Lesson 3 – Social Cognition

`• Introduction`

Social cognition is broadly defined as the way in which we think about other people, social relationships, and social institutions. It involves the cognitive processes and structures that influence and are influenced by social behavior. Understanding social cognition is crucial because it underlies how we interpret the social world and guide our actions within it.

`• Social Cognition`

Social cognition is the study of how people process social information and how these processes affect behavior.
It focuses on how we encode, store, retrieve, and apply information about ourselves, other people, and social situations.

`➥` Person Perception

Person perception is the process by which we form impressions and make judgments about other people

Initial Information: Our first impressions are often based on readily available cues:

Physical Appearance: Features like attractiveness, clothing, and grooming can significantly influence initial judgments.
Nonverbal Communication: Body language (kinesics), facial expressions, eye contact (oculesics), interpersonal distance (proxemics), and tone of voice (paralinguistics) provide rich information.
Behavioral Cues: Observable actions are a key source of information about others’ traits and intentions.

Forming First Impressions:

First impressions are formed quickly and can be surprisingly enduring.
Primacy Effect: Information received early on has a greater impact than later information in shaping our overall impression.
Thin Slicing: Forming impressions based on very brief (even seconds-long) encounters, which can sometimes be surprisingly accurate.

`➥` Impression Formation

Impression formation is the process of integrating various pieces of information about a person into a coherent overall judgment.

Models of Impression Formation:

Asch’s (1946) Configural Model: This model suggests that we form a holistic impression in which central traits influence the meaning of other traits. The context and the relationships between traits are crucial. Some traits (central traits, like “warm” vs. “cold”) have a disproportionate influence on the final impression compared to others (peripheral traits, like “polite” vs. “blunt”).
Algebraic Model: This model proposes a more mechanical process where we combine individual pieces of information about a person to form an overall impression.
- Summation: We add up the positive and negative traits.
- Averaging: We calculate the average value of the traits.
- Weighted Averaging: A variation where some traits are given more weight than others based on their perceived importance or relevance to the judgment.

`• Social Schema`

Social schemas are cognitive structures or mental templates that help us organize and interpret social information. They contain our knowledge, beliefs, and expectations about different types of people, social roles, events, and places.

`➥` Types of Schemas:

Person Schemas: Organized knowledge structures about specific individuals or types of people (e.g., stereotypes about a group, our schema for a “friendly person”).
Role Schemas: Knowledge about the behaviors expected of people in particular social positions (e.g., what a teacher, doctor, or student should do).
Event Schemas (Scripts): Mental frameworks about the sequence of actions that typically occur in a particular situation (e.g., going to a restaurant, attending a lecture, a first date).
Self-Schemas: Organized information about our own traits, values, abilities, and past experiences. They influence how we perceive and remember information about ourselves.

`➥` Influence of Schemas on Social Cognition:

Attention: Schemas direct our attention towards information that is relevant to them, often leading us to ignore schema-irrelevant information.
Interpretation: Schemas influence how we interpret ambiguous information, often making it consistent with the existing schema (schema-consistent bias).
Memory: We are more likely to remember information that is consistent with our schemas, although highly inconsistent information can also be memorable due to its novelty.
Behavior: Schemas can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies (Merton, 1948), where our expectations about someone else’s behavior lead us to act in ways that elicit the very behavior we expected.

`• Categorization and Heuristics`

Categorization: This is the process of placing individuals or objects into groups based on shared characteristics.

Social categorization (e.g., based on gender, race, occupation) simplifies our social world, allowing us to make quick inferences.

➥ Consequences of Categorization:

In-group Bias: The tendency to favor our own group (the in-group) over other groups (out-groups).
Out-group Homogeneity Effect: The perception that individuals in out-groups are more similar to each other than individuals in our own in-group.

Heuristics: These are simple, efficient rules of thumb or mental shortcuts that people use to make judgments and decisions quickly, often with limited information. While they can be helpful, they can also lead to systematic errors or biases.

