Social Cognition and Perception

Prepared by Dipesh Upadhyay

prepared by Dipesh Upadhyay 1

Topics covered

• Social cognition, Schemas and Impression formation

• Attribution, attribution process, factors affecting attribution
• Biases in attribution: Fundamental attribution error, Actor Observer
Bias, Self Serving Bias, Assumed Similarity Bias
• Other biases while judging others: Halo effect, Projection, Selective
Perception, Contrast effect, Stereotyping

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Topics covered
• Attitude, components of attitudes and cognitive dissonance
• Persuasion: Message Source, Types of Arguments and Targets
• Social influence:
• Conformity and Solomon Asch’s Experiment
• Compliance: Foot in the door, door in the face, low ball, not so
free sample, that’s not all
• Obedience
• Stereotype, Prejudice and Discrimination: techniques to reduce it

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Social Cognition

• Social cognition is how we think about and interpret

ourselves and others
• It is a cognitive process by which people understand and
make sense of others and themselves
• Social cognition involves processes that underlie our
understanding of the social world

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Schema
• Schemas are sets of cognitions about people and
social experiences
• Schemas organize information stored in memory
• Give us a framework to recognize, categorize, and
recall information relating to social stimuli such as
people and groups
• Think of a “Lecturer” for instance and describe a
number of characteristics for this professional

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Impression formation
• Impression formation is about how we perceive another person.
• It is the process by which an individual organizes information about
another person to form an overall impression of that person
• Central traits: Traits utilized to form an overall impression of others.
The presence of a central trait alters the meaning of other traits.
• How would you perceive a person when you are told he is “a rather
warm person, industrious, critical, practical, and determined,” and
told a second group that he was “a rather cold person, industrious,
critical, practical, and determined.” (Kelly, 1950)

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Meaning of Attribution in Perception
• “the act of saying what is the origin or cause of something” (Cambridge
Dictionary)
• Attribution is a tendency to explain the ways in which we judge people
depending on the meaning we attribute to a given behavior in
determining whether it is related to a person’s traits or situational
factors.
• Situational causes: A cause of behavior that is brought about by
something in the environment
• Dispositional causes: A cause of behavior that is prompted by the
person’s disposition (his or her internal traits or personality
characteristics)

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Attribution Process

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Attribution Process

• The kind of explanation we come up with depends on

• time available to us
• our cognitive resources, and
• our degree of motivation to come up with an accurate
explanation

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Factors Affecting Attribution

Distinctiveness: shows different behaviors in

different situations i.e. usual or unusual behavior,
when high external attribution
Consensus: response is the same as others to same
situation, when high external attribution
Consistency: responds in the same way over time,
when high internal attribution

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Biases or Errors in Attribution
• Fundamental Attribution Error
• Actor Observer Bias
• Self serving bias
• Halo Effect
• Assumed similarity bias
• Selective perception
• Projection
• Contrast effect
• Stereotyping

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Fundamental Attribution Error
• When it comes to other people, we tend to attribute causes to
internal factors such as personality characteristics and ignore or
minimize external variables which is known as fundamental
attribution error
• For example, someone who is often late to school is too lazy to rise
early (a dispositional cause) rather than he/she studies till late night.
• The fundamental attribution error explains why people often blame
other people for things over which they usually have no control.
• The term blaming the victim is often used by social psychologists to
describe a phenomenon in which people blame innocent victims of
crimes for their misfortune i.e. rape victims
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The Actor-Observer Bias
• When it comes to explaining our own behavior, we tend
to have the opposite bias of the fundamental attribution
error.
• When something happens us, we are more likely to
blame external forces than our personal characteristics.
• This tendency is known as the actor observer bias.

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Self Serving Bias
• Tendency to attribute personal success to personal factors
(skill, ability, or effort) and to attribute failure to factors
outside oneself.
• When their teams win, coaches usually feel that the
success is due to their coaching. But when their teams
lose, coaches may think it’s due to their players’ poor
skills.
• Similarly, if you get an A on a test, you may think it’s due
to your hard work, but if you get a poor grade, it’s due to
the professor’s inadequacies.

