. They estimated that the majority would agree with them and make the same choice. This consensus estimate is not objectively possible e.g. if 70 percent support one political party then the other must have 30, can’t have 50 therefore there must be a false consensus, availability bias explains this. Our own self beliefs are easily recalled from memory, making them most available when we are asked whether most would agree with us, this shows that our own attitudes and options’ are to some extent affecting our beliefs on how much we think others will agree with us.

The Anchoring Heuristic: often a distinction is made between the availability H and this, it’s the tendency to be bias towards the starting value (anchor) in making quantitative judgements (wyer). Plous did a exp during the cold war where he asked half the pp’s if they thought there was a greater than 1 percent chance of a nuclear war starting soon and less than 90 for the other. 1 percent estimated a 10 percent chance while 90 had a 25 percent chance. This shows that our judgements are significantly influenced by the point where we start. The AH and this have the same psychological mechanism such as the anchor exerts an impact on the judgement because its the most available information relevant. This has some important implications on social contexts such as lawyer’s structure questions in the courtroom.

The motivated tactician

People can be cognitive misers over naive scientists but the attribution theory participants can and do use complex systems but only under certain conditions. Kruglanski said people are flexible social thinkers who choose between multiple cognitive strategies based on current goals or needs, people are motivated tacticians. People are strategic on distributing there cognitive resources and determine which strategy to use, either using mental shortcuts or not. People are more likely to be a cognitive miser if they are short of time, this is the first factor. Secondly is cognitive load, is we are busy with loads on our mind we are less likely to devote much time to social perception and more likely to use heuristics. Third is importance if the decision we make is importance to us we are more likely to be a naive scientist than using heuristics. Fourth and final is information level, if we don’t have much information available to us we are more likely to use heuristics because there isn’t enough information available to us to be naive scientists.

Social categorisation

The process of understanding what something is by knowing what other things is equivalent to and what other things are different from (McGarty).  Categorization is a way of classifying some collections of objects, labelling things of all been related to each other in some way. The way researchers have viewed this has changed over time, view used to be there was a precise definition of category boundaries. If just one of these attributes were missing it would be something else, however it soon became clear there isn’t an all or nothing view and certain categories have fuzzy boundaries. Importantly typicality is variable; group members can be highly typical or atypical of a category. What defines typicality is the prototype of the category. Prototypes are the most representative members of a category. Categorization of less typical members may be slow or prone to error because they are less available, e.g. more likely to think of apple and oranges when thinking of fruit instead of kiwi which is atypical. The high probability of people bringing prototypical group members to mind when categorising others can lead to errors.

Category content

- when dealing with social categories these prototypes are referred as stereotypes. Social learning and exposure play a part when it comes to forming these things. But negative stereotypes can also be formed by illusory correlation.  This is the belief that two variables are associated with each other when they are in fact not or very little. In Hamilton and Giffords experiment they explained this effect with reference to the notion of shared distinctiveness, less comments were used about the minority group, because both the minority and negative characteristics were relatively infrequent, bother were distinctive and stood out. Consistent with the use of Representative heuristic, the low number of negative behaviours came to be seen as representative of the smaller group. These findings show that heuristics in some part be responsible for the development of negative stereotypes that come to be regarded as stereotypical of minority groups.

Category structure

-Categories not only vary in content but in structure too in terms of the intra-category variability, when the category is heterogeneous  it is perceived to be made up of many different sorts of people and when its homogeneous  it is made up of many of the same sorts of people. Out groups are often seen as homogeneous and in groups seen as heterogeneous.(OHE;Jones wood and quattrone) Also seen in perceptual judgements such as us struggling to tell Japanese faces apart and vice versa and this also works for how people ,structure there memory for groups, more likely to remember facts about someone from the in group than out group. Several explanations for OHE,  first and most obvious is we  a more detailed and varied impression of our own social category compared to others because we have spent more time with them therefore more familiar, however this can’t explain it all. OHE is observed for groups with equal levels of exposure to things like gender and secondly OHE is for artificial groups in a lab where there is no prior contact, even when group membership is anonymous and finally with increasing in-group familiarity the OHE should increase but often it does not.

Why do we categorise?

