Social Cognition: Thinking about People and Situations

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Studying Social Cognition

• Research on social judgments examines how people make decisions, interpret past events, understand current events, and make predictions for future events.

• The social judgments that are made will ultimately influence behaviors.

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Mental Mechanism Outputs

Automatic Controlled

Info

info

info

Judgments

Inputs

Social Judgments

AccurateBiased Distorted

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The Information Available for Social Cognition• Social cognition depends first of all on information.

• Understanding other people depends on having accurate information.• Snap judgment

• Sometimes we have very little information but make judgments anyway—as when people make personality judgments based on physical appearance.

• And people could make an accurate judgment of personality even when he/she has a slide of information in a second.

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Trustworthy, Extraversion, Intelligent…

Inferring Personality from Brief Glances at Faces

• What is it that people think they see in brief glances at another person’s face? • Todorow et al. (2008): Perceiving

trust (positive-negative)and dominance (power)

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However, sometimes people would go

wrong even when they have direct information

or perceive the events by themselves.

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Misleading 誤導 Information

• Firsthand information 一手訊息• This is information based on personal experience or

observation.• Secondhand information 二手訊息• This is information that comes from other sources, for

example, gossip, news accounts, books, magazines, or the Internet.

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Misleading Firsthand Information• Personal experiences may be unrepresentative.

• For instance, making judgments about what a country is like from having visited only a few people and places.

• Pluralistic ignorance 群盲

• Misperception of a group norm that results from observing people who are acting at variance with their private beliefs out of a concern for the social consequences, actions that reinforce the erroneous group norm （國王的新衣）

• Self-fulfilling prophecy（自證預言）• This is the tendency for people to act in ways that bring about the

very thing they expect to happen.• If a prophecy is to be self-fulfilling, there must be some mechanism

that translates a given expectation into an action that tends to confirm the prophecy. 8

Misleading Secondhand Information• Ideological distortions意識形態的扭曲• People may be biased when transmitting information

because they wish to foster specific ideas in others.• Distortions are caused in the service of entertainment 戲劇或娛樂效果

• Effects of the bad-news bias 負面新聞• People may believe they are more at risk of victimization

than they really are.• Fake news in the (social) media age? 假新聞的氾濫

• Misinformation, Distortion, Fraud…..9

打疫苗會得自閉症？？？

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Andrew Wakefield

台灣事實查核中心 https://tfc‐taiwan.org.tw

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Misleading Secondhand Information• Fake news in the (social) media age? 假新聞的氾濫

Why people believe?Gullibility 輕信？

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•「反覆不斷撒謊的作用不是謊言被接受為真理、真理被貶謫為謊言，而是我們失去了在世界裡自行摸索的能力。」（頁169）•「傳播錯誤的陳述主要不是為了使民眾相信某個謊言，而是為了使民眾對自己評估真假的能力失去信心，然後乖乖相信領袖說的話。」（頁169）

艾莎・威克福斯（2020/2021）。「另類真實」。

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How Information Is Presented• To understand the powerful impact of how information is

presented, we need only to consider the marketing and advertising of products.

• Order Effects： Primacy effect and Recency effect• Framing effects 框架效應

• The influence on judgment resulting from the way information is presented

• The information people receive determine how they process the information they receive later.

• Order effect• Spin framing

oFraming information to be seen as favorable or unfavorable 14

？？

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？？

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Framing Effects

• Positive and negative framing• Negative information draws more attention than positive

information.• Information framed in negative ways will elicit stronger

responses.oIn decision making, a loss is more aversive than a missed

opportunity.

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Temporal Framing•Construal level theory 構念層次理論

• A theory about the relationship between psychological distance and abstract or concrete thinking: psychologically distant actions and events are thought about in abstract terms, whereas actions and events that are close at hand are thought about in concrete terms.

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下個學年

這個學期

擴展自己的視野

增加自己的報告

How We Seek Information• It is important to understand how we seek and interpret

information.• Confirmation bias 驗證偏誤• The tendency to test an idea by searching for evidence that

would support it 看只想看到的oCan lead to false beliefs because people may fail to attend

to disconfirming information• Synder & Swann. 1978• Cracker 1982

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Confirmation Bias: Study (Crocker, 1982)

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A balanced search for

confirmatory and disconfirmatory information

is essential to a sound judgment.

But sometimes it is not easy.

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Motivated Confirmation Bias 動機式驗證偏誤

• People seek confirmatory information when they want to maintain a certain belief.• For instance, supporters and opponents of the death penalty

were found to interpret the same evidence in opposite ways.

