Week 2

Chapter 2
Social Cognition:
How We Think About the Social World
Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Learning Objectives
•
3.1 What is automatic thinking, and how are
schemas an example of that kind of thought?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of
schemas?
•
3.2 What are other types of automatic thinking
and how do they operate?
•
3.3 How does culture influence social thinking?
•
3.4 What are some of the drawbacks of controlled
thinking, and how can we improve its effectiveness?

On Automatic Pilot:
Low-Effort Thinking
3.1 What is automatic thinking, and how are schemas an
example of that kind of thought? What are the
advantages and disadvantages of schemas?

Social Cognition
• How people think about themselves and the social

world
• How people select, interpret, remember, and use

social information to make judgments and
decisions

The Controlled Thinker
Rodin’s famous sculpture, The Thinker, mimics controlled thinking, where people
sit down and consider something slowly and deliberately. Even when we do not
know it, however, we are engaging in automatic thinking, which is nonconscious,
unintentional, involuntary, and effortless.
Source: Sean Nel/Shutterstock

Two Kinds of Social Cognition
1. Automatic thinking
– Quick
– No conscious deliberation of thoughts, perceptions,
assumptions
2. Controlled thinking
– Effortful and deliberate
– Thinking about self and environment
– Carefully selecting the right course of action

Automatic Thinking (1 of 3)
• We often size up a new situation very quickly.
• Often these quick conclusions are correct.
– Example: You can tell the difference between a college

classroom and a frat party without having to think about
it.

• Imagine a different approach: slow and deliberate
thinking.
• Imagine driving down the road and stopping

repeatedly to analyze every twist and turn.
• Imagine meeting a new person and excusing

yourself for 15 minutes to analyze what you
learned from them.

• Thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional,

involuntary, and effortless
• How do we do this?
– Relate new situations to past experiences
– Use schemas
 Mental structures that organize our knowledge of the social
world
 Influences the information people notice, think about, and

remember

People as Everyday Theorists:
Automatic Thinking with Schemas
• The term schema encompasses our knowledge
and impression of:
– Other people
– Ourselves
– Social roles
 E.g., what a librarian or engineer is like
– Specific events
 E.g., what usually happens when people eat a meal in a
restaurant

Schemas and Stereotypes
• When applied to members of a social group such

as a fraternity, gender, or race, schemas are
commonly referred to as stereotypes.
– Can be applied rapidly and automatically when we

encounter other people.

Function of Schemas
• Schemas used to
– Organize what we know
– Interpret new situations
• Korsakov’s syndrome
– Neurological disorder
 Can’t form memories
– Each situation is new

Schemas as Memory Guides
• Helps “fill in the blanks” when trying to remember
– Remember some information that was there
 Particularly information to which our schemas led us to pay

more attention
– Also remember other information that was never there
 Add this information unknowingly

How Schemas Affect Perception (1 of 2)
• Two groups of students observe the same exact
lecture, but prior to the lecture students are given
different descriptions of the guest lecturer:
– Condition 1: People who know him consider him a rather
cold person, industrious, critical, practical, and
determined.
– Condition 2: People who know him consider him a very
warm person, industrious, critical, practical, and
determined.
• DV: How did they rate the person’s arrogance and
sense of humor?

How Schemas Affect Perception (2 of 2)
People who know him consider him a rather cold People who know him consider him a very
person, industrious, critical, practical, and warm person, industrious, critical,
determined.
Sean Nel/Shutterstock
practical, and determined.
Sean Nel/Shutterstock
• Results:
– Arrogance: rated the same for both conditions because it’s an
unambiguous trait
– Sense of humor: rated as funnier in warm condition compared to cold
condition because it’s an ambiguous trait
• Ambiguous information – use schemas to fill in the blanks

An Alcoholic or Just Homeless?
Is this man an alcoholic or just down on his luck? Our judgments about other
people can be influenced by schemas that are accessible in our memories. If you
had just been talking to a friend about a relative who had an alcohol problem, you
might be more likely to think that this man has an alcohol problem as well,
because alcoholism is accessible in your memory.
Source: Wrangler/Shutterstock

Which Schemas Do We Use?
Accessibility and Priming
• Accessibility
– The extent to which schemas and concepts are at the
forefront of people’s minds and are therefore likely to
be used when we are making judgments about the
social world
Priming
The process by which recent experiences increase the

accessibility of a schema, trait, or concept

Accessibility and Priming (1 of 3)
• Something can become accessible for three
reasons:
– Chronically accessible due to past experience.
– Accessible because it is related to a current goal
– Temporarily accessible because of our recent

experience

Making Our Schemas Come True:
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
• The case whereby 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.

Figure 3.3
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
A sad cycle in four acts.

