1. Social Cognition: How We Think About the Social World
Chapter 3
Social Cognition:
How We Think About the Social World

3. Chapter Outline The Amadou Diallo Case
Amadou Diallo (September 2, 1975 – February 4, 1999) was a 23-year-old Guinean immigrant in New York City who was shot and killed on February 4, 1999 by four New York City Police Department plain-clothed officers: Sean Carroll, Richard Murphy, Edward McMellon and Kenneth Boss. The four officers fired a total of 41 rounds. The shooting took place at 1157 Wheeler Avenue in the Soundview section of The Bronx. The four were part of the now-defunct Street Crimes Unit. All four officers were acquitted at trial in Albany, New York.
The Amadou Diallo Case

4. Chapter Outline
I. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking

5. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
Social cognition is the study of how people select, interpret, and use information to make judgments about themselves and the social world.

6. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
People use mental shortcuts to simplify the amount of information they receive from the environment.

9. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
Automatic thinking is thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary and effortless.

10. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
People as Everyday Theorists: Automatic Thinking with Schemas
Schemas are mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social world around themes or subjects: schemas affect what information we notice, think about, and remember.

11. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
People as Everyday Theorists: Automatic Thinking with Schemas
Schemas act as filters, screening out information that is inconsistent with them. Although we may notice and remember glaring exceptions, usually we attend only to schema-consistent information.

12. What if there were no schemas?
Korsakov’s Syndrome
No memory
No schemas
Memento

13. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
People as Everyday Theorists: Automatic Thinking with Schemas
Accessibility: the ease with which schemas can be brought to mind.
Priming: the process by which recent experiences make schemas, traits, or concepts come to mind more readily.

14. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking

15. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking

16. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
People as Everyday Theorists: Automatic Thinking with Schemas
Perseverance effect: the tendency for people’s beliefs about themselves and their world to persist even when those beliefs are discredited.
Example: Milosevic Case

17. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
People as Everyday Theorists: Schemas and Their Influence
Self-fulfilling prophecy: whereby people have an expectation about what another person is like, which influences how they act toward that person, which causes that person to behave in a way consistent with the original expectation.
Example: White Men Can’t Jump

18. White Men Can’t Jump

19. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking

20. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking

21. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
Mental Strategies and Shortcuts
Judgmental heuristics are mental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently.
: Look at the mother, take the daughter

22. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
Mental Strategies and Shortcuts
The availability heuristic is a mental rule of thumb whereby people base a judgment on the ease with which they can bring something to mind.
:Doctors diagnosing illnesses

24. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
Mental Strategies and Shortcuts
The representativeness heuristic is a mental shortcut whereby people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case.
Nerelisin Hemşerim?

25. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
Mental Strategies and Shortcuts
Base rate information is information about the frequency of members of different categories in the population. It usually is not considered when people are using mental shortcuts.

26. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
Mental Strategies and Shortcuts
The anchoring and adjustment heuristic is a mental shortcut that involves using a number or value as a starting point, and then adjusting one’s answer away from this anchor.
One example of anchoring and adjustment is biased sampling, whereby people make generalizations from samples of information they know are biased or atypical.

27. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
The Pervasiveness of Automatic Thinking

28. Chapter Outline
II. Controlled Social Cognition: High-Effort Thinking

29. Controlled Social Cognition: High-Effort Thinking
Controlled thinking is conscious, voluntary, and effortful.

30. Controlled Social Cognition: High-Effort Thinking
Automatic Believing, Controlled Unbelieving

31. Controlled Social Cognition: High-Effort Thinking
Thought Suppression and Ironic Processing
Thought suppression is the attempt to avoid thinking about something we would prefer to forget.
Monitoring Process- Automatic
Operating Process- Controlled
Under cognitive load, TS is difficult.

32. Controlled Social Cognition: High-Effort Thinking
Thought Suppression and Ironic Processing
Being preoccupied reduces our ability to engage in thought suppression, or the attempt to avoid thinking about something we would just as soon forget.

33. Controlled Social Cognition: High-Effort Thinking
Mentally Undoing the Past: Counterfactual Reasoning
Counterfactual thinking is mentally changing some aspect of the past as a way of imagining what might have been.

34. Chapter Outline
III. The Amadou Diallo Case Revisited

35. Timothy Thomas From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Timothy Thomas was a 19-year old African-American man who was fatally shot by a Cincinnati police officer in Thomas was the fifteenth African-American man killed by the Cincinnati Police Department in five years, and his death led to outrage in the black community that culminated with the 2001 Cincinnati Riots.
On April 8, 2001, Thomas was seen by Cincinnati police officers and recognized as being wanted on 14 outstanding warrants. When Thomas realized he knew one of the officers, he fled. In a subsequent chase involving a dozen additional officers, Thomas was eventually confronted by Officer Steven Roach, in a dark alley. Roach was running with his gun out (standard procedure) but with his finger on the trigger, in opposition gun handling procedure taught to police. Immediately after the incident, Roach said the gun had "just gone off" in his hand.[1] Later, Roach claimed to have seen a gun, and later revised his story to claim that he only saw Thomas reaching for something at his waist, and Roach fired his gun once at Thomas.
It was later revealed Thomas was unarmed, but may have been attempting to pull up his pants. After Thomas fell, Officer Roach called for an ambulance, and when Thomas arrived at University Hospital, he was declared dead.
Thomas was the father of one child.

36. The Amadou Diallo Case Revisited
Improving Human Thinking
Often we have more confidence in our judgements than we should. To try to improve reasoning skills, we need to break through this overconfidence barrier and make people more aware of the limits of their cognitive abilities.