Social cognition: Perceiving self and

others

Ari Sudan Tiwari, Ph. D.

Social cognition: Perceiving the social world

The manner in which we receive, interpret, analyze,

remember and use information about the social

world.

Inquisitive area of social cognition

Why we are overoptimistic while planning various tasks?

Do our images of ‘certain kinds of persons’ influence our behaviour?

Do our expectations about various events shape our reactions to

them when they actually occur?

Does thinking too much get us confused and interfere with our ability

to make accurate judgments?

What types of errors we commit over and over again while

perceiving people around us?

Schemas

Schemas are mental frameworks containing

information relevant to specific situations or events,

which, once formed, help us interpret these situations

and what is happening in them.

Types of schemas

Person schemas are mental frameworks suggesting that certain traits and behaviours go together and individuals having them represent a certain type.

Role schemas contain information about how persons playing specific roles generally act.

Event schemas (Scripts) are mental frameworks of and expectations in specific situations and events.

Impact of schemas on social cognition

Attention

Information inconsistent with existing schema, and thus unexpected,

are more easily noticed and attended

Impact of schemas on social cognition

Encoding

At the initial stage, when schema are being formed, inconsistent

information are more easily encoded

Once schema are formed information consistent with the

schema are more readily encoded and stored

Impact of schemas on social cognition

Recovery and Retrieval

Information consistent with existing schema or part of them, are more

often retrieved, recovered and used in our thought, decisions and

behaviours

Heuristics: Mental shortcuts in social cognition

Heuristics are rules or principles that allow us to make social

judgments more quickly and with reduced efforts.

Bombardment of social information

Limited capacity cognitive system

Heuristics

Social interaction needs:

Rapid judgment

Reduced effort

Reasonable accuracy

Types of heuristics

Representativeness: Judging by resemblance

Strategy to make social judgments based on the extent to which current

person’s or event’s characteristics resemble with the characteristics of

stored schema of similar event or person

Availability: What comes to mind first

Strategy to make social judgments based on specific kinds of information

that can easily be brought into mind

Types of heuristics

False consensus effect

Tendency to assume that others behave or think as we do to a greater

extent than is actually true

Priming: Medical student syndrome

Some events or stimuli increase the availability of specific types of

information in memory or consciousness

Errors in social cognition

Rational vs. intuitive processing

Red and White Jelly Beans Experiment

Rational Thinking in situations involving analytical thought (Solving mathematical problems)

Intuitive Thinking in situation involving social judgments

Dealing with inconsistent information

Tendency to pay greater attention to information that is unexpected or somehow inconsistent with our expectations

Errors in social cognition

Optimistic bias for task completion: Planning Fallacy

Tendency to make optimistic prediction concerning how long a task will take

Automatic vigilance: Noticing the negative

We never notice a person’s twenty smiles but readily notice once he frowns.

Strong tendency to pay attention to undesirable or negative information

Errors in social cognition

Counterfactual thinking: Experience of regret

Tendency to evaluate events by thinking about alternatives to

them-“what might have been or should have been”

Errors in social cognition

Magical thinking

Belief that things that resemble one another share fundamental

properties; Assumptions that does not hold up to rational inquiry

Law of Contagion: When two objects touch, they pass properties

to one another,

Law of Similarity: Things that resemble one another share

fundamental properties

Person perception: Attribution

Attribution is the process of identifying the causes of others’

behaviour and their stable traits and dispositions

Correspondent Inference Theory: Jones and Davis

Behaviour that is

Freely chosen

Non common in its effects

Low in social desirability

Somehow forced

Common in its effects

High in social desirability

Originates from the person’s stable traits

Originates from the situational effects

Theory of Causal Attribution: Kelley

Causes Behind Others’ Behaviours:

Internal Causes: Persons’ traits, motives and intentions

External Causes: Some aspects of social or physical world

ConsensusThe extent to which an individual’s response is similar to one shown by others

ConsistencyThe extent to which an individual responds to a given situation in the same way as on different occasions

DistinctivenessThe extent to which an individual responds in the same way as to different situations

Low

High

Low

High

High

High

Internal Causes

External Causes

Theory of Causal Attribution: Kelley

How do we handle multiple causes?

Discounting Principle

Tendency to attach less importance to one potential cause of a

behaviour when other potential causes are also present

Augmenting Principle

Tendency to attach greater importance to one potential cause of a

behaviour if it occurs despite the presence of other inhibitory factors

Attribution: Basic sources of errors

Fundamental attribution error

Tendency to overestimate the impact of dispositional causes on others’ behaviour

Actor-observer effect

Tendency to attribute our own behaviour mainly to situational causes but others’ behaviour to internal (dispositional) causes

Self-serving bias

Tendency to attribute our own positive outcomes to internal causes (own traits or characteristics) but negative outcomes to external causes (chance, task difficulty)

Rules of justice in social relationship

The Contribution Rule and Equity

A relationship is considered fair when all individuals involved receive outcomes proportional to their respective contributions

The Need Rule and Norm of Social Responsibility

Outcome should be distributed in accordance with the relative amount of individual need

The Equality Rule

Outcomes should be distributed equally among the participants in a relationship, irrespective of individual contributions or needs

Thank You