Categories are in some way ultimate heuristics, they can be applied to all aspects of our lives, it saves us time and cognitive processing, be a cognitive miser, and second categorization clarifies and redefines our perception of our world. Once a category is activated  we tend t see members as possessing all the traits associated with the stereotype. AS such, categorization provides meaning, it reduces uncertainty and helps us to predict social behaviours providing prescriptive norms for understanding ourselves in relations to others.

When do we categorise?  There are several factors that evoke the use of categorization, sometimes we are not motivated tacticians but we are compelled to categorise without knowing it, there are 3 factors which determine whether a category will be activated without our awareness. Temporal primacy which is where we categorize on the basis of features we encounter first. Perceptual salience when the difference because salient e.g. one male in a room of females, and chronic accessibility which is categorization in terms of some categories such as race, age gender, these are so common they become automatized. When we try not to use categories to think about other people we can do it more this is because we are thinking about it first.

Consequences of categorization

- it leads to heightened accessibility of stereotype consistent information and selective encoding of subsequently acquired target information. Cohens study showed that the categorisation information made them evaluate the scene through two different lenses by telling them if they were a waitress (recall of beer) or a librarian (wearing glasses).

Categorisation and prejudice

- these distinctions shown previously don’t just apply to relatively neutral categories but also important social distinctions, such as race or ethnicity. Gaertner and Mclaughin found that white participants were faster to name more positive words after they had seen the racial category ‘white’ compared to ‘black’, also they recall more positive information than negative information about someone in their own group and more negative than positive about someone in another group. These positive versus negative stereotypes contribute to continuing problems of racial prejudice and discrimination. There are some exceptions to this rule of this, sometimes stereotype inconsistent information is better remembered  because its salient and attention grabbing, however it requires more of a cognitive effort. Cognitive overload- a condition that encourages the use of heuristics and there use of stereotypes therefore reducing memory for inconsistent information. Even if stereotype inconsistent information is remembered it will be remembered as a exception to the rule, a ‘subtype’ of the overall stereotype (librarian who does drink beer). Sub typing can preserve and perpetuate (continue indefinitely) the overall stereotype by negating the impact of stereotype-disconfirming information. However if enough stereotype-inconsistent information is subtype, the number of exceptions will become too great for the overall stereotype to remain the same therefore will lead to a re-definition of the prototype.

Categorisation and unconscious behaviour

- When people think about categories they can unconsciously begin to act in line with the stereotype associated with those categories , this is known as Behavioural assimilation, Bargh and colleagues  did 7 studies to show this effect, in their classic experiment they showed that priming the stereotype ‘elderly’ made participants actually walk slower and act like elderly people. In none of these experiments participants express and knowledge that they had been primed by the category in question, nor had any awareness of its influence on their subsequent behaviour. Activating category information may influence behaviour as well as impression because behavioural responses are mentally interpreted in a similar way to other social information like trait concepts and stereotypes etc, there is a neuropsychological explanation for this, the same area of the pre-motor cortex is active when humans perceive a action and when they perform that action themselves. Dijkster and Van Knipperburg  demonstrated the behavioural assimilation effect and found that people who imagined the stereotype professor instead of a secretary outperformed the other group on a general knowledge task, they argued that although intelligence is a abstract concept than a concrete behaviour these representations are hierarchically structured such as intelligence been associated with concentration etc and therefore temporarily induced pp’s to behave differently in their reaction to a multi choice task however not improved their overall intelligence, done things like improve confidence.

Categorization and self-efficacy

- The type of BAE showed above can impact academic performance, when negative performance stereotypes define our own groups. Stereotype threat is a predicament felt by people in situations where they could conform to negative stereotypes associated with their own group membership. The result of this fear of conforming to threatening stereotypes is that individuals may underperform to the task in its domain due to thinking of it(BAE), for example women may underperform on a maths test because they are aware of the stereotype in this category.

