SOCIAL

COGNITION
Schemas
Prototypes
Heuristics
Sources of error in Social Cognition
Social Cognition

Def
 Is the study of how people make sense out of themselves and
others.
 Looks at the higher mental processes that are engaged while in
social situations. These include:
 Perception
 Memory
 Attention
 Reasoning
 Problem solving
Schema

 These are mental frameworks that help us to

organize social information, and that guide our
actions and the processing of information relevant
to those contexts (Baron & Branscombe, 2012).
Prototypes

 Summaryof the common attributes possessed by

members of a category.
Schema and Prototypes

Both simplify and reduce the need to remember excessive

amounts of information. Each is a way of organizing
knowledge. They influence us in four ways:
 Encoding- the way we interpret information
 Memory – we are more likely to remember things consistent
with our schema
 Judgments, evaluations, predictions are schema based
 Behavior – seek out information supporting our schema
Schema based errors

 Illusory Correlations
An overestimation of the relationship between two variables. Infrequent events are used to explain the whole group.

 Biased perceptions
Positivity and negativity biases due to a person’s group membership (in-groups and out-groups). We assume that people in
our groups are similar to us and therefore better, those in the out-group are perceived as different and therefore more
negatively.

 Selectivity Bias
We pay attention or select to attend to schema consistent information. We sometimes have trouble remembering
information that is inconsistent with our schema for the individual or for the category.

 Self-fulfilling prophecy
Is the tendency to see the behaviors and traits in people that we expect to see and the tendency to behave towards the other
according to the belief.

 Base rate fallacy

Refers to the tendency for people to ignore general broad based information about population characteristics in favour of
more concrete anecdotal information – vivid examples outweigh real information
Heuristics

 Def
A heuristic is a rule that tells us the likely relationship between people
and/or events. Put differently, heuristics are rapid forms of reasoning,
shortcuts that reduce complex problems to simpler judgments. There
are five different types of heuristics:

 Representativeness heuristics
 Availability heuristic
 Simulation heuristic
 Anchoring and adjustment heuristic
 Status quo heuristic
Representative heuristic: judging by
resemblance
 Refers to a mental shortcut whereby people make
judgments based on the extent to which current stimuli
or events resemble other stimuli or categories.
 According to Kahneman & Tversky (1981), we hold a
prototype of categories of people, which gives us a
typical, but brief, description of a typical person belong
to that group. A train spotter will be wearing an anorak,
wearing glasses, and probably smelling not too fresh, a
student will be wearing jeans and carrying books etc.
Availability heuristic
‘If I can retrieve instances, they must be frequent ’
 A mental shortcut whereby people base a judgment
on the ease with which they can bring something
to mind.
 McKelvie (1997) gave the participants the names
of 26 famous women and 26 less famous men.
When they were asked to estimate how many of
each sex they were they estimated more women.
These names had been more available in their
memories.
Simulation heuristic

 According to the simulation heuristic, a person

imagines possible simulations or alternative
outcomes to events that he or she encounters. They
are used in:
 Prediction and causality, ‘When Dad finds out that
I wrecked the car he will…’
 ‘If only’ conditions
 Counterfactual construction
Anchoring and adjustment heuristic
‘Where you begin makes a difference’
 A heuristic that involves the tendency to use a
number value as a starting point to which we then
make adjustments.
 The seller’s price provides a starting point to
which buyers try to make adjustments in order to
lower the price they pay. Such lowering makes the
buyer feel that by comparison to the original
asking price, they’re getting a good deal (Baron &
Branscombe,2012).
Status Quo Heuristic
‘What is, is good’
 When people are asked to make judgments and
choices, they seem to act as though they believe
the status quo is good.
 Similar to the availability heuristic, objects and
options that are more easily retrieved from
memory are judged in a heuristic fashion as
‘good’, as better than objects and options that are
new, rarely encountered or represent a change
from the status quo (Baron & Branscombe, 2012)
Potential sources of error in Social
Cognition
 Negativity bias
Greater sensitivity to negative information than to positive information.
 Optimism bias

Tendency to expect things will turn out well overall

 Overconfidence barrier

Tendency to believe our judgments are more accurate than is reasonable

 Planning fallacy

Tendency to ‘optimistically’ predict how long a task will take to complete.

 Counterfactual thinking

‘ What might have been’; imagining other outcomes than what actually transpired
Upward counterfactual thinking – imagining a better outcome
Downward counterfactual thinking – imagining a worse outcome
Potential sources of error in Social
Cognition
 Thought Suppression
Efforts to prevent certain thoughts from entering consciousness may increase
sensitivity to these thoughts
 Magical thinking

Thoughts that are not rational

 Mood dependent memory

What we remember in a particular mood is partly influenced by what we

learned previously while in that mood
 Mood Congruency effects

Positive mood – positive information saved

Negative mood – negative information saved