➥ Types of Heuristics:

Availability Heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973): Judging the likelihood of an event based on how easily examples come to mind. Events that are vivid, recent, or emotionally charged tend to be more available in memory and thus seem more common.
Representativeness Heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1972): Classifying something based on how similar it is to a typical case or a prototype of a particular category. This can lead to ignoring base-rate information (the actual frequency of events in a population).
Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974): Making judgments by starting with an initial value (the anchor) and then adjusting insufficiently away from that anchor. The initial anchor can significantly influence the final judgment, even if it’s arbitrary.

`•` Attribution

Attribution is the process by which we seek to identify the causes of our own behavior and that of other people. It helps us to understand the social world, predict future behavior, and feel a sense of control over our environment.

`➥` Types of Attributions:

Internal (Dispositional) Attributions: Explaining behavior as due to personal characteristics such as traits, abilities, and motives.
External (Situational) Attributions: Explaining behavior as due to factors in the environment or situation.
Stable Attributions: Explaining behavior as due to factors that are relatively permanent (e.g., personality, ability, task difficulty).
Unstable Attributions: Explaining behavior as due to factors that are temporary and can change (e.g., mood, effort, luck).
Controllable Attributions: Explaining behavior as due to factors that the person could influence or control (e.g., effort).
Uncontrollable Attributions: Explaining behavior as due to factors that the person could not influence or control (e.g., natural talent, luck).

`➥` Theories of Attribution

Attribution theories aim to explain how people make causal inferences about their own and others’ behavior. Here are some key theories:

➣ Heider’s Naive Psychology (1958) [This is a foundational perspective, though not a formal “theory” with specific hypotheses in the same way as later models].

Fritz Heider is considered a pioneer in attribution theory. His “naive” or “common-sense” psychology suggests that people are like amateur scientists, trying to understand the causes of events and behavior in their social world.
Heider emphasized the distinction between internal (dispositional) and external (situational) attributions. We tend to attribute behavior to either the person’s characteristics (e.g., personality, ability) or to factors in their environment (e.g., luck, social pressure).
He also discussed the concepts of locus of control (internal vs. external cause) and stability (stable vs. unstable cause).

➣ Jones and Davis’s Correspondent Inference Theory (1965)

This theory focuses on how we infer a person’s stable dispositions (traits, attitudes, intentions) from their behavior.
We are more likely to make a correspondent inference (i.e., conclude that someone’s behavior reflects their true character) when the behavior is:
- Freely Chosen: Behavior that is willingly performed is more informative.
- Unexpected (Non-common Effects): Actions that produce unique outcomes are more telling.
- Low in Social Desirability: Behavior that goes against social norms is seen as more revealing of the individual.

➣ Kelley’s Covariation Model (1967)

Harold Kelley proposed that we make causal attributions by observing patterns in the covariation of behavior and potential causal factors. We look for what factors are present when the behavior occurs and absent when it does not.
We consider three types of information:
- Consensus: Do other people behave similarly in the same situation?
- Distinctiveness: Does the person behave differently in other situations?
- Consistency: Does the person behave the same way in the same situation on different occasions?
Based on the combination of these three dimensions, we are more likely to attribute behavior to either the person, the stimulus, or the circumstances.

➣ Schachter’s Theory of Emotional Lability (Two-Factor Theory of Emotion) (1962) [While primarily a theory of emotion, it involves attribution of physiological arousal].

Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer proposed that our experience of emotion depends on two factors:
- Physiological Arousal: We experience a general state of physiological arousal.
- Cognitive Labeling: We then seek to explain this arousal by looking at the situation and making an attribution about what we are feeling.
This theory highlights that our attributions about the source of our arousal play a crucial role in determining the specific emotion we experience.