Dual process theories

- this is brewers theory and Fiske and Newberg’s continuum model both consider impression formation to compromise two distinct processes, categorisation and individualisation. Brewer argues that either a heuristic or systematic (Ind) approach is used when forming impressions of others, this distinction maps directly on the cognitive miser vs naive scientists. The continuum theory is where one extremity (the degree to which something is extreme) is category based and other attribute based, on this continuum people can be perceived as a representative of a group or an individual separate from any category membership. They argue that people start the process of impression formation by adopting a cognitive miser approach but however if the target is not a good fit they will move along the continuum and take a attribute based approach, so we basically pick one or the other depending on which one the situation favours. This switch in processing between the two can be termed decategorisation , if this occurred the person should be defined as a individual rather than a group member which should remove any category based bias, previous research has found this to be associated with less stereotyping and less unfair attribution of negative characteristics because its based on the individual not the stereotypical stuff.

Advanced Social Psychology: Attributions

Attribution

The naïve scientist-we are able to solve complex mathematical problems, and use sophisticated logic to construct arguments, we are cogent, balanced and analytical. we apply this to everyday social thought and action. Heider argued that people are motivated by two primary needs.

1. The need to form a coherent view of the world

2. He need to gain control over the environment.

Heider believed that this desire for consistency and stability, the ability to predict and control makes everyone like a naïve scientist, the need to attribute cause to effects and to create a meaningful, stable world where things makes sense, highly influential for social psychologists, called attribution theory

Attribution theory

Heider believed that we have a basic need to attribute casually because this ascribes meanings to our world, making it clear, definable and predictable thereby reducing uncertainty.

Types of attribution;

Internal attribution- Any explanation that locates the cause as being internal to the person such as personality, mood abilities, attitudes and effort

External attributions- Any explanation that locates the cause as being external to the person, such as actions of others, social pressures or luck.

two main theory's of the making attribution processes came from research in 1970's;

Correspondent inference theory

When making social inferences people try to infer that the action of an actor corresponds to, or is  a indicator of a stable personality characteristic. People believe its because people prefer internal attributions over external attributions because its more valuable when predicting behaviour for example some just being 'rude' is a internal attribution which will predict more future behaviour because they genuinely are however a external attribution such as they are having a bad day will not apply to the future therefore less predictions will be able to be made.

According to Jonas and Davies we assess whether there is a correspondence between behaviour and personality by processing three key types of information: social desirability, choice and non-common effects. We are likely to attach attributions to a person when they do a socially undesirable action and when someone does something against the majority, this may well be because of  a underlying personality trait because the person is not conforming with the rest of the majority like usual, same for when the action is seen as freely chosen. When a behaviour has a unique consequence its seen as non common consequence and this behaviour is usually given a dispositional attribution, for example a punch. Limitations also include a lot of people make external attributions as well and we often put people’s behaviour down to having a ‘bad day’ and this theory only focuses on internal attributions.

The Co-variation Model

Kelley’s model accounts for multiple behaviours, external as well as internal, she believes that causality (relationship between cause and effect) is attributed using the co-variation principle. This principle states that for something to be the cause of a particular behaviour it must be present when the behaviour is present and absent when the behaviour is absent. Three types of information are needed for arriving at an attribution whether it be internal or external: Consensus, consistency and distinctiveness information, when observing someone’s behaviour in a social context the combined impact will determine what attribution is made.

Consensus information is the extent of which other people in the scene act the same as the target person

Consistency information is the extent to which the target person acts the same way on numerous occasions

Distinctive information is the extent to which the target person reacts in the same way in different social contexts.

The presence or absence of each of these types of information has implications for whether a dispositional or situational attribution will be more likely. Presence of consensus information implies a situational cause, whereas a absence would imply a dispositional cause, the presence of consistency implies a dispositional cause whereas the absence would be a situational cause, the presence of distinctiveness information implies a dispositional cause but the absence implies a situational. Pattern of presence or absence across the three is not always as clear cut as certain examples, the way the information is combined is not simply additive, but depends on the interacts of the different elements, people are acting like naive scientists if they attribute causally this way, seeking out and assessing these three types of information then weighting it up to either a internal or external attribution, there is evidence that people can make attribution decisions in the way outlined by this model. However it is far from universally applicable, while people use all three of these information, they are not equally attended too (Chen, Yates and Mcginnies) people pay more attention to the target persons information than other peoples in the contexts information (Windschild and wells). Perhaps more importantly, although people follow these rules and deduce causality logically in some circumstances, these only appear when all the information is laid out for the participants to see clearly  and when people have the time to work out a likely cause in the complex way above, however when some information is missing people can still make attributions. This implies there are alternate ways in which people can make these sorts of judgements.

