Social Cognition

• Social cognition: how people think about themselves, the social world and how they select, interpret, remember and use social information to make judgements/decisions
• Two kinds of social cognition: automatic thinking and controlled thinking
• Automatic thinking is quick, effortless with no conscious deliberation of thoughts, perceptions and assumptions
• Schemas: mental structures people use to organise knowledge about the world around themes influencing the way we interpret new situations
• When schemas are applied to members of social groups, that is know as stereotypes
• Schemas can become stronger or more resistant to change
• Confirmatory Hypothesis Testing: selectively seeking information that supports one's beliefs
• Snyder & Swann (1978) asked half pps to find out if other person was introvert and the other half of pps to find out if other person was extrovert -> pps selected questions that confirmed their hypothesis -> confirmatory hypothesis testing
• Holding an opposite hypothesis or having a need for valid information reduces confirmatory hypothesis testing
• Self-fulfilling prophecy: occurs when a person's expectations about their own behavior or abilities influence their behavior and performance.
• Priming: process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a schema/trait/concept
• Factors that affect accessibility (of schemas): past experience, relation to current goals, temporarily related to recent experience
• Representativeness Heuristic selects schema based on similarity between stimulus and schema
• Conjunction Error: belief that a combination of events is more likely than only one of the events separately (A vs A&B)
• Availability Heuristic: selecting info based on how easily examples come to mind
• Anchoring Heuristic: selecting a reference value and revising estimate up/down to reach conclusion
• Controlled Thinking is effortful and deliberate, carefully selecting right course of action
• The easier it is to mentally undo an outcome, the stronger the emotional reaction to it
• Mentally undoing the past: counterfactual reasoning, 'what ifs'