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Mental Mechanism Outputs

Automatic Controlled

Info

info

info

Judgments

Inputs

Mental Mechanisms• Bottom-up processing 由下而上的歷程

• “Data-driven” mental processing, in which an individual forms conclusions based on the stimuli encountered in the environment

• Top-down processing 由上而下的歷程

• “Theory-driven” mental processing, in which an individual filters and interprets new information in light of preexisting knowledge and expectations

• Using schemas 基模 to understand new information• Priming 觸發 the schema

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Schemas• Schema

• A knowledge structure consisting of any organized body of stored information

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Attention Memory Construal Behavior

The Influence of Schemas• Priming

• The presentation of information designed to activate a concept and hence make it accessible.

• A prime is the stimulus presented to activate the concept in question.• Schemas can influence judgments even when the schema activation

occurs outside of our conscious awareness.• Automatic Processes （vs. Reflective processes）• Situations always act as prime and are so powerful and automatically

contagious that we don’t realize this is happening

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Subliminal primes influence Impressions• Subliminal primes 閾下觸發

• Bargh & Pietromonaco (1982)• Phase 1: Vigilance task– Press a key as soon as you see a flash– Flashes masked subliminally presented words– 0%, 20% or 80% of the words were hostility primes

‘hostile’, ‘rude’, ‘whip’, ‘punch’

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Subliminal primes influence Impressions• Bargh & Pietromonaco (1982)• Phase 2: Read behavioral description– 12 sentence paragraph– Included sentences that were ambiguous with respect to hostility– “A salesman knocked at the door, but Donald refused to let him enter.” “He also told me that he was refusing to pay his rent until the landlord repaints the apartment”

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Subliminal primes influence Impressions• Bargh & Pietromonaco (1982)• Phase 3: Evaluate Donald

– Various trait descriptors– Hostile-related

Negative in evaluative tone (hostile, unfriendly, dislikable) Positive in evaluative tone (kind, considerate, thoughtful).

– Hostile-unrelatedNegative in evaluative tone (boring, conceited, narrow-minded) Positive in evaluative tone (dependable, interesting, intelligent)

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Subliminal primes influence Impressions

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4.5

5.5

6.5

7.5

8.5

Hostile related Hostile‐unrelated

Donlad’s negative impression

0% 20% 80%**

**

Subliminal primes influence Impressions

Results revealed that – % of hostility primes affect judgments of Donald, who has engaged in ambiguously hostile behaviors– Primes shape our construals– Primes only affect construals when the primes are directly applicable or relevant to the behaviors

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Which Schemas Are Activated and Applied? • Recent activation活化• Schemas can be brought to mind, or activated, in various

ways. oRecent activation is one of the most common and

important ways of doing so.• Frequent activation and chronic accessibility• People differ in the schemas they tend to use when

evaluating others.• Expectations • Sometimes people apply a schema because of a preexisting

expectation about what they will encounter. 32

Which Schemas Are Activated and Applied?

• Consciousness of activation: necessary or not?• At the end of many priming experiments, researchers have

found that very few participants suspected that there was any connection between the two parts of the study—the initial priming phase and the subsequent judgment phase

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Biases in Judgment and Decision Making

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Kahneman & Tversky

Dual Processing of Information• Dual modes of information processing

• Intuitive systemoCognitive miseroRapid responses based on associations that come automatically to

mindoIntuitive information processing can be done in parallelMany things can be intuitively processed at the same time

• The rational systemoSlower and more controlled, and based on rules and deduction;

performs its operations one at a time—serially

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Intuition versus Reason

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Intuitive Processing and Mistaken Judgment

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Heuristics• Heuristics捷思• Intuitive mental operations, performed quickly and

automatically, that provide efficient answers to common problems of judgment

• Tversky & Kahneman (1974)• Availability 可用性• Representativeness 代表性• Anchor & Adjustment 定錨性

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The Availability Heuristic• The process whereby judgments of frequency or probability are based on

how readily pertinent instances come to mind• Accessibility 可促接性 may be influenced by personal attitudes,

cultural learning, or recent exposure.• Examples

• Which has more tornadoes, Kansas or Nebraska?oMany would intuitively say Kansas because of how easy it is to

think of an example from The Wizard of Oz, but the two states have about the same number of tornadoes.

• 哪一個城市比較危險？ 嘉義 或台南？

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The Availability Heuristic

k _ _ _ _...(king )_ _ k_ _ …(acknowledge )

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•Are there more words that begin with “r” or have “r” as a third letter?• Many people would intuitively say that more words begin with

“k” because it is easier to think of examples, but in reality, more words have “k” as a third letter.