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Halo effect
• Hari is intelligent and kind. Is he also hard working?
• Halo effect: Drawing a general impression about an
individual on the basis of a single characteristic.
• A phenomenon in which an initial understanding that a
person has positive/negative traits is used to infer other
uniformly positive/negative characteristics or vice versa.
• However, because few people have either uniformly positive
or uniformly negative traits, the halo effect leads to
misperceptions of others

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Assumed Similarity Bias
• The tendency to think of people as being similar to
oneself, even when meeting them for the first time
• How similar to you—in terms of attitudes, opinions, and
likes and dislikes—are your friends and acquaintances?
• Most people believe that their friends and acquaintances
are fairly similar to themselves.
• But this feeling goes beyond just people we know
• Given the range of people in the world, this assumption
often reduces the accuracy of our judgments

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Selective perception
• The tendency to selectively interpret what one sees on the basis of
one’s interests, background, experience, and attitudes.

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Projection
• Attributing one’s own characteristics to other people.

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Contrast effect
• Evaluation of a person’s characteristics that is affected by
comparisons with other people recently encountered who rank
higher or lower on the same characteristics.

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Stereotyping
• Judging someone on the basis of one’s perception of the group to
which that person belongs.

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Social Perception and Behavior
• Attitude and cognitive dissonance
• Persuasion
• Social influence
• Prejudice and techniques to reduce it

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An Attitude is
• An attitude can be defined as a tendency to respond positively
or negatively toward a certain idea, person, object, or situation
• For example, you probably hold attitudes toward the prime
minister of Nepal (a person), abortion (a behavior), affirmative
action (a belief), or gender (a concept)
• It is a learned tendency to evaluate some object, person, or
issue in a particular way; such evaluations may be positive,
negative, or ambivalent.

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Components of Attitudes also known as ABC Model
• Affective Component: It is the way a person feels toward the object,
person, or situation. Affect is used in psychology to mean “emotions”
or “feelings,” so the affective component is the emotional component.
For example, some people might feel that Folk music is fun.
• Behavior Component: It is the action that a person takes in regard to
the person, object, or situation. For example, a person who feels that
Folk music is fun is likely to tune in a radio program which is playing
folk music, buy rap music CDs, or go to a folk music concert.
• Cognitive Components: it is the way a person thinks about himself, an
object, or a situation. These thoughts, or cognitions, include beliefs
and ideas about the focus of the attitude. For example, the folk music
lover might believe that it is superior to other forms of music.
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Attitude Formation
• Direct contact with the person, object: One way in which attitudes
are formed is by direct contact with the person, idea, situation, or
object that is the focus of the attitude.
• Direct instruction parents and others: Another way attitudes are
formed is through direct instruction, either by parents or some other
individual.
• Interaction with others: Sometimes attitudes are formed because the
person is around other people with that attitude.
• Vicarious learning (by observing others): Many attitudes are learned
through the observation of other people’s actions and reactions to
various objects, people, or situations.

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Cognitive Dissonance
• It explains the Link Between Attitudes and Behavior
• Cognitive dissonance: Occurs when a person holds two
contradictory attitudes or behaviors or thoughts
(cognitions)
• Leon Festinger (1957) experiment

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How Dissonance is Reduced?
• Modifying the cognition
• Changing the importance of a cognition
• Adding cognitions
• Denial

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Persuasion: a method of changing attitude???

• Persuasion is the process by which one person tries to change the

belief, opinion, position, or course of action of another person. It
depends on a number of factors:
• Message source: The characteristics of a person who delivers a persuasive
message, known as the attitude communicator i.e. physically and socially
attractive, expertise and trustworthiness
• Characteristic of the message i.e. What the message is like i.e. One-sided
argument, Two-sided argument or Fear-producing message
• Characteristics of the Target i.e. central route of processing or peripheral
route of processing i.e. Intelligence person or Gender

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Figure: Routes to persuasion i.e. central or peripheral

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Social Influences
• Conformity
• Compliance
• Obedience

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In 1978, the Reverend Jim Jones, leader of the People’s Temple
in Jonestown, Guyana, ordered his followers to drink poisoned
drinks or shoot each other. Of the cult members, 640 adults
died and 274 children were either killed by their own hands or
those of their parents. prepared by Dipesh Upadhyay 30
Social Influence

Social Influence is the process

through which the real or imagined
presence of others can directly or
indirectly influence the thoughts,
feelings, and behavior of an
individual.

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Conformity
• Conformity is a change in behavior or attitudes brought about
by a desire to follow the beliefs or standards of other people
because of real or imagined group pressure
• Pressures to conform can be painfully strong
• The classic demonstration of pressure to conform comes from
a series of studies carried out in the 1950s by Solomon Asch
(Asch, 1951).

