College aantekeningen
Lectures Social Cognition
- Instelling
- Tilburg University (UVT)
This document contains all the lectures given in the course Social Cognition, including extra information from the lectures.
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Stella Barenholz 2019-2020SOCIAL COGNITION
2019-2020
CONTENT
Lecture 1: History and concepts...........................................................................................................................................2
Lecture 2: Memory.................................................................................................................................................................... 5
Lecture 3: Heuristics and biases........................................................................................................................................12
Lecture 4: Deliberate decisions.........................................................................................................................................16
Lecture 5: Affect, mood, and emotions...........................................................................................................................20
Lecture 6: Automaticity........................................................................................................................................................29
Lecture 7: Stereotypes...........................................................................................................................................................36
Lecture 8: Social comparison..............................................................................................................................................44
Lecture 9: Prosociality and morality 1............................................................................................................................50
Lecture 10: Prosociality and morality 2.........................................................................................................................56
Lecture 11: Consumer Behavior........................................................................................................................................60
Lecture 12: Approach and Avoidance.............................................................................................................................64
Exam question.......................................................................................................................................................................... 68
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,Stella Barenholz 2019-2020
LECTURE 1: HISTORY AND CONCEPTS
S OCIAL COGNITION : THE CONCEPT
Social cognition means that we construct a social reality. It determines how we think about our
environment, our friends, our impressions with others, and how this changes our own behavior. So
the idea is how people make sense of their social environments. Social reality is constructed based on
three assets.
1. Situation: What is going on? Who is involved?
2. Person: Who processes the information? What sort of person is this?
3. Cognitive processes: How does thinking and feeling work?
So both these general and individual factors influence how we construct social reality. So we consult
influences from both the situation, the person, and underlying processes.
Social cognition combines two lines of research. First is phenomenology, a systematic description of
how people say they experience themselves, their social environments and themselves in their social
environments. It is about the lay theories during normal social interaction, and what people think in
normal situations. This is about everyday psychology and mental models.
Second is cognitive psychology, which studies differences and modes of thinking, learning,
memorizing, and other basic cognitive functioning. Here, models of information processing and
retention are important. They describe how people process and deal with information.
If we take these two together, we arrive at some questions:
- How is social information encoded, stored, and retrieved from memory?
- How is social knowledge structured and represented?
- How are social judgments and decisions made?
Social cognition has many applications in real life:
- Marketing: promoting products and services by using the knowledge of how people process
things in commercial breaks
- Public Policy: organizing society effectively
- Management: providing conditions for high productivity
- Public Relations: engaging public opinion and getting people to stand for their opinions
- Journalism: communicate effectively
- NGOs: mobilize supporters and administer services effectively
More generally, social cognition is important for life, for understanding yourself and others in their
social contexts.
T HE ROOTS
The idea about humans from economic psychology is the rational decision maker (homo
oeconomicus). This means that they make choices in a rational way, which also maximizes their
utility. They do this in an objective way, free from emotions. Fourth, they would be logical and free
from cognitive processing errors or biases. This idea is based on the expected utility theorem by von
Neumann and Morgenstern (1947). If we apply this in social cognition, it would mean people would
always make rational social choices. But, our behavior is not always rational.
1. If we look at the reasons people die, we see that 50% of deaths in the USA between the ages
of 15 and 64 are the result of bad personal decisions, such as smoking, lacking exercise,
criminality, drug or alcohol use, risky sexual behavior. So even we know these decisions are
not rational, we still do it. Especially for students, they know smoking leads to negative
health outcomes. But people still smoke; there is a dissonance between the rational choice
and the actual behavior.
2. A classic example is the experiment by Ash (1951) about conformity, in which people have
to look at a line and then make a choice about three other lines which one is most similar. In
the control condition, participants could just answer it. In the experimental condition, there
were 7 confederates who were instructed to do something else. The experiment used 18
trials. In the first two trials, all the actors answered correct. In the second trial, they gave the
same wrong actor. In the remaining 15 trails, they either answered correctly or wrong. They
then looked at how much people adapted their behavior or attitude to the group.
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We see that in the control condition, almost 100% got it correct. In the experimental
condition, around 60% got it correct. This means they adapted their behavior, so they
conformed. Again, this is not rational behavior so not similar to the homo oeconomicus.
People know their answer is not rational, but they still do it.
