Social Cognition and Affect – Notes/summary lectures
Lecture 1 – What is social about cognition and affect? (Chapters 1 and 2)
Topics from the field of social cognition:
• How to people think about others?
• How do we process information in a social context?
• How do we process social stimuli in general?
• How do our own ideas about the world influence our perception and behavior?
• How do we infer other people’s motives?
Approaches used:
1. The examination of patterns in social judgment: Keeping the context, changing the
target person, changing the context, keeping the target person constant.
2. The examination of errors/biases in social judgement: Comparison of judgement to
absolute scores, comparison of judgements for different target persons, comparison
between cultures.
3. The comparison of different dependent variables: Differences between judgement
and behavior. Prediction of behavior based on different variables.
4. Examination of neural activity during social judgements
5. Examination of patters in large scale data sets.
Basic assumption of research and theorizing in the area of social cognition: Social thinking is
not passive perception; people have naïve theories about themselves and about others and
social thinking can be subject to biases and it is very much linked to the specific situation.
These implicit assumptions can be wrong, for example: You think that you’re very ugly, but
actually you look just fine.
• Example – Making sense of a dating situation: Examples from “The Guardian’s” Blind
date series. The same situation can lead to very different perceptions. As an external
perceiver one can oftentimes have quite accurate guess on how the evening went.
The picture leads you to have thoughts about how the situation has gone.
Asch, 1946; Lorge, 1936: The Halo effect – Good looking, nice, intelligent, social
• However, the overgeneralization from the impression that someone looks good can
also lead to wrong judgements.
Asch, 1946: The Primacy effect, the first word guides the
perception.
1
,Field Theory (Lewin): Behavior is a function of the person and
the situation. Individual behavior can be studies by
examining the difference forces in a given situation
(motivational influences). The study of an individual isolated
from its context is likely to lead to inaccurate picture of the
person.
The role of context: Asch experiment – If the social context is manipulated people say that
they see different things.
To add a social meaning to something makes it easier to remember it.
Messages from these examples:
• People do not passively perceive the environment
• They are active perceivers
• Subjective interpretation can alter individual responses to situations
• Not all aspects of a situation receive equal attention, instead a selective subset of
information is used.
Goal of research on social cognition: Identification of mechanisms and factors influence
these active, subjective and selective interpretation of the social environment.
Models of the individual in social cognition
Empirically example that our attitudes guide our behavior
Effron (2018, study 1): The key idea is that the political
standpoint (democrat of republican) may influence how
people evaluate falsehoods that relate to the own
position. Considering how the opposite of the truth could
have been true, leads people to be less critical of telling
falsehoods
2
,Function of social knowledge
Social knowledge is mentally organized in schemas/categories/concepts (representations of
objects or people, or behavior that we believe ‘belong’ together). Social knowledge is often
divided into different categories/concepts of:
• Social groups (stereotypes): Elderly, foreigners, Germans, Psychology students,
nurses, hooligens.
• Personality traits: Shy, smart, extraverted
• Events (scripts): Going out for dinner, a ride on the bus, a wedding
Concepts are not by definition true! They represent what we believe things to be like.
Dual process models
Dual process models are one of the key theoretical traditions in social cognition research and
is usually defined by two processes. One more automaticity and one more controlled (more
time). Recent years the focus has been more on controlled processes and automatic
processes were seen as ‘given’.
The classic elements of automaticity are:
1. Lack of conscious intent: Most well-known example is the stroop-effect were reading
the meaning (non intentional process) of the word interferes with the task (naming
the color).
2. Efficiency: The process costs little (mental) effort – If something stays the same, even
though the individual is under pressure, you can assume that this is an automatic
3
, process. If a distraction task does influence the performance, cognitive control is
needed for the task and you can assume that it is a more controlled process.
• Research example (Gilbert, Pelhan & Krull(: People watched a video (without
sound) of a woman having a conversation. The woman is clearly nervous.
They are told the topic of the conservation is: A. Holiday plans. Or B. Sexual
fantasies. The idea is that when you think somebody is talking about their
holiday plans and is visibly nervous this woman must be very nervous,
because it’s not very common to be nervous talking about holiday plans.
However, if you think that the woman is nervous when talking about sexual
fantasies it would make total sense to be nervous. Half of the people watches
the video under cognitive load (additional task: remembering the discussion
topics). Task – crucial dependent variable: How dispositionally nervous is this
woman?
o Idea – To see whether the cognitive
load would influence peoples
judgement about whether the woman
is nervous or not: When under load,
correction for the situation. When
under load, no time for correction for
the situation. Load hinders a situational
correction. Thus: Categorization and
inferences are automatic, situational
correction is not!
3. Lack of awareness by the individual: We can’t really report how a task happens and
how it affects another task. We are not aware of: That a process takes place (e.g.,
attention); how a process takes place (e.g., priming) and what the result is of the
process (e.g. keeping distance).
• Dion, Berscheid & Walster (1972): Show that psychical attractiveness
influences people’s judgements about how good, moral, interesting,
successful etc. persons are.
• Nisbett & Wilson (1977): People are not aware that how well they rate their
teachers is caused by how attractive the teacher is.
• Automatic Vigilance: Persons are very quick to point out the
odd one on right sign of the screen because it’s negative
infomation and take longer to point the odd one out on the
left sight because it’s positive information.
4. Lack of control by the individual: Usually illustrated by processes that
just happen without being controlled (it starts and runs). E.g., You want people not to
stereotype, but they still do it because they do response quicker to stereotypical
information (IAT-effect).
What automatic behavior is not: It’s not (always) responded to your feelings (vs reason); It’s
not (always) irrational; It’s not by definition inflexible and It is not (always) superficial or
shallow.
Controlled processing and behavior are more accessible to people in terms of how:
• People have the ability to direct and regulate cognition and behavior;
4
