Social cognition: Perceiving self and
others
Ari Sudan Tiwari, Ph. D.
Social cognition: Perceiving the social world
The manner in which we receive, interpret, analyze,
remember and use information about the social
world.
Inquisitive area of social cognition
Why we are overoptimistic while planning various tasks?
Do our images of ‘certain kinds of persons’ influence our behaviour?
Do our expectations about various events shape our reactions to
them when they actually occur?
Does thinking too much get us confused and interfere with our ability
to make accurate judgments?
What types of errors we commit over and over again while
perceiving people around us?
Schemas
Schemas are mental frameworks containing
information relevant to specific situations or events,
which, once formed, help us interpret these situations
and what is happening in them.
Types of schemas
Person schemas are mental frameworks suggesting that certain traits and behaviours go together and individuals having them represent a certain type.
Role schemas contain information about how persons playing specific roles generally act.
Event schemas (Scripts) are mental frameworks of and expectations in specific situations and events.
Impact of schemas on social cognition
Attention
Information inconsistent with existing schema, and thus unexpected,
are more easily noticed and attended
Impact of schemas on social cognition
Encoding
At the initial stage, when schema are being formed, inconsistent
information are more easily encoded
Once schema are formed information consistent with the
schema are more readily encoded and stored
Impact of schemas on social cognition
Recovery and Retrieval
Information consistent with existing schema or part of them, are more
often retrieved, recovered and used in our thought, decisions and
behaviours
Heuristics: Mental shortcuts in social cognition
Heuristics are rules or principles that allow us to make social
judgments more quickly and with reduced efforts.
Bombardment of social information
Limited capacity cognitive system
Heuristics
Social interaction needs:
Rapid judgment
Reduced effort
Reasonable accuracy
Types of heuristics
Representativeness: Judging by resemblance
Strategy to make social judgments based on the extent to which current
person’s or event’s characteristics resemble with the characteristics of
stored schema of similar event or person
Availability: What comes to mind first
Strategy to make social judgments based on specific kinds of information
that can easily be brought into mind
Types of heuristics
False consensus effect
Tendency to assume that others behave or think as we do to a greater
extent than is actually true
Priming: Medical student syndrome
Some events or stimuli increase the availability of specific types of
information in memory or consciousness
Errors in social cognition
Rational vs. intuitive processing
Red and White Jelly Beans Experiment
Rational Thinking in situations involving analytical thought (Solving mathematical problems)
Intuitive Thinking in situation involving social judgments
Dealing with inconsistent information
Tendency to pay greater attention to information that is unexpected or somehow inconsistent with our expectations
Errors in social cognition
Optimistic bias for task completion: Planning Fallacy
Tendency to make optimistic prediction concerning how long a task will take
Automatic vigilance: Noticing the negative
We never notice a person’s twenty smiles but readily notice once he frowns.
Strong tendency to pay attention to undesirable or negative information
Errors in social cognition
Counterfactual thinking: Experience of regret
Tendency to evaluate events by thinking about alternatives to
them-“what might have been or should have been”
Errors in social cognition
Magical thinking
Belief that things that resemble one another share fundamental
properties; Assumptions that does not hold up to rational inquiry
Law of Contagion: When two objects touch, they pass properties
to one another,
Law of Similarity: Things that resemble one another share
fundamental properties
Person perception: Attribution
Attribution is the process of identifying the causes of others’
behaviour and their stable traits and dispositions
Correspondent Inference Theory: Jones and Davis
Behaviour that is
Freely chosen
Non common in its effects
Low in social desirability
Somehow forced
Common in its effects
High in social desirability
Originates from the person’s stable traits
Originates from the situational effects
Theory of Causal Attribution: Kelley
Causes Behind Others’ Behaviours:
Internal Causes: Persons’ traits, motives and intentions
External Causes: Some aspects of social or physical world
ConsensusThe extent to which an individual’s response is similar to one shown by others
ConsistencyThe extent to which an individual responds to a given situation in the same way as on different occasions
DistinctivenessThe extent to which an individual responds in the same way as to different situations
Low
High
Low
High
High
High
Internal Causes
External Causes
Theory of Causal Attribution: Kelley
How do we handle multiple causes?
Discounting Principle
Tendency to attach less importance to one potential cause of a
behaviour when other potential causes are also present
Augmenting Principle
Tendency to attach greater importance to one potential cause of a
behaviour if it occurs despite the presence of other inhibitory factors
Attribution: Basic sources of errors
Fundamental attribution error
Tendency to overestimate the impact of dispositional causes on others’ behaviour
Actor-observer effect
Tendency to attribute our own behaviour mainly to situational causes but others’ behaviour to internal (dispositional) causes
Self-serving bias
Tendency to attribute our own positive outcomes to internal causes (own traits or characteristics) but negative outcomes to external causes (chance, task difficulty)
Rules of justice in social relationship
The Contribution Rule and Equity
A relationship is considered fair when all individuals involved receive outcomes proportional to their respective contributions
The Need Rule and Norm of Social Responsibility
Outcome should be distributed in accordance with the relative amount of individual need
The Equality Rule
Outcomes should be distributed equally among the participants in a relationship, irrespective of individual contributions or needs
Thank You