Social Cognition

How we think about others and how those thoughts influence us

Attitudes and Attitude Formation Impression Formation Attribution Cognitive Dissonance

Schemas

Our concept of somethingExample: children have schemas

about what a dog is. At first they think a dog is all furry animals with tails.

Social schema

Organized clusters of ideas about categories of social events and people.

Examples: Tell me about

NerdsJocksFirefightersLibrarians

Person Perception

First impressions are powerful

Social Categorization- quickly assign a person to a group

Tend to notice behaviors in others that already fit our preconceived notions. Notice the Asians who get straight As. Notice the White guy who can’t dance.

Implicit Personality Theory

Assume certain things are related. Varies by culture

Rich people are happy Attractive people are nicer Quiet people are shy Athletic people aren’t intellectual

Stereotypes

Type of schema

A specific characteristic we assume somebody has because of their social schema.

Oh, you are from South Carolina. You must hate Northerners and have Confederate

flags all over your house!

Confirmation Bias

Focus on what confirms our beliefs

Ignore events that do not fit with our stereotypes and tell ourselves that that is a rare exception.

Educated, entrepreneur, millionaire

Attributions

Think of the word “attribute”

Attributions when we try to explain our own behavior and the behavior of others.

What do you notice about the results

of our attribution scales?

Fritz Heider & Attribution Theory

Situational Cause

Behavior caused by outside forces

He must have gotten stuck in traffic

Dispositional Cause Behavior caused by

personality, comes from within us.

He is irresponsible!

Theory on how & why people choose particular explanations of behavior

Effect of Attribution

How we explain someone’s behavior affects how we react to it.

Problems with Attribution

Fundamental Attribution Error- tendency to overestimate dispositional causes and underestimate situational causes in others.

They are stupid losers.

Actor-Observer Bias- tendency to focus more on situational causes in explaining our own behavior.

I am a victim.

Fundamental Attribution Error

Teacher- that kid is so lazy and doesn’t care about anything!

Student- I work 30 hours a week to help support my family

More Attribution Problems

Self-Serving Bias- We attribute our success to personal/internal factors but attribute our failures to situational/external factors.

Hindsight bias- tendency to, after learning the outcome, to believe we could have predicted the outcome

Hindsight Bias

“I knew that Asian kid would be valedictorian!

“I could have told you she’d meet a creepy guy on the Internet.”

Situational or dispositional Attributions?

A teen crashes the car. One parent says it was because of the slippery road. Another says it’s because he wasn’t paying attention to driving.

One parent uses dispositional attributes; the other uses situational attributes.

Cognitive Dissonance

How did that survey make you feel?

Why did you feel that way?

Cognitive Dissonance Theory- when our attitudes and behaviors don’t match, we experience emotional discomfort.

Dealing With Cognitive Dissonance

You have a belief that cheating on tests is bad. But you cheat on a test!!!

Cognitive Dissonance

The theory that we act to reduce the discomfort (dissonance) we feel when two of our thoughts (cognition) are inconsistent. For example, when we become aware that our attitudes and our actions clash, we can reduce the resulting dissonance by changing our attitudes.

Festinger and Carlsmith 1957

Those told to lie for $1 felt cognitive dissonance, had to change attitude to feel better.

Those told to lie for $20 didn’t feel dissonance, didn’t have to change their attitude.