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.