Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture – Susan T. Fiske & Shelley E. Taylor
Ch1 Introduction
Social cognition = how people make sense of other people & themselves.
Phenomenology = describe systematically how ordinary people say they experience their world.
Naïve psychology = people’s everyday theories about each other are themselves worth studying.
Approaches To Studying The Social Thinker
Configural model: people form unified overall impression of other people. The unifying forces shape
individual elements to bring them in line w/ overall impression. Pressure toward unity changes the
meaning of individual elements to fit better in context. Impression made up of traits & their
relationship.
Schema: comprises attributes & their relationship.
Algebraic model: takes each individual trait, evaluates it in isolation & combines the evaluations into
a summary evaluation.
Both models are right, but people follow each process under different informational & motivational
circumstances that mimic the respective research paradigms of the two approaches.
Elemental approach: breaks scientific problems down into pieces & analyzes the pieces in separate
detail before combining them.
Holistic approach: analyzes pieces in the context of other pieces & focuses on the entire
configuration of relationship among them.
Lewin’s Psychological field = infl social envir emphasized, as perceived by the individual.
Person in the situation – cognition & motivation determine behavior in the psy field.
Tension between elemental (piecemeal) & holistic (configural) can be integrated as 2 complementary
processes.
The Ebb and Flow of Cognition in Psychology
Wundt’s introspection. Didn’t meet the criteria of data being publicly reproducible.
Shift to behaviorist psy (Thorndike, Skinner): instrumental learning (reward & punishment). Both
effect & cause are observable, cognition seems irrelevant.
Information processing rose: idea that mental operations can be broken down into sequential stages.
Steps intervening between stimulus & response.
During & after 90s Decade of the Brain, cogn neuroscience altered the landscape. Interplay between
human cogn & emotion, diffuse neural systems involved in language production & comprehension,
neural bases of cogn control including inconsistency monitoring, neural bases for distinct types of
category learning, neural evidence for long-standing concepts such as episodic memory (past
experiences), supported by neuropsy of brain damage & neuroimaging studies of memory.
Social psy consistently leaned on cogn concepts, even when most psy was behaviorist.
Others can infl a person’s action w/out even being present. Not only causes but also end result of
social perception & interaction in heavily cogn terms. The person in between the presumed cause &
the result is viewed as thinking organism.
Consistency seekers: motivated by perceived discrepancies among their cognitions.
Consistency theories rely on perceived inconsistency, which places cognitive activity in a central role.
Upon perceiving inconsistency, the person is presumed to feel uncomfortable & motivated to reduce
the inconsistency. Reducing the state feels rewarding.
Naïve scientist: how people uncover the causes of behavior.
Attribution theories: how people explain their own & other’s behavior. Causal analyses of social
world.
Cogn system has limited capacity, so people take shortcuts.
, Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture – Susan T. Fiske & Shelley E. Taylor
Cogn miser model: people are limited in capacity to process info, so they take shortcuts whenever
they can.
People adopt strategies that simplify complex problems. The strategies may not be correct processes
or produce correct answers, but they are efficient. Search for rapid, adequate solutions.
Motivated tactician: fully engaged thinker w/ multiple cogn strategies available, who chooses among
them based on goals, motives & needs.
Activated actors: social envir rapidly cue perceivers’ social concepts, w/out awareness, and almost
inevitably cue ass cogn, evaluations, affect, motivation & behavior.
What is Social Cognition?
Mentalism = belief in the importance of cogn representations.
Cogn elements people naturally use to make sense of other people constitute the ‘what’ of social
cogn. Mental representations are cogn structures that represent one’s general knowledge about a
given concept or stimulus domain & one’s memory for specific experiences.
Cogn process: how cogn elements form, operate & change.
Cross-fertilization between cogn & social psy.
Application to the real world.
Brains Matter
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques: yield images of the brain at work.
Observe blood flow to distinct areas of the brain, revealing clues as to their possible functions in
different tasks.
