Complete summary of the literature in English with Dutch notes on the subject of Social Cognition. This summary contains the 10 chapters in the book and the articles listed as preparatory material.
Samenvatting Literatuur Sociale Cognitie
Universiteit Utrecht
Schooljaar 2023-2024
Inhoud
Social cognition: How individuals Construct Social Reality (Greifender, Bless & Fiedler) ..................... 1
Chapter 1: Introduction: what is social cognition research about? ..................................................... 1
Chapter 2: General framework of social cognitive processing ............................................................ 3
Chapter 3: Perceiving and encoding ................................................................................................... 5
Chapter 4: Storing and retrieving information ..................................................................................... 8
Chapter 5: Using information ............................................................................................................ 13
Chapter 6: Using information: judgmental shortcuts ......................................................................... 16
Chapter 7: The interplay of cognition and feelings ........................................................................... 18
Chapter 8: The interplay of cognition and feelings ........................................................................... 20
Chapter 9: Communicating information ............................................................................................ 22
Chapter 10: How the environment constraints social cognitive processing ...................................... 26
Evil Acts and Malicious Gossip (Smith) ................................................................................................ 27
The Tyranny of choice (Schwartz) ........................................................................................................ 30
When words decide (Schwartz) ............................................................................................................ 30
Social attributions from faces (Todoroy et al) ....................................................................................... 32
Moving on from the basic theory of facial expressions (Russell) .......................................................... 35
Attitudes and attitude change (Bohner & Dickel) .................................................................................. 37
Executive functions and self-regulation (Hofman) ................................................................................ 41
Human cooperation. Trends in cognitive sciences (Rand) ................................................................... 44
Social cognition: How individuals Construct Social Reality (Greifender, Bless &
Fiedler)
Chapter 1: Introduction: what is social cognition research about?
Making sense: constructing social reality
Individuals construct their own subjective social reality based on their perception of the input. It is this
construction of social reality that determines how individuals think, feel and behavior in a complex
social world.
The assumption that individuals construct their subjective social reality and that this
construction provides the basis for social behavior leads us to the very heart of social cognition
research: How is an objective situation translated into subjective reality?
Different perspectives on the social thinker
Three aspects – speed, accuracy, consistency and combinations thereof – are reflected in different
approaches and perspectives of social cognitions research.
• Consistency seekers → individuals try to perceive the world just as they believe it is. They strive
for consistency between their prior beliefs about the world and their interpretation of specific new
situation. This need is incorporated into many theoretical approaches, for example Festinger’s
(1957) dissonance theory. The basic assumption is that inconsistencies in social thinking can
create a negative, aversive feeling. This aversive states motivates individuals to reduce the
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inconsistency. Individuals who strive only for consistency are prone to inaccurate constructions of
social reality.
• Naïve scientists → individuals gather all relevant information unselectively and construct social
reality in an unbiased manner. The interpretation of the world is barely influenced by wishful
thinking, and conclusions are drawn in an almost logical, scientific manner. Attribution theories
address how people explain behavior and events.
• Cognitive misers → in many situations, individuals are not able or motivated to engage in
systematic, elaborative thinking. In daily life individuals often need to respond within a reasonable
period of time or have to make their judgement very quickly. This perspective maintains that
individuals, especially when they are under time pressure or confronted with an unusually
complex situation, strive to simplify the cognitive processes. Like the naive scientist, the cognitive
miser is aiming for high accuracy – but now under the constraint of strategies that are faster and
require less effort.
• Motivated tacticians → individuals seem to be quite flexible in their strategies when constructing
subjective social reality. This perspective holds that individuals may have multiple strategies
which can be applied depending on the situational constraints (dual process models). Ze
verwerken belangrijke informatie niet grondig wanneer ze onder tijdsdruk staan én wanneer de
situatie niet persoonlijk relevant voor ze is.
• Activated actors → Much of our social thinking and behavior is highly automatic. As automatic
processes require little effort and time, they allow for quick assessments of a situation. This
perspective holds that cues in the environment automatically bring to mind relevant knowledge
about adequate interpretations and behaviors.
The cognitive component of social cognition
The general notion that cognitive processes are highly context-dependent has always played a
particularly important role in social cognition. Gestalt theorists emphasized that it is not the stimulus
perse that influences our behavior but our perception of it. In general terms, the context in which a
particular stimulus is interpreted may take two different forms: the context may vary as a function of
other stimuli that are present in the same situation, or it may vary as a function of the prior knowledge
that is used to interpret the target stimulus.
Social Brain Hypothese (Dunbar) = Hoe groter de groep waarin je leeft, des te groter je neocortex
moet zijn.
What is social about social cognition
Two important differences set social cognition apart from cognitive psychology:
• Nature of the stimulus: social cognition is specific because of the social nature of the stimulus and
its relation to the perceiver. The most pronounced difference between social and non-social
perception rests on how directly individuals can observe target attributes. For social targets, many
attributes cannot be directly perceived or objectively assessed. For instance, attributes such as
intelligence, love, aggressiveness or humor cannot be directly seen, heard, smelled or felt. These
attributes constitute distal entities that have to be inferred or construed from more proximal cues,
and sometimes they have no objective existence at all. Two further aspects are directly related to
the non-observability of the attributes in social cognition:
1. Because social attributes are often not directly observable, it is often difficult to know how
accurate our judgments about social attributes are.
2. The attributes themselves are often ill-defined.
In addition three further aspects make social judgment a very complex task. First, the targets of
social perception may change rapidly and individuals therefore need to adapt their judgments.
Second, unlike inanimate objects people change when they are aware that they are being
observed. Finally, persons as judgmental targets often try to influence the perceiver, they want to
influence the impression the perceiver is forming.