The Effects of Teachers’ Expectations
Teachers can unintentionally make their expectations about their students come true by
treating some students differently from others.
Source: Monkey Business/Fotolia

Types of Automatic Thinking
3.2 What are other types of automatic thinking and how
do they operate?

Automatic Goal Pursuit
• Automatic goal pursuit
– Prime goals in subtle way to see if it influences behavior
• Example:
– Task 1: Primed goals via a sentence unscrambling task
 Condition 1: Words related to God (spirit, God, sacred, prophet)
 Condition 2: Neutral words
 Condition 3: Nonreligious words related to fairness (civic, contract)
– Task 2: Economics game—given $1 coins ($10 total) to divide up
between themselves and partner (thought task unrelated to first)
– Results: Gave more money in the God ($4.56) and fairness ($4.44)
than in the neutral ($2.56) condition

How Goals Influence Behavior
Research has found that people’s goals can be activated unconsciously by their
recent experiences. For example, someone who walks by a church might have
the “Golden Rule” activated without knowing it, making him or her more likely to
give money to a homeless person.
Source: Gina Sanders/Fotolia

Automatic Decision Making
• Automatic decision making
– Distracting oneself prior to making a decision
• Ensuring distraction improves decision making:
– Have a conscious goal to make a good choice
– Decision requires integration of complex information

Automatic Thinking and Metaphors
About the Body and the Mind (1 of 2)
• Physical sensations can prime metaphors
– Example:
 Scent of cleanliness increases the degree to which people

trust strangers and help others (Helzer & Pizarro, 2011; Meier,
Schnall, Schwarz, & Bargh, 2012)
 Cleanliness associated with morality; dirtiness with immorality

Automatic Thinking and Metaphors
About the Body and the Mind (2 of 2)
• Metaphors can influence decisions
– Holding hot coffee or iced coffee
– Encounter a stranger
 Hot coffee: Primes “warm & friendly” metaphor
– Stranger rated as friendly
 Iced coffee: Primes “unfriendly people are cold”
– Rate stranger as unfriendly

A Heavy Clipboard Carries Weight
Will this person’s answers to the questionnaire be influenced by how heavy the
clipboard is? Why or why not?
Source: Feedough/Getty Images

Mental Strategies and Shortcuts (1 of 3)
• Mental shortcuts
– Efficient
 Don’t usually have time to fully search all options
– Usually lead to good decisions quickly

• Schemas are a shortcut people use
– But we don’t have a ready-made schema for every

judgment or decision
– Sometimes there are too many schemas available
• So what do we do?

• Judgmental Heuristics
– 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
• The trouble: sometimes what is easiest to remember is not

typical of the overall picture, leading to faulty conclusions
• Physicians have been found to use the availability heuristic

when making diagnoses. Their diagnoses are influenced
by how easily they can bring different diseases to mind.

How Easily Does It Come to Mind?
• Availability Heuristic
– Example
 When physicians are diagnosing diseases, it might seem
straightforward for them to observe people’s symptoms and
figure out what disease, if any, they have.
– Sometimes, symptoms might be a sign of several different
disorders.
– Do doctors use the availability heuristic, whereby they are more

likely to consider diagnoses that come to mind easily?
– Several studies of medical diagnoses suggest that the answer is

yes.

Availability Heuristic and
Self-Judgments (1 of 2)
• People were asked to remember either 6 or 12
examples of their own past assertive behaviors
– People who thought of 6 examples
 Rated themselves as relatively assertive
 It was easy to think of this many examples
– “Hey, this is easy—I guess I’m a pretty assertive person”

Availability Heuristic and
Self-Judgments (2 of 2)
• People were asked to remember either 6 or 12
examples of their own past assertive behaviors
– People who thought of 12 examples
 Rated themselves as relatively unassertive
 It was difficult to think of this many examples
– “Hmm, this is hard—I must not be a very assertive person”

Figure 3.5
Availability and Assertiveness
People asked to think of 6 times they had behaved assertively found it easy to do so and
concluded that they were pretty assertive people. People asked to think of 12 times they
had behaved assertively found it difficult to think of so many examples and concluded that
they were not very assertive people (see the left-hand side of the graph). Similar results
were found among people asked to think of 6 or 12 times they had behaved unassertively
(see the right-hand side of the graph). These results show that people often base their
judgments on availability, or how easily they can bring information to mind. (Adapted from
Schwartz et al., 1991)

How Similar Is A to B?
The Representativeness Heuristic
• Representativeness heuristic
– A mental shortcut whereby people classify something

according to how similar it is to a typical case
• Base rate information
– Information about the frequency of members of

different categories in the population

Personality Tests and the
Representativeness Heuristic
• We tend to perceive personality tests as uncannily
accurate, known as the “Barnum effect”
• Why does this happen?
– Representative heuristic—statements are so vague

that everyone can find a past behavior similar to the
feedback
– We do not go beyond representative examples that

come to mind

Cultural Differences in Social
Cognition
3.3 How does culture influence social thinking?