For the experimental conditions themselves, there were people that answered never right so
completely conformed. There were also people that were less conformed and either
sometimes answered wrong, or never answered wrong.
So, a lot of people not only changed their behavior, but also their attitudes as conformity to
the group. In the debriefing and post-hoc interviews, some participants said they didn’t want
to look silly or be rejected by the rest of the group. This is called normative social influence,
using others as a reference for what should be done. Some participants said they thought the
others must have had better eyesight or be better informed. This is called informational
social influence, using others as a source of information. Lastly, some participants said the
others were correct and their answer was correct. This is a distortion of perception, a
change of belief.
Behaviorism
This perspective that people don’t always make rational decisions, is also adapted by Behaviorism.
We want to know how people think, but this is not straightforward and it is very difficult to actually
see how people are thinking. The methodological behaviorism pioneered by Watson said that
cognitions cannot be observed well, so we have to reduce behavior to a stimulus-response fact. We
don’t look at what is going on in the mind, but just the outcome (behavior). This can be done by
reinforcement learning.
A more radical form of behaviorism was supported by Skinner. He asked if cognitions are even the
cause of behavior. He said that there was no evidence on the causal direction of the cognition-
behavior link. Cognitions therefore could be post-hoc rationalizations of behavior.
Cognitive revolution
Then came the cognitive revolution. This describes how cognition came back on the table as a study
subject. It became interesting again because it involved meaning and how people make sense of the
world. This is also seen in this quote of Bruner: the cognitive revolution was an all-out effort to
establish meaning as the central concept of psychology [...]. Its aim was to discover and to describe
formally the meanings that human beings created out of their encounters with the world, and then to
propose hypotheses about what meaning-making processes were implicated.
In this revolution, the idea was to overcome methodological problems. They turned to experimental
manipulation of the environment, and then observe changes in behavior which would depict mental
states and changes in those states. This would fit the idea of the Ash experiment. Another good
example would be the study done by Festinger (1959) about cognitive dissonance. Participants
were asked to do a boring task, and then were divided into three groups:
- Group condition: their opinion was asked about the experiment
- First experimental condition: they were asked to tell the next participant that it was an
interesting experiment and then receive 1$
- Second experimental condition: they were asked to tell the next participant that it was an
interesting experiment and then receive 20$
Then there was a debriefing in an interview. Participants were asked how interesting the task was, so
we can see that participants in the 1$ condition thought the task was way more enjoyable than in the
20$ condition. The same result applies to the scientific importance of the experiment, and if they
would participate in a similar experiment again. Only if they were asked how much they learned, the
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, Stella Barenholz 2019-2020
20$ condition would score higher. For all the other questions, the 20$ condition would score lower
than both control condition and 1$ condition.
These results would seem weird, but we can explain them. Individuals have an individual self-
concept in which they have an image or an idea how they are. There can be a situation in which
specific behavior is required, which causes a conflict between that behavior and the self-concept
someone has. This is called cognitive dissonance and causes a need to resolve it. For example,
someone thinks of themselves as very truthful, but has to lie in a situation. If they get paid a lot of
money to lie, they could resolve this conflict by thinking they did it for the money. In this case, the
threat to the self-concept would be smaller. It they get paid less, they would think that they wouldn’t
lie for so little money, which means ‘they must have actually liked it’. This adaptation of cognition
resolves the conflict as well, but it does mean people actually change their opinion.
This cognitive revolution shows that people have short-cut ways of thinking. The way people think
does have a systematic thing to it. Some research lines can explain this.
1. Consistency maximization means people achieve coherence between conflicting beliefs and
attitudes, described in the cognitive dissonance theory by Festinger.
2. Bounded rationality says that people operate quasi-rationally within the bounds of limited
cognitive capacities. This can be explained more by the bounded rationality theory of Simon,
and the idea of the “Cognitive Miser” by Fiske and Taylor, that people are generally lazy and
make the most out of limited resources.
3. Strategic sophistication means people flexibly adapt strategies to changing situational
demands, described in the “Motivated Tactician” of Fiske and Taylor. It suggests that we
adapt how we think and how we apply cognitive resources depending on the situation. This
also fits the strategic sophistication in economics.
Therefore, we could say research is re-discovering rationality after this revolution. People think
and have short-cuts, which work and are clearly systematic, but often not correct. The importance
here is that they are systematic and therefore can be studied.
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