➣ Bem’s Self-Perception Theory (1972)

Daryl Bem argued that we often infer our own attitudes and feelings by observing our own behavior and the situation in which it occurs.
This is particularly true when our internal feelings are ambiguous or weak. We essentially make attributions about ourselves in the same way we make attributions about others.
For example, if we see ourselves eating quickly, we might infer that we are hungry. If we agree to help someone without obvious external pressure, we might infer that we are helpful.

➣ Weiner’s Attributional Theory (1979, 1985, 1986)

Weiner’s Attributional Theory (1979, 1985, 1986)

Bernard Weiner focused on attributions for success and failure, particularly in achievement contexts.
He proposed that people’s explanations for success or failure can be categorized along three causal dimensions:
- Locus of Control: Internal (e.g., ability, effort) vs. External (e.g., task difficulty, luck).
- Stability: Stable (e.g., ability, task difficulty) vs. Unstable (e.g., effort, luck).
- Controllability: Controllable (e.g., effort, strategy) vs. Uncontrollable (e.g., ability, luck, task difficulty).
Weiner argued that these attributions have important consequences for our emotions (e.g., pride, shame, anger, pity) and our future expectations and motivation. For instance, attributing failure to a stable and uncontrollable cause (like low ability) might lead to feelings of helplessness and decreased motivation.

◦ Applications of Attribution Theory

Understanding attribution processes has numerous real-world applications across various domains:

Education: Teachers can use attribution theory to understand students’ responses to success and failure and to encourage adaptive attributional styles (e.g., attributing failure to lack of effort rather than lack of ability).
Therapy: Therapists can help individuals identify and modify maladaptive attributional patterns that contribute to depression, anxiety, and relationship problems. For example, challenging self-blaming attributions for negative events.
Organizational Behavior: Managers can use attribution theory to understand employee motivation, performance evaluations, and conflict resolution. Understanding how employees attribute successes and failures can inform feedback and reward systems.
Health Psychology: Understanding how people attribute the causes of their health problems can influence their coping strategies and adherence to treatment.
Legal Settings: Jurors’ attributions about the causes of a defendant’s behavior can significantly impact their judgments.
Intergroup Relations: Attributional biases, such as the ultimate attribution error (attributing negative out-group behavior to disposition and positive out-group behavior to external factors), can contribute to prejudice and discrimination. Understanding these biases can inform interventions aimed at improving intergroup relations.
Advertising and Marketing: Marketers often try to influence consumers’ attributions for product success or failure. For example, attributing positive outcomes to the product’s quality rather than external factors like advertising.
Personal Relationships: Attributions about a partner’s behavior (e.g., “They are late because they don’t care” vs. “They are late because of traffic”) can significantly impact relationship satisfaction and conflict.

`➥` Biases in Attribution

Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) or Correspondence Bias (Ross, 1977): The pervasive tendency to overestimate the role of personal (dispositional) factors and underestimate the role of situational factors in explaining other people’s behavior.
Actor-Observer Bias (Jones & Nisbett, 1972): The tendency to see our own behavior as caused by situational factors, while attributing other people’s behavior to dispositional factors.
Self-Serving Bias: The tendency to attribute our successes to internal factors (e.g., our abilities, effort) and our failures to external factors (e.g., bad luck, task difficulty). This bias helps to protect our self-esteem.
Belief in a Just World (Lerner, 1980): The assumption that bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people. This bias can lead to blaming victims for their misfortunes as a way to maintain a sense of predictability and control over one’s own life.

`★ Important names and dates`

Asch (1946): Configural Model of Impression Formation.
Merton (1948): Concept of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
Tversky & Kahneman (1972, 1973, 1974): Research on Representativeness, Availability, and Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristics.
Jones & Davis (1965): Correspondent Inference Theory.
Kelley (1967): Covariation Model of Attribution.
Ross (1977): Formalization of the Fundamental Attribution Error (Correspondence Bias).
Jones & Nisbett (1972): Actor-Observer Bias.
Lerner (1980): Belief in a Just World theory.