Attributional biases- Kelley's model does to some extent explain judgements, people can look for and combine three types of information however its rare that that all of us routinely do this complex process required by the co variation model, rather than being logical and rational people often go on their gut feeling, we don’t spend much time on creating these impressions about people we meet day to day. Researchers started to believe we take shortcuts in social judgement after people were making a number of 'systematic errors' when they were asked to make assessments of causality in experiments. The errors were not random which suggests alternative psychological strategies being made which came from the shortcomings of the naïve scientist approach.

The Fundamental Attribution Error: People tend to make more internal attributions rather than external even when the situational cause is clear. This is shown by Jones and Harris (1967) in their study were two groups of participants who read essays and one group were told it was the writers own choice for the topic and another where they were told the writer had no choice and the pp's ignored the situational attribution and still used the internal attribution that it reflected the writers own opinion. The reason why this Fundamental attribution error occurs is because of perpetual salience. The person being observed is the most perpetual salient aspect of the situation (moving and talking) so an internal attribution is more accessible (Taylor and Fiske). Something much simpler (what appears to capture the attention the most) determines the social judgement, not a complex naïve scientist-like thought process, the idea that people use simple processing ways such as PS is reinforced by the observation of another attribution bias, the actor-observer bias.

FAE  is not as universal as suggested, cross cultural researchers realized that in non-western cultures the tendency to use dispositional attributions wasn’t so fundamental because of differences between individualistic and collectivist cultures. Individualistic cultures tend to focus on the individual therefore more of a tendency to see internal attributions however collectivist focus on a bigger social world and focuses on those around them therefore more external attributions may be made however culture is not the only thing which can affect FAE.

The Actor-Observer Bias- The tendency to attribute other people's behaviour to internal causes and our own behaviour to external causes. Storms: in a apparent 'conversion' task two pps were allocated to observer roles and two as actors and simply had a 5 minute chat with each other, in a subsequent phase they were required to attribute causality (judge whether opinions expressed reflected the speaker ‘stable personality or some contextual determinant). He found that observers emphasized dispositional factors when explaining actor’s behaviours and actors emphasized contextual factors when explaining their own behaviour, explanation again is perceptual salience. Actor’s attention was directed away from themselves and looking at that situation and this made it more accessible to them and the observer’s attention was on the actor making dispositional explanations more accessible to them. Further support it was PS is when the actors were shown videotapes of their opposite perspective before making attributions and when actors saw their own faces their attention shifted to themselves causing them to make more internal attributions.

Self-Serving Attributions- as well as cognitive perceptual processes providing an inferential shortcut in attribution judgements, motivations can also bias attributions . Olson and Ross  argue that we are more likely to make internal attributions for our own successes and external for failures because this protects our self esteem, internal boosts our self worth and external protects us from feeling bad. This also works in group level too where groups attribute their success’s to internal and other group success’s to external therefore make us feel good by association.

Ingroup Attributions: we often divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’, in the same we make self serving attributions we make group serving attributions e.g. our foot ball team won because of skills etc but if the others win they had a bad referee which is external. These group-focused explanations are called intergroup attributions, these can lead to propagate prejudice and discrimination against minority groups in society, if minority’s positive behaviour is often due to external and negative due to internal it is easy to see how a negative stereotype is held against some groups.

Social Representations: Moscovici theory of SR refers to shared belief and understanding between a broad group of people, these include culturally held and transmitted knowledge about causal relations. This theory says that causality is transformed and communicated through informal discussion to form a common place, consensually held belief. SR are shared beliefs ranging from social to politics, they can be derived from formal theories that are then transformed into popular consciousness through discussions between people e.g. Freuds theory and people saying there being ‘anal’. These tend to be studied using qualitive measures so it shows how causality is shown through a more broad social level, providing common sense theories that help us make sense of our social worlds, this can be related to naive scientists where we attempt to make sense of the world around us