Download ppt - Chapter 3 Social Cognition: How We Think About the Social World

Chapter 3Chapter 3Chapter 3Chapter 3

Social Cognition: Social Cognition:

How We Think About the How We Think About the Social WorldSocial World

Chapter OutlineChapter Outline

I. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking

On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort ThinkingOn Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking

• Social cognition is the study of how people select, interpret, and use information to make judgments about themselves and the social world.


• People use mental shortcuts to simplify the amount of information they receive from the environment.


• Social cognition is pragmatic, adopting different procedures depending on the person’s goals and needs in a situation.


• People as Everyday Theorists: Automatic Thinking with Schemas

Schemas are mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social world around themes or subjects: schemas affect what information we notice, think about, and remember.



Schemas act as filters, screening out information that is inconsistent with them. Although we may notice and remember glaring exceptions, usually we attend only to schema-consistent information.



Accessibility: the ease with which schemas can be brought to mind.

Priming: the process by which recent experiences make schemas, traits, or concepts come to mind more readily.



Perseverance effect: the tendency for people’s beliefs about themselves and their world to persist even when those beliefs are discredited.


• People as Everyday Theorists: Schemas and Their Influence

Self-fulfilling prophecy: whereby people have an expectation about what another person is like, which influences how they act toward that person, which causes that person to behave in a way consistent with the original expectation.


• Mental Strategies and Shortcuts

Judgmental heuristics are mental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently.



The availability heuristic is a mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind.


• Mental Strategies and ShortcutsThe representativeness heuristic is a mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case.

Base rate information is information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population. It usually is not considered when people are using mental shortcuts.



The anchoring and adjustment heuristic is a mental shortcut that involves using a number or value as a starting point, and then adjusting one’s answer away from this anchor.

One example of anchoring and adjustment is biased sampling, whereby people make generalizations from samples of information they know are biased or atypical.


II. Controlled Social Cognition: High-Effort Thinking

Controlled Social Cognition: High-Effort Controlled Social Cognition: High-Effort ThinkingThinking

• Controlled thinking is conscious, voluntary, and effortful unlike automatic thinking which is nonconscious, effortless, and involuntary.


• The Motivated Social Thinker

In many studies, people make judgments that are of little importance to them. When the importance is increased, people may use more sophisticated strategies, are more accurate, and are more likely to notice facts that conflict with their schemas.


• Ironic Processing and Thought Suppression

Being preoccupied reduces our ability to engage in thought suppression, or the attempt to avoid thinking about something we would just as soon forget.


• Ironic Processing and Thought Suppression

According to Wegner, thought suppression depends on two processes: “monitoring” (searching for evidence that the unwanted thought is about to intrude) and “operating process” (finding a distraction).


• Counterfactual thinking is mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been.


III. A Portrayal of Social Thinking

A Portrayal of Human ThinkingA Portrayal of Human Thinking

• People as “flawed scientists”: Though people are brilliant thinkers, they are often blind to truths that don’t fit their theories and sometimes even treat others in ways that make their theories come true.


IV. Improving Human Thinking

Improving Human ThinkingImproving Human Thinking

• Teaching Reasoning Skills

Often we have more confidence in our judgements than we should. To try to improve reasoning skills, we need to break through this overconfidence barrier and make people more aware of the limits of their cognitive abilities.

Study QuestionsStudy Questions

What is social cognition? What do researchers in this area study?


What are the advantages of automatic thinking? When is this type of thinking problematic?


Why are schemas so important to study? What role do they play in people’s understanding and interpretations of themselves and the social world? What are examples of cognitive processes that are influenced by schemas?


What functions do schemas serve? Why does their use sometimes have adaptive value? How is their use maladaptive? How do accessibility and priming affect schema use?


What is the relationship between schemas and the perseverance effect?


Why does the self-fulfilling prophecy occur? What function does it serve? How can it affect resistance to schema change?


How do cultures influence schema content?


Why do people use judgmental heuristics? What are three heuristics that people use to make judgments? When people rely on these heuristics what kind of information are they not taking into account?


What are the effects of motivation on judgment formation? How is automatic thinking different from controlled thinking? What effects does cognitive load have on these two types of thinking?


How do automatic processing and controlled processing interact to allow for successful thought suppression?


What is the relationship between the occurrence of counterfactual thinking and emotional reactions to events?


What is perhaps the best metaphor for the social thinker? Why?


What can we teach people so that they overcome the overconfidence barrier and increase their reasoning ability?