Exam 3

• Social cognition: the way in which individuals process, remember, and use information in social contexts.

  
  

  -Predict and explain behavior

  -Help make sense of the world and people around us
• •How does the social context influence cognitive processes?

  •Past experiences and beliefs influence social judgments.
• Stereotypes are social knowledge structures (schemas) or social beliefs.
• Stereotypes help us to process and organize information and creates mental short cuts
• Older adults worse at guessing ages of faces, better with their age group, have more positive views of aging
• Age-based double standard: We judge memory failures as more serious with older adults than memory failures in younger adults.

  •Ex- where you let your keys, your phone, your car, etc.

  
  

  •Younger adults judge older adults more harshly; older adults judge young and older adults relatively equally.
• When might we use fast or automatic thinking?

  when we are mentally exhausted or need to solve a problem quickly.
• use slow effortful thinking when you focus, pay attention, monitor and control your behavior, formulate an argument, solve a problem, or do anything that causes your brain to exert itself
• automatic thinking make decision with little effort.
• Disadvantages of automatic thinking?

  lack of flexibility and control that results when we learn things too well and are not conscious of doing them.

  choices are constrained (so many options, attention is not goal driven (driven by non conscious triggers), and

  subject to manipulation (outside our awareness).

  Lose value of experiences
• Implicit Stereotyping -activation of strong stereotyped beliefs that affect your judgments of individuals without your being aware of it (i.e., the process is unconscious)
• Implicit Association Test

  Measures how strongly two concepts are associated with positive or negative words (e.g., “good” vs. “bad”).

  The way it works: The IAT score is based on how long it takes a person, on average, to sort the words in the third part of the IAT versus the fifth part of the IAT. We would say that one has an implicit preference for thin people relative to fat people if they are faster to categorize words when Thin People and Good share a response key and Fat People and Bad share a response key, relative to the reverse.
• Problems with IAT?

  •Not good at predicting behavior

  •Tends not to correlate with other attitude measures

  •Affected by extrapersonal information, cultural knowledge, norms
• Imagined Group Contact


  •Contact with outgroup members can help to reduce bias.

  •imagine yourself having a positive interaction with a member of a group about whom you hold negative stereotypes.
• Can Implicit stereotypes be change?

  •Yes, if we see ourselves having different kinds of interactions with the target groups, though the elder we get, the more work this takes.

  •Reduced bias in four domains:

  1. •Attitudes
  2. •Emotions
  3. •Intentions
  4. •Behaviors

  •Effects greatest for those who elaborated more on the imagined contact.
• Stereotype Threat

  •fear of being judged in accordance with a negative stereotype about a group to which you belong.
• Social Knowledge Structures


  •Similar to a schema (mental structures)

  •how we represent and interpret the behavior of others in a social situation

  •Scripts for events

  •What you do at a restaurant

  •How to behave on a date
• •Strong social beliefs come from

  •Cohort differences

  •Socialization
• individual differences in the strength of social representations of rules, beliefs, and attitudes linked to specific situations

  •Cognitive- our thoughts about a situation

  •Emotional- how we react or our feelings about a situation.
• Self-perception of aging


  •individual’s perception of their own aging.

  •More positive views correlated with well-being, health, and longer life.
• •Labeling theory: 


  when confronted with age-related stereotypes, older adults are more likely to include that in their self-perception.
• •Resilience theory: 


  Negative stereotypes result in a rejection of that view in favor of a more positive one  -

  negative images of aging have more powerful effects than positive ones in determining self-perceptions of aging.

  Negative stereotypes have greater impact
• •Emotional Intelligence: 


  Ability to recognize emotions, identify them, and use that information to guide thinking and behavior.

  2 aspects:

  •Can think of it as a trait that reflects a person’s self-perceived dispositions and abilities

  •An ability that reflects success at processing emotional information and then using it appropriately in social contexts.
• emotional intelligence in older age does what?


  increase with age and may increase well-being in older adults
• •Impression formation: 


  how we form and revise first impressions about people.
• Do older adults change their first impressions easily? 


  •Older adults: if positive information is presented first followed by negative à yes, overall negative appraisal.

  If negative information is presented first à no, impression was hard to modify.

  •Negativity bias: Negative impressions persist despite new positive information.

  •Affected more by cognitively demanding contexts (time limit, distractions, etc.)
• Do younger adjults change thier first impressions easily?


  •Younger adults: consistent with new info•Based on most recent information received
• •Social Knowledge: 


  previous experiences stored in memory regarding social situations and contexts.

  •How would you behave at an important dinner? Out with friends at a concert?

  Helps us to form impressions of people
• •What happens when people don’t live up to our expectations?


  •If the supervisor’s behavior is inconsistent with our implicit theory of how he or she should act, this affects the impression we form of the supervisor.
• Accessibility of social knowledge depends on ?


  •Strength of information stored: what information do you readily have access to?•

  •Age: older adults depend on easily accessible information to make impressions and judgments.

  •source judgments (remembering the source for learned information).

  •social judgment biases: Older adults have a harder time distinguishing fact from fiction.
• Age Differences in Social Judgments


  •Cognitive demand matters

  •If we are taxed, distracted, tired, etc. it becomes harder to override initial judgments (fast, automatic process).

  •Older adults more likely to stick to initial judgments

  •Also less likely to take into account external factors
• •Causal attributions: 


  explanation about why certain behaviors occur.
• •Dispositional attribution: 


  behavior is due to some internal characteristic of the person.

  •Poor performance was due to the participant’s anxiety.
• •Situational attribution 


  behavior is caused by an external force•Poor performance due to bad lighting or social pressure
• Correspondence Bias


  Observers under-emphasize situational and environmental explanations for behavior and over-emphasize dispositional and personality based explanations
• Correspondence Bias aka?


  • Emerging adults have a tendency to draw inferences about older people's dispositions from behavior that can be fully explained through situational factors
  • Also known as the fundamental attribution error
• Older adults were more predisposed to making

  dispositional attributions

  and engaged in less postformal/dialectical reasoning in negative relationship situations
• The correspondence bias in older adults only occurred in negative relationship situations
• Why do everyday reasoning biases in older adults occur? not because of declining cognitive ability, but because older adults are more likely than younger adults to base their judgments on their own beliefs
• For older Americans to correct their attributions


  The constraint needs to provide a meaningful reason why a person would contradict his or her own beliefs