Economic & Consumer Psychology Lecture Notes
Lecture 1: Introduction
1. Social Cognition = how people make sense of people and themselves
- Social perception:
- Attribution: when do we associate a circumstance to something
- Decisions: quick decisions vs. informed decisions.
- Attitudes: are they stable or easy to change? How we persuade people?
- Experiment: virtual prejudice, Dutch people stayed closer to Dutch descendants rather
than Moroccan descendant. Also skin conductance (stress) was higher.
2. Contemporary Ways of Research
* Experimental lab research on social behavior.
* Cognitive and physiological measurements.
* Individual, unconscious schema driven behavior —> people acting on stereotypes
Behaviorism vs. Social Cognition:
- Classic (behaviorist) perspective: stimulus —> response
- Socio-cognitive perspective: stimulus —> information processing, mental
representations (cognitions) —> response
3. Social cognition characteristics:
- Mentalism = cognitive representations (stereotypes, attitudes, knowledge)
- Information processing process
- Cross-fertilization - different fields (cognitive psychology, neuroscience)
- Relevant ‘real world’ phenomena
- People are not things, people can:
- Intentionally influence their environment
- ‘look back’
- Often imply ‘the self’
- change, they are complex
- Have crucial unobservable traits
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, - Their accuracy of perception is hard to determine
- Seek explanation/trigger for their search of meaning
4. Models of Social Thinker
* The thinker as consistency seeker:
- Consistency in behavior, attitudes, self image
- Provides meaning and certainty
- Cognitive Dissonance Theory: acting differently than beliefs and attitudes cause
unpleasant feelings.
- Experiment: ‘I’ll give you 20$ or 1$ to tell the other participant that it was an exciting
task’ —> most positive attitude with 1$ —>20$ task is boring and I lied to say that it
was exciting (low dissonance) —> 1$ task is bıring, I lied and I got quite low
compensation (high dissonance) to reduce the dissonance, I change the attitude ‘The
task was actually nice!’ (feeling positive)
* The thinker as cognitive miser:
- Avoids cognitive effort
- Uses heuristics
- Relies on schematic information processing
* The thinker as naive scientist:
- Wants to figure out consequences
- Systematic information processing
- Aimed at informed, accurate judgments
- Attribution theory = ‘why does someone act that way?’ - because of character or
situation? ‘Out of role behavior’ —> polite situation —> rude —> ‘because of character’
* The thinker as motivated tactician:
- When do we do what?
- When schema/heuristic?
- Accurate picture/informed decision?
- 2 factors: (1) motivation: do you want to create an accurate picture? (2) cognitive
capacity: can you create an accurate picture?
- Not motivated/incapable? Cognitive miser! Motivated/capable? Naive scientist!
* The thinker as activated actor: social priming certain automatic behavior
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,- Dual Process Model:
1 - System 1: intuitive, categorical, holistic, quick, less effort, affective, associative, rigid
2 - System 2: rational, individualized, analytical, slow, effort, neutral, logical, flexible
- Automaticity:
- Subliminal priming: showing quick words —> huge impact on business
- Behavioral priming: conscious priming, exclusive restaurant pictures (vs. neutral
setting) makes the norm salient. —> Due to priming, people started acting according to
the norm and eating properly! —> Also works for the odor! When it smelled clean,
people ate more neatly!
* Criteria for automaticity:
(1) Unconscious of: stimulus, consequences
(2) Efficient: requires little or no attention
(3) Unintentional: happens without wanting it
(4) Uncontrollable: you cannot stop it (similar to reflex)
(5) It’s a continuum: completely automatic ————— completely controlled
* Types of automaticity:
(1) Subliminal priming: pre conscious automaticity
- priming people with secretaries/professors then later trivial pursuit questions —>
professor priming performed better in trivial
(2) Supraliminal priming: post conscious automaticity
- When? Recently activated prime or frequently activated prime
- Constructs that a person frequently uses when
judging social stimuli
(3) Chronic accessibility: we have accessible
constructs (easy to access), activated, ready
and waiting in mind, to interpret information.
- Depends on: individual differences, roles, culture,
becomes stronger when consciously used,
strengthens itself —> ‘Proceduralisation’ (vicious cycle)
(4) Goal dependent automaticity
- Experiment (Karemann et al): Lipton Ice and Nipeic Tol (same letters)
- Made thirsty + primed —> priming works cause the goal matches the prime
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, - Not thirsty + primed —> priming doesn’t work cause there is no goal.
Lecture 2: Goals & Self-regulation
1. Core Social Motives
Every economic decision making is goal directed behavior. To market a product, you need
to understand consumers. Understanding consumers = understanding their motives. To
attract consumers, the experience of shopping is also important.
Motives = drives of people. Examples: motive to have control, to have friends, to give
meaning. Motives set behaviors in motion.
Goals = cognitive representation of desired en-state, in your mind.
Self-regulation = what you do to achieve your goals.
MOTIVES:
* Belonging to something —> the most motive of humans. It’s everywhere, an umbrella
motive.
- Most fundamental human social need to family, friends and groups.
- Contributes to physical/psychological health, people who feel like they don’t belong
feel sick.
- Being alone/isolated is an aversive state, we try to avoid this.
- Ostracism experiment: Cyberball paradigm, ‘online game’ threw a ball to each other -
without talking-, then they don’t anymore. This makes them feel isolated, left out.
Conditions 1: Everyone got the ball equally. Condition 2: One player did not receive
the ball anymore.
- Consequences: stress, similar to physical pain, strong emotions (anger, sadness).
Attempts to regain connections, if their motive is to feel better about themselves they
show helping behavior. If their motive is to have control, they show aggressive
behavior.. People still felt this pain even when they were excluded out of groups they
DON’T want to relate to.
* Understanding our social world —> create meaning, core motive.
- Related to humans being naive scientists & consistency seekers.
- People need a socially share sense of meaning.
- Meaning threats experiment (Travis Proulx): Subtle threat with red heart and black
heart cards. Hearts usually come in red, the meaning is being threatened. They
punished world-view threatening people (drug addicts, prostitutes). To restore this
meaning, they showed them artificial grammar paradigm in which they would find a
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