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Social Cognition
AP Psychology 8-10% of AP
Exam
Quick Write:
• Describe when a stereotype has caused
you to have a wrong impression about
someone, or caused someone else to
have a wrong impression about you.
• Has this wrong impression changed your
behavior or the behavior of the other
person?
• What advice would you give to others
when forming impressions about people?
Social Psychology
• how thoughts and
feelings influence
behavior toward others,
and how the behavior of
others influences
people’s thoughts
• Social Cognition –
mental processes
associated with the
ways people perceive
and react to other
individuals and groups
Social Influences on the Self
• Self-concept – the
beliefs we hold about
who we are and what
characteristics we
have
• Self-esteem – the
evaluations we make
about how worthy we
are as human beings
Self Comparison
Leon Festinger – people make two types of comparisons:
Temporal Comparison
Social Comparison
Considering your present
condition in relation to
how you were in the past
Evaluating yourself in
comparison to others using others as a
basis for evaluating
your attributes
Social Comparison
• Reference Groups – categories of people to which you see yourself
as belonging and to which you compare yourself
– Downward social comparison – strategy of choosing someone as the
target of comparison to oneself who is not as good on some
dimension of importance
– Upward social comparison – comparing yourself to people who do
much better
Social Identity
• Our beliefs about the groups to which we belong, and
thus is a part of our self-concept
– A group identity helps people to feel part of a larger
whole (may foster an “us versus them” mentality)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZ_qXmxdgGM
Self-Schemas
• Mental representations of
people’s beliefs and views
about themselves
– Unified self-schemas – regard
their attributes as stable
across every situation and role
– Differentiated self-schemas –
regard their attributes as
changing in different roles or
situations
Impressions
• First Impressions – quickly formed,
difficult to change, long-lasting
influence
• People are confident about
their judgment
• Easier to remember
• Forming Impressions – schemas
create a tendency to infer a great
deal about a person on the basis of
limited information
• Lasting Impressions – difficult to
change, long-lasting influence
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
Basis = Without our awareness, schemas cause us to subtly lead
people to behave in line with our expectations
4 steps:
1.
Adopting an attitude concerning a person
2.
Behave as though your attitude is correct
3.
Others react to your attitude
4.
Your prophecy comes true, not because you were right, but
because your behavior/attitude caused the prophecy to come true
Attribution
• The process people go through to explain causes of
behavior
• People tend to attribute behavior in a particular
situation either to:
– Personal or Dispositional Attribution (primarily
internal) causes
– Situational Attribution (primarily external) causes
Biases in Attribution
• http://www.youtube.com/wat
ch?v=AkWTCXDCVvc
• Fundamental Attribution
Error: a tendency to overattribute others’ behaviors
to internal factors, such as
personality traits
• False Consensus Effect–
tendency to overestimate
the number of people who
feel how you feel
• Self-serving bias –
tendency to take credit for
success (internal) but to
blame failure on external
causes
Sources of Attributions
Harold Kelley’s 3 Elements:
1. Consensus – the degree to which other people’s
behavior is similar to that of the individual. Ex: if it is
similar, it has high consensus. If it is dissimilar, it has
low consensus
2. Consistency – the degree to which the behavior occurs
repeatedly in a situation. Ex: if it always occurs, it has
high consistency. If it occurs intermittently, it has low
consistency
3. Distinctiveness – the extent to which similar stimuli
draw the same behaviors from the individual. Ex: if it is
highly predictable, then it has low distinctiveness. If it
is not predictable, it has high distinctiveness.
An internal attribution is most likely when there is low
consensus, high consistency, and low distinctiveness.
Attributions
Attitudes
• The tendency to think, feel, or act positively or
negatively towards objects in our environment
• 3 Components:
– Cognitive – set of beliefs about attributes of the
attitude object
– Affective – feeling about the object (emotional) –
a like or dislike
– Behavioral – involves a way of acting toward the
object
– http://educationportal.com/academy/lesson/attitudes.html#lesson
3 Components of Attitude
Forming Attitudes
• Modeling (Bandura, Skinner)–
children learn from their parents
what one should believe and feel
about certain objects
• Classical Conditioning
(Pavlov)– people are more likely
to form a positive attitude toward
an object when it is paired with
stimuli that elicit good feelings
• Mere-exposure effect – attitudes
toward an object tend to become
more positive as people are
exposed to that object more often
Prejudice and Stereotypes
• Stereotypes – Perceptions, beliefs, and expectations a
person has about members of some group – schemas
about the entire groups of people
• Prejudice – undeserved, usually negative attitude
toward an individual based on his or her membership in
some group
• Discrimination – action (based on prejudice attitude)
• Out-group homogeneity – members of the “in group”
see themselves as better than the “out groups”
• Contact Theory – bring hostile groups together and give
them a common goal = prejudice will be reduced
David Duez Video Lecture Link
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_A_H
qxgTHU