SOCIAL

COGNITION
HOW WE THINK OF THE
SOCIAL WORLD
Social Cognition
How people think about themselves and
the social world
Two different kinds of
Social Cognition
1. Automatic thinking
2. Controlled Thinking
Automatic thinking
- Thinking that is nonconscious,
unintentional, involuntary, and
effortless
Schemas
- Mental structures people use to
organize their knowledge about the
social world around themes or subjects
that influence the information people
notice, think about, and remember
Question

How would you feel if we

do not have schemas?
Answer:

Korsakov’s (Korsakoff ’s) syndrome

- People with this disorder lose the
ability to form new memories
 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 judgments about the social world

It has three Reasons

First Reason:
• some schemas are chronically accessible due to past
experience (Chen & Andersen, 1999; Coane & Balota,
2009; Schlegel et al., 2009)

Second Reason:
• it is related to a current goal

Third Reason:
• schemas can become temporarily accessible because of
our recent experiences (Bargh, 1996; Higgins &
Bargh, 1987; Oishi, Schimmack, & Colcombe, 2003).
 Example of Priming (Implicit Memory):

Suppose you are in a conversation while other

people nearby are discussing something else. You
ignore the other discussion, but a few words from
that background conversation probably creep into
your own. You do not even notice the influence,
although an observer might.
 For each of the following three-letter
combinations, fill in additional letters to make
any English word based on the situation given
earlier:

CON_______ DIS_______
SUP_______ PRO_______
 Question

How will we make our

schemas come true?
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
The case wherein people have an expectation about:
◦ what another person is like
◦ which influences how they act toward that person
◦ which causes that person to behave consistently with
people’s original expectations

making the expectations come true

Types of Automatic Thinking
 Automatic Goal Pursuit
A classmate you don’t know very well tells you he is having
difficulty with some of the material in Psych 22 and asks
whether you can have coffee and go over your class notes
with him. On the one hand, you want to be helpful,
satisfying your goal to be a caring, compassionate person.
On the other hand, you want to satisfy your goal of doing
well in the class and are hesitant to hurt your chances by
raising someone else’s grade.
Which goal do you act on?
Automatic Decision Making
How do you make decisions?
Automatic Thinking and Metaphors About the
Body and the Mind

Suppose that, as you are leaving a store one day, a stranger

approaches you and says that her purse was just stolen and
asks if you could spare a couple of dollars so that she could
take the bus home. On the one hand, the woman could be
telling the truth and really need someone to help her out,
but on the other, she could be making the whole thing up in
order to get money to buy drugs or alcohol
Will you decide to help her?
Mental Strategies and
Shortcuts:
Judgmental Heuristics

What shortcuts do people use?

What more likely kill you?
 Judgmental Heuristics

-Heuristic comes from the Greek word meaning

“discover”
- Mental shortcuts people use to make judgments
quickly and efficiently
 Availability Heuristic

-A mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment

on the ease with which they can bring something to mind
- is a cognitive bias in which you make a decision based on
an example, information, or recent experience that is that
readily available to you, even though it may not be the best
example to inform your decision (Tversky & Kahneman,
1973)
 Representativeness Heuristic

-A mental shortcut whereby people classify something

according to how similar it is to a typical case
-Basic rate information: Information about the frequency of
members of different categories in the population
- Knowledge of base rates will allow you to better understand
the likelihood of certain events occurring in your life
Cultural Differences in Social
Cognition

How does culture influence social

thinking?
 Cultural Determinants of Schemas

-When one interacts with members of the same culture

over and over again
-explains how people organize and process information about
events and objects in their cultural environment.
 Holistic versus Analytic Thinking

Analytic Thinking Style Holistic Thinking Style

A type of thinking in which
people focus on the properties
of objects without considering
their surrounding context
A type of thinking in which
people focus on the overall
context, particularly the ways
in which objects relate to each
other
 Question

In your own opinion, who is more forgiving? People,

who have analytical thinking or holistic thinking?
Controlled thinking
Thinking that is conscious, intentional,
voluntary, and effortful
 Controlled Thinking and Free will

How do you make your decisions? Is it through controlled

thinking (self-control) or free will?
 Controlled Thinking and Free will

- Self-control focuses on a specific set of internal constraints

(temptations, desires, urges, needs, etc.)
- Belief in a free will includes freedom from all constraints
 Counterfactual Thinking

-Mentally changing some aspects of the past as a way of

imagining what might have been
-Counterfactual thoughts can have a big influence on our
emotional reactions to events. The easier it is to mentally undo
an outcome, the stronger the emotional reaction to it (Camille
et al., 2004; Miller & Taylor, 2002; Zhang & Covey, 2014).
How can we improve our
human thinking?

One purpose of controlled thinking is to

provide checks and balances for
automatic thinking.
Make people a little more humble about their reasoning
abilities

• Overconfidence Barrier: The fact that people usually have

too much confidence in the accuracy of their judgments

Directly teach people some basic statistical and

methodological principles about how to reason correctly,
with the hope that they will apply these principles in their
everyday lives.
LET’S REVIEW!
 Summary

- Social cognition refers to the ways in which people think

about themselves and the social world
- Two types of social cognition:
- Automatic Thinking which is nonconscious, unintentional,
involuntary, and effortless.
- Controlled Thinking which is conscious, intentional, voluntary,
and effortful.
 Summary
- Automatic Thinking
- Schemas: mental structures for organizing their knowledge
about the social world around themes or subjects and for
influencing what they notice, think about, and remember
- Two types:
- Accessibility: they are at the forefront of our minds.
- Priming: the process by which recent experiences increase the
accessibility of a schema.
- Making Our Schemas Come True: Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
- whereby a schema or expectation about another person influences how
we act toward that person, which causes that person to behave
consistently with our expectation.
 Summary
- Types of Automatic Thinking
- Automatic Goal Pursuit: In our everyday lives there are often
competing goals, and the one we choose to follow can happen
automatically. People often act on goals that have been recently
primed.
- Automatic Decision-Making: People’s unconscious minds often help
them make good decisions. A good procedure is to analyze all the
alternatives, spend some time analyzing the options consciously, and
then distract oneself to allow unconscious processes to operate.
- Automatic Thinking and Metaphors About the Body and the Mind:
People use metaphors about the mind and the body. Physical
sensations can prime a metaphor, which then influences people’s
judgments.
 Summary
- Judgmental Heuristics are mental shortcuts people use to
make judgments quickly and efficiently.
- Availability heuristic whereby people base a judgment on the
ease with which they can bring something to mind
- Representativeness heuristic whereby people classify
something according to how similar it is to a typical case.
- How Does Culture Influence Social Thinking?
- Cultural Determinants of Schemas
- Holistic versus Analytic Thinking
 Summary
- Analytic Thinking: a type of thinking in which people focus
on the properties of objects without considering their
surrounding context.
- Holistic Thinking: a type of thinking in which people focus on
the overall context, particularly the ways in which objects
relate to each other.
 Summary
- Controlled Thinking
- Free will: There can be a disconnect between our conscious sense of
how much we are causing our own actions and how much we really are
causing them.
- Counterfactual Reasoning: whereby people mentally change some
aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been
- Improving Human thinking:
- social cognition can go wrong, producing faulty judgments
- Research shows that some kinds of thinking, such as statistical
reasoning, can be improved dramatically with training