Electroencephalography (EEG) & facial electromyography (EMG) older techniques. Transcranial
magnetic stimulation (TMS) newer method.
fMRI Records re-oxygenizing blood flow to just-
activated brain areas
EEG Records voltage fluctuation on the scalp,
detecting neural activity
EMG Records voltage changes on skin over muscles,
so their activity
TMS Electromagnetic induction stimulates or inhibits
brain regions
EDR Measures skin moisture
CV Indexes cardiac output, ventricle activity, total
peripheral resistance
Hormone levels Link to sociality
Immune functioning Assays track specific immune cells & system
operation
Genetic analyses Combined w/ envir, detect interactive links to
social cognition
When movements involved attributing a (quasi-human) mental state to objects, distinct activation
patterns emerged: mPFC, STS/TPJ, FFA.
FFA particularly responds to faces or other objects in one’s domains of expertise.
Social ‘activations’ often emerge as relatively little change from a supposedly neutral baseline. Object
judgements often create deactivations from the baseline. Activations even relative to baseline in
dorsal (upper) part mPFC, as well in STS, FFA.
Neural & cultural processes are inextricably linked. Pick up cultures & socialize us.
, Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture – Susan T. Fiske & Shelley E. Taylor
When people are ostracized, active anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) dampened by activating the
right ventral prefrontal cortex (rvPFC). Also occurs in physical pain.
Cultural info is stored in our brains. Mental representations of social info are complex & distinctly
charac by features that differ from nonsocial representations.
People’s brains change physically depending on their cultural experience. Taxi drivers have a larger
posterior (rear) hippocampus area (spatial memory storage).
Cultures Matter
Most findings culturally bounded. Mistakes because pp mostly WEIRD undergraduates.
Configurations of beliefs differ across cultures. Cultures w/ general beliefs in social cynicism assume
that power displays elicit compliance & people endorse such infl strategies. The same endorsement
goes for variations of beliefs about religiosity, reward for effort, fate control.
Indep & autonomous (Westerners) vs more interdep & harmonious (East Asians).
Cultural patterns relate to each other. While contrasts are real. So are the similarities & so are the
places between the extremes.
Cultural social cognition reflects the importance of humans as adaptive social beings, evolved to
focus on other people, to imitate behavior, discern intent, cooperate together, learn symbol systems.
Part One: Basic Concepts in Social Cognition
Ch2 Dual Modes in Social Cognition
Motivated tactician: tendency to rely on relatively automatic process or alternatively on more
effortful ones, depending on situational & motivational demands. Choose modes, but typically not
consc.
Automatic Processes Make Social Thinking Efficient
Full automaticity: unintentional, uncontrollable, efficient, autonomous, uncosnc, goal-indep, purely
stimulus driven, fast responses.
Subliminal priming or preconsc: prime registers on sense, but no awareness of effect on responses.
Depends on context. Likely incl amygdala & interior almond-shaped pair of brain regions in detecting
emotionally sign stimuli.
Variety of other regions implicated in automatic processes more related to social rewards or positive
valence (orbitofrontal cortex (vmPFC), insula, basal ganglia & ventral striatum).
The more reflex-like, relatively automatic forms of social cogn implicate the lateral temporal cortex
(pSTS), vmPFC, dAAC.
Emotionally neutral concepts can be primed below awareness.
Consc priming or postconsc: consc perception of prime, but no awareness of effect on responses.
Depends on context.
More impactful on a daily basis. Pre- & postconsc effects operate similarly, in part because people
are unacquainted w/ priming effects, so even consc primes don’t typically prompt efforts to
counteract them.
Individual differences in chronic accessibility: can be preconsc or postconsc, habitual processing by
particular categories or concepts, as if chronically primed. Depends on person.
People may or may not be aware that they habitually code other people in terms of something.
Proceduralization = development of automaticity occurring through practice. Involves 2 kinds of
practice effects. w/ practice, any judgement of honesty will speed up, showing a trait-specific
practice effect. 2nd kind of practice effect speeds judgements of traits even in general.