Cultural Determinants of Schemas
• Culturally Universal
– All people have schemas
• Culture Differences
– Content of schemas

Culture and Social Cognition (1 of 2)
• Analytic thinking style

– focus on objects without considering surrounding
context
– associated with Western cultures
• Holistic thinking style

– focus on the overall context, relation between objects
– associated with Eastern cultures

Culture and Social Cognition (2 of 2)
• Eastern and Western cultures
– equally capable of using both styles
– environment in which people live “primes” one style

over the other

Controlled Social Cognition:
High-Effort Thinking
3.4 What are some of the drawbacks of controlled
thinking, and how can we improve its effectiveness?

Controlled Thinking
• Controlled Thinking
– Thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and

effortful

Controlled Thinking and Free Will (1 of 2)
• Association between conscious thought and

behavior creates perception of free will
– But, forces outside of awareness may influence

behavior and conscious thoughts
 May overestimate or underestimate amount of control

Controlled Thinking and Free Will (2 of 2)
• Belief in free will predicts behavior
– Cheating
– Helping

Who’s Doing Facilitated Communication?
Facilitated communication was developed to allow communication-impaired
people to express themselves. Unfortunately, it appears to be the case that the
facilitators were unwittingly controlling the communications.
Source: Bernd Wittenbrink, Joshua Correll et al © 2002

Mentally Undoing the Past
• Counterfactual Reasoning
– Mentally changing some aspect of the past in imagining
what might have been
 “If only I had answered that one question differently, I would
have passed the test.”
– 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

Counterfactual Reasoning
• Among people who had suffered the loss of a

spouse or child
– Imagining more ways to avert tragedy was associated

with greater distress

Second-Place Sadness
Who do you think would be happier: someone who won a silver medal at the
Olympics or someone who won a bronze? Surprisingly, research shows that
silver medalists are often less happy, because they can more easily imagine how
they might have come in first and won a gold.
Source: Nikola Solic/Reuters

Emotional Consequences of
Counterfactual Reasoning (1 of 2)
• Silver medal winners (2nd place) often express

greater dissatisfaction than bronze medal winners
(3rd place)
– Silver
 May imagine ways they could have placed first and won gold
– Bronze
 May imagine ways they would not have won any medal

Emotional Consequences of
Counterfactual Reasoning (2 of 2)
• Positive consequences
– Motivation to improve in future
• Negative consequences
– If it leads to rumination—repetitive focus on negative

things
– Associated with depression

Improving Human Thinking
• Make people more humble

– Ask people to consider the point of view opposite to their
own
 People realize there are other ways to construe the world
– Make fewer judgment errors
• Teach basic statistical principles

– Facilitates application of principles to everyday life
 e.g., base rates

Figure 3.6
Performance on a Test of Statistical Reasoning Abilities by Graduate Students in
Different Disciplines
After 2 years of graduate study, students in psychology and medicine showed
more improvement on statistical reasoning problems than students in law and
chemistry did. (Adapted from Nisbett, Fong, Lehman, & Cheng, 1987)

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Chapter 2

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

• How people think about themselves and the social

• How people select, interpret, remember, and use

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Source: Sean Nel/Shutterstock

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

• Often these quick conclusions are correct.

– Example: You can tell the difference between a college

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

• Imagine driving down the road and stopping

• Imagine meeting a new person and excusing

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

• Thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional,

 Influences the information people notice, think about, and

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

• When applied to members of a social group such

– Can be applied rapidly and automatically when we

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

– Interpret new situations

 Can’t form memories

– Each situation is new

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

• Helps “fill in the blanks” when trying to remember

– Remember some information that was there

 Particularly information to which our schemas led us to pay

– Also remember other information that was never there

 Add this information unknowingly

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

The process by which recent experiences increase the

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

– Chronically accessible due to past experience.

– Accessible because it is related to a current goal

– Temporarily accessible because of our recent

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

– have an expectation about what another person is like,

– influences how they act toward that person, which;

– causes that person to behave consistently with

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Source: Monkey Business/Fotolia

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Source: Gina Sanders/Fotolia

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

– Distracting oneself prior to making a decision

• Ensuring distraction improves decision making:

– Have a conscious goal to make a good choice

– Decision requires integration of complex information

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

 Scent of cleanliness increases the degree to which people

 Cleanliness associated with morality; dirtiness with immorality

Copyright © 2018 Pearson Education, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

 Hot coffee: Primes “warm & friendly” metaphor

– Stranger rated as friendly