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Social Contagion Notes for BSc Psychology: Psychology and Society
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PYC3701 Latest Exam Pack 2024
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PYC4803 EXAM PACK 2024
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PYC4803NOTES
, Group decisions – the factors that impact the effectiveness of group decision making................................ 123
Brainstorming................................................................................................................................... 126
Role of leadership........................................................................................................................................... 127
Chapter 2 – social cognition
Basically
Social cognition = how we think about the social world and how we attempt to
understand complex issues and why we sometimes are less than rational
we often use automatic thought to think about the social world
o automatic thought = thought that is quick without conscious reasoning and
without effort – very efficient
o automatic thinking can lead to satisfactory judgments
o can lead to important errors in our conclusions and result in less than optimal
decisions
o more controlled thinking tends to happen when something is important to us or
unexpected happens
Heuristics
heuristics = simple rules for making complex decisions or drawing inferences in a
rapid and efficient manner
information overload = the demands of our cognitive system are greater than its
capacity
o our processing capacity can be depleted by high levels of stress or other
demands on us
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, techniques to deal quickly with large amounts of information
o this happens often under conditions of uncertainty
o when the correct answer is difficult to know or would take a great deal of
effort to determine
o most useful tactic for making sense of complex information – heuristics
Representativeness: judging by resemblance
representativeness heuristics = made a judgement on the basis of the rule/idea that the
more an individual seems to resemble, or match a given group, the more likely they
are to belong to that group
prototype = a list of attributes commonly possessed by members of each of these
occupations
these kinds of judgements are often accurate
o because belonging to certain groups does affect the behaviour and style of
people in that group as these groups often attract people who have certain
characteristics
these decisions/judgements are often made on the basis of representativeness
heuristics tend to ignore base rates
o base rates = the frequency with which given events or categories occur in the
population
representativeness heuristics is also used when judging whether specific causes
resemble each other and are therefore likely to produce effects that are similar in
terms of magnitude
o when people are asked to judge the likelihood that a particular effect was
produced by a particular cause they are likely to expect the strength of the
cause to match its effect
o cultural groups differ in the extent to which they rely on the representativeness
heuristic
▪ people from Asia tend to consider more potential causal factors when
judging effects than Americans
▪ Asians consider more information and arrive at more complex
attributions when judging an event therefore showing less of a
tendency to rely on repetitiveness heuristics
▪ repetitiveness heuristics = a simplification strategy
Heuristics – availability
if I can recall it happening many times = the event must be a frequent occurrence
o if something is dramatic and makes an impression us = easier to bring it to
mind
o = the ease of retrieval effect
o Ease of retrieval effect can lead us to overestimate the likelihood of events that
are dramatic but rare, because they are easy to bring to mind.
Our desires can bias our decision making towards greater risk taking
The amount of information we can bring to mind also matters
o The more information we can think of the greater its impact on our
judgements
If the judgment involves emotions or feelings, we tend to rely on the ease rule
If the judgment involves facts or the task is inherently difficult, we tend to rely more
on the amount rule
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, If we are aware that we have less information about other people or unfamiliar objects
making judgements about them seems more difficult and ease of retrieval is given less
weight
When we think we are familiar with a task know more about it or believe the task
itself is ease of retrieval is particularly likely to be the basis of our judgement
Anchoring and adjustment
o Another heuristic that strongly influences our behaviour
o Anchor = The tendency to deal with uncertainty in many situations by using
something we do know as a starting point (the anchor) and then making
adjustments to it
▪ In uncertain situations we have to start somewhere, and an anchor
gives us this starting point
Portion size effect = the tendency to eat more when a larger portion of food is
received than a smaller portion
o = anchoring and inadequate adjustment
Schemas
Schemas = mental frameworks for organizing social information
o Through past experience we have built up a mental framework containing the
essential features of this kind of situation
o They help us to organize social information guide our actions and process
information relevant to particular context
o Everyone in a given society tends to share many basic schemas
o Once schemas are formed, they play a role in determining what we notice
about the social world, what information we remember and how we use and
interpret such information
The impact of schemas on social cognition – attention, encoding and retrieval
o Attention = the information we notice
▪ Schemas often act as a kind of filter
▪ Information consistent with our schemas is more likely to be noticed
and to enter our consciousness
o Encoding = the processes we use to store noticed information in memory
▪ During encoding the information that becomes the focus of our
attention is much more likely to be stored in long -term storage
▪ In general information which is consistent with our schemas is encoded
▪ Information that is sharply inconsistent with our schemas –
information that does not agree with our expectations in a given
situation – may be encoded into a separate memory location and
marked with a unique tag
▪ Inconsistent information is sometimes so unexpected that it is literally
seizes our attention and almost forces us to make a mental note of it
o Retrieval = how we recover information from memory in order to use it
▪ What information is most readily remembered?
People tend to report remembering information that is
consistent with schemas more than information that is
inconsistent
This could come from differences in actual memory from
simple response tendencies
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