Social Cognition
Geir Overskeid
http://on.to/geir
Social cognition:
What are we talking about?
• Definition: How we think about social
relations and the things that influence those
relations
• This definition comes in many variations
• The need for social cognition is often
thought to have been a driving force behind
the evolution of human cognitive abilities
Two important concepts
• Intuition (System 1)
• Reasoning (System 2)
Another important concept
• Accessibility, not to be confused with
availability.
• All aspects of a situation, a thing, a person
tend not to be equally accessible to an
observer. What is easily accessible often
becomes the basis for judgments and
decisions that are mainly intuitive (Syst. 1)
• Most decisions are mainly intuitive
Accessibility
The fundamental error of attribution
• In explaining the behavior of others, we tend to
overestimate the importance of the actor’s stable
dispositions and underestimate the power of the
situation
• The fundamental attribution error has been found
wherever researchers have looked, but seems
somewhat weaker in East Asia
• The exception: Explaining one’s own behavior.
Her the pattern may be the other way around.
Intuitive judgments
• Intuitive judgments leave little room for
uncertainty: People often feel strongly that
”this is the way it is.”
• Normally, only one alternative is
represented
• Heuristics form the basis of many intuitive
judgments
Heuristics
• Heuristics are often useful, but can cause
bias and lead to irrational behavior
• Behavior is rational when it is efficient in
reaching the actor’s goal
• We often overestimate the degree to which
we engage in reasoning. To a great extent,
choices are based on heuristics and
intuition.
An example: Representativeness
• The heuristic known as representativeness may
strongly influence our assumptions regarding a
person’s group membership, or as to whether she
resembles a stereotype. Let us look at Linda:
• Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and
very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a
student, she was deeply concerned with issues
of discrimination and social justice, and also
participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.
• Is Linda a bank teller? Is she a feminist and a bank
teller?
Priming - two modern classics
John Bargh et al. (1996):
• ”Old age” is unconsciously primed by way of a
scrambled sentence test. Result: Participants
walk more slowly.
• White participants who have subliminally seen
the face of a young Black male become more
hostile than those who have subliminally seen
the face of a young White male.
Compensation
• If people feel they should compensate for
irrelevant influence, they often compensate
too strongly. Some examples:
• Priming (contrast)
• Mood
• Liking
• When there’s nothing to compensate for
Other aspects of intuition
• A photograph may be sufficient basis for a
good appraisal of personality
• Other people’s facial expressions may affect
us unconsciously
• Lacking this kind of intuition may increase
a person’s risk of having social problems
Nosce te ipsum
• People often aren’t very good at
understanding the causes behind their
behavior
• The basis we have for understanding our
own behavior may not be much better than
our starting point for understanding others
Consciousness as cause
• Simply thinking about an action before it
takes place may make people feel they
caused it
• Even “willed” processes may not be
governed by conscious will
What can be unconscious?
• Most things
• John Bargh assumes that more 99 per cent of
human behavior is unconsciously controlled
• Consciousness probably exists primarily for
planning and simulation
What can be unconscious?
Among other things:
• Causes
• What affects my mood? Why did I fall in love? How
did I get that idea?
• Processes
• How did I solve that problem? Why does a situation
look the way it does to me?
• Social learning
• I thought I learnt A, but it was B instead, and also C.
It takes one to know one
• We overestimate the extent to which other
people understand or think the way we do
• Exception: Self-serving bias. We tend to see
our strengths as unique. Our weaknesses, on
the other hand, we see as more common
than they really are.