Chapter 9 Social Psychology as Science
Download
Report
Transcript Chapter 9 Social Psychology as Science
Social Cognition
Over the next few days we’ll focus on social
cognition and self justification.
Tonight: overview of concepts
election-related social cognition
Thursday: film analysis – Capturing the
Friedmans
Tuesday: article seminar and self
justification
Making sense of the
world
People are constantly trying to make
sense of our social world
Our brains are powerful and efficient, but
imperfect
We try to be rational, but we aren’t always
Cognitive misers
We try to conserve our cognitive energy
We adopt strategies to simplify complex
problems
We ignore some information to reduce our
cognitive load
This leads to biases in our thinking
**How do you try to simplify the information
related to the election?**
A few ads to get you thinking…
http://www.yeson1098.com/videos.html
http://www.defeat1098.com/media/video
http://www.pattymurray.com/multimedia/vi
deo?id=0023
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V66tq1
Rmdd4
Effects of Context on Social
Judgment
Reference points and contrast effects
Priming
Gain or loss? Positive or negative?
Ordering
What are we thinking about?
Framing
Good compared to what?
Primacy effect and impression formation
Amount of information
Dilution effect
Judgmental heuristics
(definition)
A mental shortcut
Simple rules that guide our judgment and
problem solving
When do we use heuristics?
When we don’t have time to think
carefully
When we are overloaded with
information
When the issues at stake aren’t very
important
When we have insufficient information
to use in making a decision
Judgmental heuristics
Representative heuristic – it’s like this in
one way, must be like it in other ways
Availability heuristic – specific examples
come easily to mind
Attitude heuristic – our positive or negative
attitudes affect our judgment
Halo effect –
False consensus
Availability heuristic
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/monjuly-15-2002/i-know-what-you-did-lastsummer-of-the-shark
Stereotyping and Categorization
Self-fulfilling prophecy: Our stereotypes
lead us to treat people in ways that make
them conform to expectations
Illusory Correlation: we see a relationship
we expect but where none exists
Ingroup/outgroup effects: all of them are
the same and my group is better
Human cognition
is conservative
We try to preserve that which is already
established
We maintain our existing knowledge,
beliefs, attitudes and stereotypes
Confirmation bias
Hindsight bias
Attribution Biases
Three general biases we use when we
are interpreting and explaining the
world
Fundamental Attribution Error
Actor Observer Bias
Self Biases
Fundamental attribution error
The tendency to overestimate the
importance of personality factors
rather than situational factors when
describing and explaining the causes
of social behavior
Actor-observer bias
The tendency for actors to attribute
their actions to situational factors
while observers attribute the same
actions to personality factors
Self Biases - Egocentric
thought
The tendency to perceive ourselves
as more central to events than is
actually the case
We tend to think we influence events
and people more than we do
Self-serving bias
The tendency to make dispositional
(personality) attributions for our
successes and to make situational
attributions for our failures