1. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Chapter 3 Social Cognition: How We Think About the Social World

2. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. PowerPoint Presentation Prepared By Fred W. Whitford Montana State University

3. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Chapter Outline I. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking

4. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. 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.

5. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking People use mental shortcuts to simplify the amount of information they receive from the environment.

6. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking Automatic thinking is thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary and effortless.

7. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. 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.

8. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. 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.

9. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. 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.

10. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking

11. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking

12. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. 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.

13. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. 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.

14. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking

15. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking

16. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking Mental Strategies and Shortcuts Judgmental heuristics are mental shortcuts people use to make judgments quickly and efficiently.

17. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. 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.

18. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. 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.

19. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. 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.

20. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. 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.

21. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking The Pervasiveness of Automatic Thinking

22. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Chapter Outline II. Controlled Social Cognition: High-Effort Thinking

23. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Controlled Social Cognition: High- Effort Thinking Controlled thinking is conscious, voluntary, and effortful.

24. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Controlled Social Cognition: High- Effort Thinking Automatic Believing, Controlled Unbelieving

25. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. 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.

26. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. 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.

27. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. 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.

28. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Chapter Outline III. The Amadou Diallo Case Revisited

29. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. 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.

30. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Study Questions What is social cognition? What do researchers in this area study?

31. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Study Questions What are the advantages of automatic thinking? When is this type of thinking problematic?

32. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Study Questions Why are schemas so important to study? What role do they play in people’s understanding and interpretations of themselves and the social world? What are examples of cognitive processes that are influenced by schemas?

33. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Study Questions What functions do schemas serve? Why does their use sometimes have adaptive value? How is their use maladaptive? How do accessibility and priming affect schema use?

34. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Study Questions What is the relationship between schemas and the perseverance effect?

35. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Study Questions Why does the self-fulfilling prophecy occur? What function does it serve? How can it affect resistance to schema change?

36. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Study Questions How do cultures influence schema content?

37. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Study Questions Why do people use judgmental heuristics? What are three heuristics that people use to make judgments? When people rely on these heuristics, what kind of information are they not taking into account?

38. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Study Questions What are the effects of motivation on judgment formation? How is automatic thinking different from controlled thinking? What effects does cognitive load have on these two types of thinking?

39. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Study Questions How do automatic processing and controlled processing interact to allow for successful thought suppression?

40. Aronson Social Psychology, 5/e Copyright © 2005 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. Study Questions What is the relationship between the occurrence of counterfactual thinking and emotional reactions to events?