• There are twice as many words with K as the third letter

The Availability Heuristic• Distinguishing ease of retrieval from amount retrieved• Not simply an assessment of the number of instances that

are retrieved• Biased assessments of risk• One area in which the availability heuristic can lead to

trouble in everyday life is the negative information being overreported in the news.•死於空難的人數比較多，還是死於車禍？

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• 556人 135萬人（ 2018年）

Biased Assessments of Perceived Causes of Death

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The Availability Heuristic

• Cognitions that are more available / accessible / vivid in memory are estimated as occurring more frequently • Fluency: the feeling of ease (or difficulty) associated with

processing information.• Some stimuli are easier to process: unfamiliar or irregular words

are harder to process than simple or familiar words

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Representativeness Heuristic

• Representativeness heuristic 代表性

The process whereby judgments of likelihood are based on assessments of similarity between individuals and group prototypes, or between cause and effect• Law of Small Numbers • Neglecting Base Rates • Conjunction Fallacy

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Representativeness HeuristicLaw of Small Numbers

• Flipping a coin 5 times • It came up Heads each of the first 5 flips. • What most likely came up on the 6th flip?

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Representativeness HeuristicLaw of Small Numbers

• I flipped a quarter 10 times before class. • Which is more likely to be the exact series of heads (H) & tails

(T) I saw?

Series A: HHHHHTTTTT

Series B: HTTHTHHTHT

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The following is a description drawn from a pool of 70 lawyers and 30 engineers.

• Jack is a 45-year-old man. He is married and has four children. He is generally conservative, careful, and reserved. He shows no interest in political and social issues and spends most of his free time on his many hobbies which include home carpentry, sailing, and mathematical puzzles.

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What is the likelihood that Jack is an engineer?

The following is a description drawn from a pool of 30 lawyers and 70 engineers.

• Jack is a 45-year-old man. He is married and has four children. He is generally conservative, careful, and reserved. He shows no interest in political and social issues and spends most of his free time on his many hobbies which include home carpentry, sailing, and mathematical puzzles.

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What is the likelihood that Jack is an engineer?

Representativeness HeuristicNeglecting Base Rates

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Subjects’ estimates didn’t changeacross the different base rate conditions.

Jack is an engineer

Representativeness HeuristicConjunction Fallacy

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• 「琳達31歲、單身，直率而聰明。她主修哲學。當年在學校唸書

的時候，非常關心歧視問題與社會正義，也參加反核遊行。」

• 琳達可能是怎樣的人：小學教師、書店員工且加入瑜珈班、活躍的女性

主義者（F）、銀行行員（T）、銀行行員兼活躍的女性主義者（T＆F）

等等，共有八個選項。

85-90%的人，在排序上 F > T&F > T

但是違反了下列機率法則 P(T) P(T&F)

Prospect theory 展望理論Kahneman & Tversky (1979)

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DECISION UNDER RISKGain vs. Loss

Which one do you choose?

A: A sure gain of $500 B: A 50% chance to gain $1000 and a 50% chance of gaining $0

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Which one do you choose?

If you are given $1000, then you need to take choice:A: A sure loss of $500 B: A 50% chance to loss $1000 and a 50% chance of loss $0

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Framing effects•Framed as Gains:

A: A sure gain of $500

•B: A 50% chance to gain $1000 and a 50% chanceof gaining $0 •EXPECTED VALUE:A = +500 vs. B = +500

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•Framed as Losses: A: A sure loss of $500

B: A 50% chance to lose $1000 and a 50% chance of losing $0 •EXPECTED VALUE:

A = +500 vs. B = +500

Framing effects•Framed as Gains:

A: A sure gain of $500

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•Framed as Losses: B: A 50% chance to lose $1000 and a 50% chance of losing $0

Prefer sure gains and a risk to lose nothingRisk averse for gains; Risk seeking in loss situations

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+ 500

‐500‐1000

+ 1000

0

Losing $500 hurts more than gain $500 yield pleasure

Risk averse 

Risk seeking 

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An earthquake dilemma

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•An earthquake is about to hit Taipei and is expected to kill 600 people. •Two plans have been proposed.•If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved•If Program B is adopted, there is a 1/3 chance that 600 people will be saved and a 2/3 chance that no one will be saved

72%

Save Frame

An earthquake dilemma

•An earthquake is about to hit Taipei and is expected to kill 600 people. •Two plans have been proposed.•If Program A is adopted, 400 people will die•If Program B is adopted, there is a 1/3 chance that no one will die and a 2/3 chance that 600 people will die

6078%

Die Frame

Economic rationality was challenged, people are not so rational!

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