SOCIAL COGNITION:We are categorizing creatures, Developing Schemas

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Social Psychology (PSY403)

Lesson 18

SOCIAL COGNITION

Aims

To acquaint students with the concept of social cognition and cognitive misers in making sense of their

social world.

Objectives

To understand the dual process of social cognition

To describe how do we organize and make sense of social information through social

categorization and schemas.

To discuss what shortcuts stretch our cognitive resources.

What is Social Cognition?

Social cognition is the way we analyse, remember, and use information about the social world (Berkowitz

& Devine, 1995)

Social cognition focuses on the way we use this information to arrive at coherent judgments.

Dual-Process models of social cognition: strategies

Explicit cognition: Deliberate judgments or decisions of which we are consciously aware

Implicit cognition: Judgments or decisions that are under the control of automatically activated

evaluations

How do we organize and make sense of social information

Usually we make quick impression of people based on minimal information available and we do not have

luxury of engaging in detailed impression. Luckily then we come equipped with alternative social strategies

that rely on implicit cognition. To make sense of our social world, we categorize things, and develop

theories (schemas) of how the social world operates.

We are categorizing creatures

A mental grouping of objects, ideas, or events that share common properties is known as category

concepts

Categories are building blocks of cognitions

Bruner, Goodnow, & Austin (1956) indicated that category membership is determined via defined

features, i.e., an animal with three body divisions, six legs, an external skeleton, and a rapid

reproductive system = INSECT. If one or more of these attributes is missing the animal is

something else.

Expands our ability to deal with the huge amount of information

Social categorization (Hampson, 1988)

The classification of people into groups based on their common attributes

Usually done on the basis of readily apparent physical features: sex, age, and race; primary

categories for human beings (Schneider, 2004); special for evolutionary and socio-cultural reasons

BUT...many categories have uncertain or `Fuzzy' boundaries (Rosch, 1978) and do not fit in with a

strict classification system.

Social Psychology (PSY403)

Category refers to features that characterize the most typical (McGarry, 1999).

Prototypes are the most representative members of a category (Barsalou, 1991).

Categorization of less typical members may be slower/errorful because they are less available

(male nurses).

Correct categorization depends on how similar a given instance is to the prototype, e.g., the

prototype of the category `engineers' is a male which may lead to errors in categorization when

encountering a female engineer. Similarly the prototype of a "nurse" fits well with a female.

Developing Schemas

We not only mentally group objects, ideas, or events into categories, but we also develop theories

about these categories, called schemas.

A schema is an organized, structured set of cognitions about a concept.

Event schemas are known as scripts.

Schemas are often called stereotypes when applied to members of a social group

Schemas can be about particular people, social roles, groups, or common events.

People are good or bad in certain schemas, like someone's computer schema may not be good.

Advantages of Schematic Processing

Schemas Aid Information Processing

Schemas Aid Recall

Schemas Speed Up Processing

Schemas Aid Automatic Inference

Schemas Add Information

Schemas Aid Interpretation

Schemas Provide Expectations

Schemas Contain Affect

What shortcuts stretch our cognitive resources: The cognitive miser?

Processing resources are valuable so we engage in timesaving mental shortcuts when trying to

understand the social world (Fiske & Taylor, 1991)

Timesaving mental shortcuts, called heuristics, reduce complex judgements to simple rules-of-

thumb (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974)

Advantages of using cognitive miser are: 1. quick social judgement and, 2. reasonable accuracy

Quick and easy - but can result in biased information processing (Ajzen, 1996)

A. The Representativeness Heuristic

The tendency to judge the category membership of people based on how closely they match the

prototypical member of that category. There is an old saying that "It looks like a duck, it quakes

like a duck, then it is probably a duck"

One important qualifying information is base rates

Importance of personal descriptions vs. base-rate information: study by Tversky & Kahneman

(1973) where they told the research participants that an imaginary named Jack had been selected

from a group of 100 people. Some were told that 30 were engineer and others were told that 70 of

100 were engineers. Half of them were given a description of jack that either fit the omen

stereotype of an engineer or did not. Then they were asked to guess the probability that Jack was an

engineer. The results showed that when participants received only importance related to base rates,

they were more likely to guess that he was an engineer, but when they received information about

jack's personality, they tended to ignore the base-rate information. This tendency is known as base-

rate fallacy.

Social Psychology (PSY403)

Figure 1 illustrates this study.

S tu d y o f T v e rs k y & K a h n e m a n

(1 9 7 3 )

B. The Availability Heuristic

The tendency to judge the

frequency or probability of an

100

event in terms of how easy it is

to think of examples of that

event (accessibility, Tversky &

Kahneman (1973), e.g., plane

crashes.

Study of Schwarz et al. (1991)

Recall 12 (cognitively

Ba s e r a t e in fo

Ba s e ra t e in fo + Ba s e ra t e in fo +

re p re s e n t a t iv e un r e p re s e n t a t iv e

difficult) vs. 6 (cognitively

d e s c r ip t io n

easy) examples of assertive and unassertive behaviour

Rate assertiveness

People attend to the difficulty of retrieving instances of certain behaviours rather than just the

content

Figure 2 illustrates this study

C.The Anchoring & adjustment Heuristic

R a t e d a s s e r t iv e n e s s fo llo w in g r e t r ie v a l o f

Anchoring is the tendency to be biased

a s s e r t iv e b e h a v io u r s

towards the starting value or anchor in

6 it e m s

making quantitative judgements

1 2 it e m s

In a survey study Plous (1989) asked

6 .5

one of the following questions from

the respondents:

1. Is there a greater than 1%

5 .5

chance of a nuclear war

occurring soon? (10%), OR

2. Is there less than a 90%

4 .5

chance of a nuclear war

occurring soon? (25%)

A s s e r t iv e b e h a v io u r

U n a s s e r t iv e

b e h a v io u r

Estimated chances of a nuclear

The results of this study are illustrated in Figure

war

100

Reading

3. Franzoi, S. (2003). Social Psychology.

Boston: McGraw-Hill. Chapter 5.

>1%

<90%

Anchor

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