This is a summary of the book 'Social Cognition' which is needed for the exam in Economic and Consumer Psychology. It is 107 pages long and therefore summarizes , but also gives sufficient detail to understand and study. It includes all relevant material for the exam. (and thus does not cover the n...
Economic and Consumer
Psychology - Summary
Chapter 1 - Introduction 1
Chapter 2 - Dual Modes in Social Cognition 8
Chapter 3 - Attention and Encoding 16
Chapter 4 - Representation in Memory 24
Chapter 5 - Self in Social Cognition 34
Chapter 6 - Attribution Processes 41
Chapter 7 - Heuristics and Shortcuts 49
Chapter 8 - Accuracy and EfBiciency in Social Inference 56
Chapter 9 - Cognitive Structures of Attitudes 61
Chapter 10 - Cognitive Processing of Attitudes 67
Chapter 11 - Stereotyping 72
Chapter 12 - Prejudice 81
Chapter 13 - From Social Cognition to Affect 89
Chapter 14 - From Affect to Social Cognition 97
Chapter 15 - Behavior and Cognition 103
Chapter 1 - Introduction
- example of mistaken social cognition
- Social Cognition = study if how people make sense of other people and themselves
- Focuses on how ordinary people think and feel about people
- can be studied by asking people how they make sense of others = phenomenology
- = to describe systematically how ordinary people say they experience the world
- Even useful when people are wrong
- naive psychology = common sense theory, peoples’ everyday theories about each other
- Sometimes researchers’ informal personal experience provides a basis for formal theory
and empirical research
- social cognition goes beyond naive psychology -> also entails Bine grained analysis of how
people think about themselves and others -> methods of cognitive psychology
- Cognitive processes inBluence social behavior -> two viewpoints: intuitive analysis and Bine
grained cognitive perspective
, 2
Approaches to studying the social thinker
Asch’s Competing Models
- Solomon Asch (1946) examined how people make sense of other people, combining their
personality components and coming up with an integrated overall impression
- Set the stage for person perception research
- Asch theorised that we Bit the persons various qualities (traits) into a single unifying theme
(impression)
- Made this point in 12 unique studies
- Participants had to form an impression based on list of personality traits
- eg. Switching the traits cold and warm amongst other traits created a completely
different description of the target person
- Asch proposed two models to account for the results: conBigural and algebraic model
- Con?igural Model = people form a uniBied overall impression of other people; the
unifying forces shape individual elements to bring them in line with the overall
impression
- Pressure towards unity changes meaning of individual traits to Bit into context
- People use variety of strategies to organise and unify impression and thus change
meaning of ambiguous terms
- Schema
- Holistic model/approach to social cognition
- Algebraic Model = takes each individual trait,
evaluates it in isolation and combines the
evaluations into a summary
- All pros and cons -> information averaging
- Much research backs this up
- Impression = a + b + c + d / a+b+c+d+G (G here general positivity/negativity)
- Elemental approach to social cognition
- these two ideas are fundamentally different ideas -> debated
- But both models are Blexible enough to account for each others data -> neither falsiBiable
- Both models are right, but people follow each process under different circumstances
- Elemental approach = breaks scientiBic problems down into pieces and analyses the pieces
in separate detail
- Holistic approach = analyses pieces in context of other pieces and focus on entire
conBiguration
Elemental Origins of Social Cognition
- until the beginning of the 20th century, psychology was branch of philosophy
- British philosophers’ elemental tradition likened the mind to chemistry
- Basic elements creates mental chemistry
- in elemental view, ideas Birst come from our sensations and perceptions -> then become
associated by contiguity in space and time
- Associated through repeated pairings
- Frequency of repetition is a major factor that determines the strength of an association
- psychology as own science in early 20th century -> mental chemistry tested by Wundt and
Ebbinghaus
, 3
- Observed their own thought processes
- Introspection
- Basis of modern experimental psychology
Holistic Origins of Social Cognition Research
- Immanuel Kant
- Against elemental approach
- Argued for tackling the whole mind at once
- Mental phenomena as inherently subjective
- Construction of reality (same as perception)
- The intellect organised the world, creating perpetual order from surrounding Bield
- Gestalt Psychology
- Drew on holistic insights and Kant
- First describe phenomenon of interest, the immediate experience of the perception,
without analysis
- Reliance on asking people how they make sense of the world
- Focus on experience of dynamic wholes (as opposed to elementalists)
- Believe that emergent structure is lost by breaking the whole into pieces
- Perceptual whole as having properties not discernible from the isolated parts
- The individual acquires meaning in context
Lewin’s Person-Situation Field Theory
- Kurt Lewin (1951)
- Imported gestalt ideas to social psychology
- Focused on persons subjective perceptions not on objective analysis
- Emphasised the inBluence of the social environment as perceived by the individual =
psychological ?ield -> cannot result from objective description by others
- Restraining and driving forces
- motivation, cognition and person in the environment
- Persons own reports provide best reports
- Emphasis on individual phenomenology
- No one force predicts actions, but the dynamic equilibrium among them, the ever changing
balance of forces predicts action
- Total Psychological Field is determined by: Person in the Situation + Cognition and
Motivation
- Person in the situation = person contributes needs, beliefs, perceptual abilities -> act on
environment to constitute psychological Bield
- Cognition and Motivation = both are functions of person and situation and jointly predict
behavior
- Cognition provides the interpretation of world(if person is confused, behavior will be
unstable)
- Motivation strength predict whether a behavior will occur and how much of it
Conclusion about Elemental and Holistic Views
- historical origins of social cognitions contrast elemental and holistic viewpoints
- Elemental approaches aim to build up from the bottom
- Piecemeal nature of this approach contrasts sharply with the holistic nature of the gestalt
- Holistic view tackles entire conBiguration
, 4
The Ebb and Flow of Cognition In Psychology
- introspection got bad reputation
Cognition in Experimental Psychology
- Wundt’s work relied heavily on trained introspection
- But ultimately abandoned introspection because didn’t conform to scientiBic standards
- Data should be publicly reproducible
- Examination and replication
- psychologists shifted away from studying internal processes towards external events
- Behaviourist Psychology
- early 20th century
- Only overt measurable acts were of importance
- Thorndike, Skinner
- Instrumental learning and no place for cognition
- Rewards and punishment
- The effect becomes a cause
- S and R
- But linguists criticised the lack of frameworks attempt to account for language
- And new approaches came about
- Information Procession = mental operations can not be broken down into sequential
stages
- Many cognitive processes
- How people acquire knowledge and skill
- Information procession theory speciBies the steps intervening between stimulus and
response
- Main focus: sequential processing
- Aiming to specify cognitive mechanisms
- new scientiBic tools
- Computer simulations
- Also as metaphor
- Framework for mental processes -> input output, memory storage etc.
- Human cognition resembles computer information processing
- cognitive neuroscience -> brain networks etc.
- 1970s: cognitive psychology re-emerged
- 1990s: decade of the brain -> neuroscience profoundly altered studies
- Distinct neural bases for distinct types of category learning
- Neural evidence for episodic memory
- Neuropsychology of brain damage
- Neuroimaging studies
Cognition in Social Psychology
- social psychology always leans on cognitive concepts
- Reaction depends on people’s perception
- Other people can inBluence each other without even being present -> ultimate reliance on
perception to the exclusion of objective stimuli
- Social psychological causes are largely cognitive and the results are largely cognitive
- Person in between the presumed cause and the result is viewed as a thinking organism
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