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Solomon Asch’s
study on conformity

More than 1/3 of participants

conformed and went along with
the group’s wrong answers
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Important Variables Producing Conformity
• The characteristics of the group: The more attractive a group
is to its members, the greater its ability to produce conformity.
• A person’s relative status, i.e. lower a person’s status in group,
greater the power of the group over that person’s behavior.
• The situation in which the individual is responding:
Conformity is considerably higher when people must make a
response publicly.
• The kind of task: People working on tasks and questions that
are ambiguous (having no clear answer) are more susceptible
to social pressure.
• Unanimity of the group: Conformity pressures are most
pronounced in groups that are unanimous in their support of a
position.
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Conformity and Groupthink
• Groupthink is a type of thinking in which group members share
such a strong motivation to achieve consensus that they lose the
ability to critically evaluate alternative points of view.
• Groups limit the list of possible solutions to just a few
• They spend relatively little time considering any alternatives once
the leader seems to be leaning toward a particular solution.
• Group members may completely ignore information that challenges
a developing consensus.

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Zimbardo Study on accepting social roles
• Zimbardo prison study: two-week
study at Stanford
• Half were assigned role of “guard”
• Half were assigned role of
“prisoner”
• The study was stopped after only
six days because “guards” abused
their role of power and
“prisoners” suffered severe
psychological responses.

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Compliance: Submitting to Direct Social Pressure
• In some situations social pressure is much more
obvious with direct, explicit pressure which is
known as compliance.
• Several specific sales tactics represent attempts
to gain compliance.
• Among the most frequently employed are:
• Foot-in-the-door technique
• Door-in-the-face technique
• That’s-not-all technique
• Not-so-free sample
• Lowball technique
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Obedience: Obeying Direct Orders

• Obedience is a change in behavior due to the commands of

others.
• Stanley Milgram’s study on obedience study in the 1960s
• Participants were placed in a situation in which they were told
by an experimenter to give increasingly stronger shocks to
another person as part of a study on learning.

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Milgram’s Study on Obedience
• Milgram study : would participants assigned as
“teachers” obey the experimenter’s commands to shock
the “learners” for wrong answers?

• 25% of people surveyed said

they would shock past 150
volts
• Some 65 percent of the
participants eventually used
the highest setting on the
shock generator, 450 volts, to
shock the learner.
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Milgram’s Studies

• Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority

figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being.
• Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we
are brought up.
• People tend to obey orders from other people if they recognize
their authority as morally right and/or legally based.
• This response to legitimate authority is learned in a variety of
situations, for example in the family, school, and workplace.

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Prejudice and Discrimination

• Stereotypes
• Prejudice
• Discrimination

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Stereotypes
• Stereotypes are generalized beliefs and expectations about social groups
and their members
• Stereotypes may be negative or positive which grow out of our tendency to
categorize and organize the vast amount of information we encounter in
our everyday lives.
• It is also the cognitive component of prejudice
• Prejudice includes thoughts (stereotypes), feelings, and behavioral
tendencies (possible discrimination)
• Common stereotypes and forms of prejudice involve race, religion,
ethnicity, and gender.
• Even people who on the surface appear to be unprejudiced may harbor
hidden prejudice.

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Prejudice
• Prejudice are the negative (or positive) evaluations of groups and
their members
• Stereotypes can lead to prejudice.
• Prejudice includes thoughts (stereotypes), feelings, and
behavioral tendencies (possible discrimination)
• Common stereotypes and forms of prejudice involve race,
religion, ethnicity, and gender.
• Even people who on the surface appear to be unprejudiced may
harbor hidden prejudice.

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Discrimination
• Discrimination is a negative behavior toward members of a
particular group
• Discrimination can lead to exclusion from jobs,
neighborhoods, or educational opportunities, and
• May result in members of particular groups receiving lower
salaries and benefits.
• Untouchability in case of Nepal.

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Reducing Prejudice and Discrimination
• Increasing contact between the target of stereotyping and the holder
of the stereotype.
• Making positive values and norms against prejudice more
conspicuous: communicating what is desirable and what is not
• Providing information about the targets of stereotyping
• Educating for Tolerance
• Reducing stereotype threat: programs for inclusion

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