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Summary Social Cognition: Lectures 1 to 9
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Summary of all the lectures of Social Cognition
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Social CognitionHC: c.kogler@tilburguniversity.edu
WC: n.h.p.knabben@tilburguniversity.edu
Eindcijfer: 80% tentamen (40% MC/40% open vragen), 20% workgroup assignment (10% mini-
lecture/10% literature checks)
Papers uit de workgroups hoef je niet specifiek te kennen voor het tentamen, tenzij deze genoemd
worden in de werkcolleges
HC1 31/1/2017
Bruner and Goodman (1947)
Showed 10 year-old kids coins, and the kids had to guess the size of the coin
The kids were either coming from a poor or a rich household
The richer the household, the smaller the kids guessed the size of the coin
The poorer the household, the bigger the kids guessed the size of the coin
Williams and Bargh (2008)
Invited people the participate in an experiment. When people arrived in the hall, the subjects
were told to rate characteristics of a person and were given either a hot or a cold drink
There was found a significant difference in several items which were related to warm or hot
characteristics (generous, cold, unfriendly)
1
,Mazar and Zhong (2010)
Two lists of products; one list had organic products, the other list had non-organic
Measuring which list the subject looked at and whether or not the subject bought something
People looked at the organic list, and were more generous in the dictatorgame afterwards,
than the people who looked at the non-organic products
The opposite happened when people actually bought a product from either the organic or
non-organic list
What determines how we think and feel about our social environment? How do we form impressions
about other people? What determines our social behavior?
Social environment is very complex and dynamic; no two situations are the same
- Individuals need to make sense of social situations in order to interact successfully
Constructing Social Reality:
There are three different input elements distinguished on a very general level
1. Input from a given situation:
2. Input in form of priori knowledge that individuals bring to a situation
3. Processes that operate on the input
Social cognition:
People have mental models of:
- Themselves
- Their social environment
- Their relation to the social environment
These mental models influence how people perceive themselves, their environment and
relationships
Perceptions influence these mental models
How can we profit from studying social cognition by influencing perceptions and understandings?
- Marketing: how to promote products or services
- Public policy: organize society more effectively
- Management: work more effectively
- Public relations: shape public opinion
- Journalism: communicate more effectively
- NGOs: administer services more effectively
- Life: understanding yourself and others
2
,Foundational theories:
Psychoanalytic theory (Sigmund Freud)
Attempts to account for all aspects of social cognition and behavior
Most factor impacting behavior are implicit, automatic and not consciously controlled
Three interacting systems:
o ID (it)
Motivation system: basic urges, drives, and needs that people are born
with
Hunger, thirst, sex and aggression
Pleasure Principle: primary aim is immediate gratification
Inconsistent with behavior = anxiety
o EGO (I)
Referee system: mediates between ID, SUPEREGO and reality
Reality Principle: enact motivations (ID) and serve society (SUPEREGO),
taking demands and consequences of reality into account
Sublimation: channeling basic motivations into alternate goals
o SUPEREGO (over-I)
Society system: values, standards, restrictions and principles that are
imparted by our societies
Driven by Morality Principle
Guiding and evaluating our behavior
Two components:
Ego ideal: goals and aspirations
o Consistent with behavior = pleasure
Conscience: restrictions and prohibitions
o Inconsistent with behavior = anxiety
Link with social cognition: ID often is a compulse in a certain situation, which might cause
certain behavior. But then the SUPEREGO might come up and might change the behavior
which leads to a compromise between the ID and the SUPEREGO
Structuralism (Wilhelm Wundt)
Regularities of conscious perception
He was interested in introspection: what do you experience when your hear a certain
chord from the guitar?
o Introspection: asking the person himself what he/she experiences in certain
situations
Periodic Table of the Mind
o Sensations
o Images
o Affections
Behaviorism (Ivan Pavlov and John B. Watson and Skinner)
What is in the head, isn’t observable, so it is not interesting to investigate
Classical conditioning (Pavlov)
Methodological
Internal mental states cannot be observed, behavior is a function of environment and
situation; reinforcement of punishment (Watson)
(Skinner): there is no free will (radical), mental states dp not cause behavior
If some situation causes certain behavior, then that situation is the cause of the behavior,
and not the mental state. Post-hoc approach
3
, Cognitive dissonance theory: Leon Festinger
We don’t like situations where things conflict: i think that I am a good person but I just hit someone
in the face inconsistency
- Punishment treated as reward
- Internal motivation: maintain consistency
o Cognitive consistency
- Self-understanding
o Applies to self-concept
- Dissonance = post-hoc?
o Inconsistency between behavior and attitude
HC2 2/2/2017
Memory
How is information organized in memory?
Can we ‘remember’ things that aren’t true, or didn’t happen? And do we lie then?
We don’t replay events exactly as they happened, but we reconstruct them!
This is an active process, which makes it possible to reconstruct the event different from what
actually happened
- Creating memories: encoding
Encode the information
- Recollecting memories: retrieval
We retrieve information from
the memory, this can affect the
encoding stage because the
memory (stored information)
can change
- Different processes and variables affect
each stage
- Bidirectional influence from encoding and retrieval
Hermann Ebbinghaus tried to study memory in a clean way – no meaning
- So without the influence (expected associations) of earlier memories
- He tried to memorize 2000 nonsense syllables made of three letters: xaf, dax, zop, jel, etc.
o Those didn’t make sense, weren’t influenced by earlier memories
- Ebbinghaus made a Forgetting Curve, to show that it is quite hard to memorize things that
have no meaning to us
o He forgot a lot of syllables he learned
- It is very difficult to remember things without meaning
Expectancy plays a big role in how we understand information, and when we don’t understand
something, it is harder for us to remember and recall this information
- Things are easier to encode in to memory and retrieve from our memory when we
understand what it is about
4
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