• Nature of the processing: constructing social reality is a mutual process. An individual’s
construction of social reality is strongly influenced by the constructions of others. Social cognitive
processing is also different from the processing of inanimate targets because of a strong link
between the way individuals think about their social world and the way they think about
themselves (self-conception). Aspects of self-involvement:
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1. When a person’s self is involved and the situation is highly important, individuals are more
likely to process incoming information extensively.
2. Under certain conditions, self-involvement additionally influences the direction of processing.
At times, an accurate construction of social reality can be quite self-threatening.
3. The specific nature of social cognition is reflected in strong time constraints. In most social
situations individuals have a fairly limited time to respond.
Chapter 2: General framework of social cognitive processing
Three main ingredients
How does a person go about constructing social reality? We can distinguish three different elements:
• Input from the given situation → external outputs and internal outputs.
• Input in the form of prior knowledge → the fate of a particular stimulus input depends also on
the prior knowledge the perceiver brings to the situation.
• Processes that operate on the input → processes can take very different forms and differ on a
variety of dimensions. For example, individuals can process the information very quickly and
rather superficially, or they can mull it over for quite a while.
General themes underlying the construction of social reality
This section will outline three general themes that are involved in all cognitive processes:
The limitation of human processing capacity and the allocation of processing resources
A person’s processing capacity is limited. Two limitations: processing capacity and time. Individuals
have developed adaptive mechanisms that allow for efficient processing. First,
individuals may rely on less information. The nature of the situation influences the
selection, which results in a highly context-dependent and thus highly adaptive
construction of social reality. A second way is making shortcuts. Cognitive
processes differ with respect to the load they impose on processing capacity.
Instead of relying on elaborative processes, individuals often rely on less taxing
processes (heuristics). A heuristic is a cognitive device that enables the social
individual to make judgment in ways that require little processing capacity.
What determines the amount of processing? First, the amount of free
resources. The smaller the number of other taxing activities, the greater the
likelihood that more elaborative processes will occur. Second, it is processing
motivation that determines the amount of processing that takes place. Individuals
have a strong processing motivation if the target of their cognitive processes is
perceived as interesting or important.
Top-down and bottom-up processing
Sometimes human information processing is guided primarily by prior knowledge
and the expectations individuals bring to a situation. In this case the processing is
called concept-driven or top-down processing. At other times human
information processing is called data-driven or bottom-up processing. In top-
down processing, impressions and judgments about a specific target person are
based predominantly on prior beliefs about the group to which the target person is
assigned. In bottom-up processing, judgements about the target person are based on the implications
of the behavior that is observed.
Processes that rely more heavily on prior knowledge (top-down) usually require fewer
processing resources.
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Automatic and controlled processes
Automatic processes are unintentional, require very few cognitive resources, cannot and need not
to be controlled and lie outside an individual’s awareness. Controlled processes, demand
considerable resources, their initiation and running requires conscious regulation. And they are
potentially within the scope of an individual’s awareness. Deviations from a specific automatized
sequence of processes require more controlled and intentional processing. Controlled processes fail
when other tasks are taxing a person’s resources. There are two aspects to the question of control:
control pertains to a person’s ability to bring a particular content to awareness, as well as the ability to
suppress a particular content.
The sequence of information processing
Individuals have to perceive the stimulus events. Next, perceivers need to extract some meaning
from the basic input, they need to encode their perceptions. Because this encoding relies heavily on
prior knowledge stored in memory, individuals need to retrieve prior knowledge. Finally, the encoded
perception will be stored in memory and
will potentially affect the assessment of
future events. Both the newly encoded
input and the old knowledge stored in
memory will then provide the basis for
further processing, leading to inferences,
judgments, and decisions. Sometimes,
the final outcome of this cognitive
process is manifested in an overt
behavioral response.
• Perception and attention →
individuals need to construct an
internal representation of the
situation. Ideally, all the different stimuli could be used for constructing this representation,
however the capacity of information processing is limited. Individuals need to select which stimuli
enter into further processing. Individuals have the ability to direct their attention to some aspects
of the situation and exclude others. Our attention is generally attracted by stimuli that stand out.
Three facets of salience (= most noticeable):
1. Salience resulting from discrepancy to other stimuli in the situation.
2. Salience resulting from discrepancy to prior knowledge.
3. Salience resulting from the relation to goals. If you are very hungry, the food at the party will
attract your attention. Relevance can be due to external instruction: individuals can be
instructed to attend to a particular stimulus in a situation.
• Encoding and interpretation → to give meaning to the stimulus input. Encoding compromises
various processes that are involved when an external stimulus is transformed into an internal
representation. Individuals accomplish the encoding task by relating the new stimulus to prior
general knowledge. Much of our prior general knowledge is represented in the form of categories.
The term category denotes an elementary knowledge structure, corresponding to a singular
concept or class of objects. To make sense of a particular input, individuals need to relate the
input to some meaningful category. In turn, identifying a perceived target as belong to a category
allows the perceiver to infer more information than is actually provided.
• Storage and retrieval → individuals might use the information as a basis for their behavior in
later situations. Information should be stored in such a way that it can be recalled easily if needed
in a later situation. The more processing an individual allocates to a particular stimulus, so the
more someone thinks about a piece of information, the more likely it is for the information to be
stored in memory. If the incoming information is consistent with prior knowledge, it is sufficient to
store a link to the prior knowledge structure rather than storing the new information again.
Consistent information can be recalled easily. But individuals may reconstruct the original
situation on the basis of their general knowledge rather than recalling it. The comes at the cost of
intrusion errors: individuals may also reconstruct information that is part of their general
knowledge but not part of the actual information given. Inconsistent information, cannot be
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