Chapter 3: Social Cognition

- How people think about themselves and the social world

- How people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgement
and decisions.
- Despite our cognitive abilities, we are prone to making some fascinating mistakes
- Kinds of social cognition:
o Automatic thinking
o Controlled thinking

Automatic Pilot
- People are typically good at sizing up a new situation quickly and accurately
- We form impressions of people quickly and effortlessly, without much conscious
analysis of our environments, based on our past experiences and knowledge of the
world.
- Automatic thinking: thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and
effortless
- We used a schema.

Schema & Low effort Thinking

- Schemas: mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social
world and interpret new situations
- Especially situations that are confusing or ambiguous
- Influences the information we notice, think about, and remember
- Helps us fill in faps of our knowledge
- Korsakov’s Syndrome: what if everything you encountered was inexplicable, confusing,
and unlike anything else you’ve known?

Factors that influence the schemas we use

- Accessibility: The extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of people’s
minds and are therefore likely to be used when making judgements about the social
world
- Schemas are accessible when they are related to:
o A past experience
 o A current goal
o A recent experience (priming)
- Priming: the process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of schemas,
trait, or concept
- Priming is a good example of automatic thinking because it occurs quickly,
unintentionally, and unconsciously
HIGGINS, RHOLES, & JONES (1977)
A study about impressions of people by priming the impressions using positive and negative
terms.

Self-fulfilling Prophecy
Making our schemas come true

Rosenthal and Jacobson (2003) demonstrated the self-fulfilling prophecy in an elementary

school. Condition: “bloomers” vs other students; Measured Variable: IQ points gained.

Automatic Thinking Types:

- Automatic goal pursuit: our goals can be activated unconsciously by recent experiences
- Heuristics: Mental shortcuts used to make judgements
o Availability heuristic: base a judgement on the ease with which they can bring
something to mind
o Representativeness heuristic: people classify something according to how similar
it is to a typical case
o Kahneman & Tversky (1973)

2
Cultural determinants of Schemas
- The schemas our culture teaches us strongly influence what we notice and remember
about the world
- Culture can influence the kinds of thinking people automatically use to understand their
worlds
- Analytic thinking style:
o A type of thinking in which people focus on the properties of objects without
considering their surrounding context.
o This type of thinking is common in Western cultures
- Holistic thinking style:
o A type of thinking in which people focus on the overall context, particularly the
ways in which objects relate to each other
o This type of thinking is common in East Asian cultures.
- Research suggests that people in all cultures are capable of thinking holistically or
analytically, but htat the environment in which people live, or even which environment
has been recently primed, triggers a reliance on one of the styles.

Controlled Social Cognition:

- Thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful (requiring mental energy)
- People have the capacity to think in a conscious, controlled way about only one thing at
a time
- Example: counterfactual thinking:
o Mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might
have been
o This way of thinking is less ideal if it results in rumination which has been found
to be a contributing factor to depression
 Rumination means people repetitively focuses on negative things in their
lives
o Can be useful if it focuses people’s attention on ways, they can better cope in the
future.