Download Social Cognition - Harvard FAS

Social Cognition
Running head: SOCIAL COGNITION
Social Cognition
Dana R. Carney & Mahzarin R. Banaji
Harvard University
Not final version – please do not cite without permission
1
Social Cognition
2
Social Cognition
Human beings are social animals. They think feel and act, involving themselves, others,
and larger collectives throughout every moment of the day. The enormous yet seemingly natural
tasks of social perception, social memory, and social decision-making in which the species
engages, and the byproducts of such work constitutes the study of social cognition. To examine
how social cognition unfolds, scientists have studied mental processes to learn about
representations of the social world and the invisible mechanisms by which the world is acted
upon: through the attitudes, beliefs, intentions and behavior of social agents.
The study of social cognition, in a sense, is more than a century old, if we look to the
earliest studies in social psychology conducted to examine the effects of others on the individual
(Triplett, 1898). It emerged as an explicit field in the late 1970’s with the merger of social and
cognitive psychology (Fiske & Taylor, 1st edition; 2nd edition; Hastie, et al., 1980; Ostrom, 1984).
The the first edition of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology to carry the subheading in
1981 was issue 40, volume 1. In the last few years, the definition of social cognition has been
more broadly applied, not only in social psychology and social neuroscience but also in cognitive
psychology and cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology and primatology (Adolphs,
2001; Banaji, Baron, Dunham, & Olson, in press; Mitchell, Banaji, & Macrae, 2005; Mitchell,
Macrae, & Banaji, 2004; Santos, Nissen, & Ferrugia, 2006).
Overview of Chapter
There is no finite set of topics that comprises social cognition because the field’s
boundaries continue to grow. It is worthwhile to summarize the topics that have constituted the
study of social cognition, primarily over these past 30 years, as taken together they constitute a
historically meaningful starting point. In this chapter we select what we regard to be the most
Social Cognition
3
robust and compelling evidence that forms the basis for the study of social cognition with an
emphasis on a recent diversification of the concept. In so doing, we will identify, with the
broadest strokes, the early work and focus upon the most recent developments in social
neuroscience, animal cognition, and infant and early childhood development. Such a review
should provide a springboard to questions of methodology and theory, although the primary
focus will remain on discoveries about how the mind operates in its natural social habitat.
The first sets of recent social cognition studies were conducted under the rubric of
person perception and person memory (e.g, Gilbert, 1998; Hastie et al., 1980). Explicit practical
links were made at this early stage to the law, in the form of understanding eyewitness
identification and jury decision-making (e.g., Hastie, Landsman, & Loftus, 1978). Influenced by
the work of Solomon Asch and early attribution theories, social cognition modernized the study
of social trait inference, impression formation, and attribution processes beginning in the early
1980’s (e.g., Gilbert Pelham, Krull, 1988; Ross, 1977; Smith & Miller, 1979; Trope, 1986).
Other related work simultaneously focused on identifying the essential architecture of social
cognition, including the basics of automatic and controlled processing (e.g., Banaji & Greenwald,
1995; Bargh & Pietromonaco, 1982; Bargh & Thien, 1985; Devine, 1989), the study of attitudes,
preferences, and evaluation (e.g., Smith, 1984; Smith & Lerner, 1986; Fazio & Zanna, 1978;
Fazio, 1986). Further work of note includes studies of group perception and the end products of
stereotyping and intergroup relations (Brewer, 1979; Brewer, 1988; Erber & Fiske, 1984;
Hamilton, 1981; Neuberg & Fiske, 1987; Word, Zanna, & Cooper, 1974).
Some of these studies produced results that were revolutionary. Others offered
groundwork upon which subsequent scientific giants now stand. Together, these findings all
point to one fundamental, critical aspect of the human social mind: the deeply embedded and
Social Cognition
4
critically adaptive need to belong (for an extensive review, see Fiske, 2004). It is this need that
lays the groundwork for all study of what it means to be a social creature. There is no more
fitting way to begin this chapter than with the research that documents the profound human need
to belong and the processes that emerge from this orientation.
Social Intimacy and the Fundamental Need to Belong
There is broad consensus that social attachment and the need to belong to other humans is
critical to survival (e.g., Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Fiske, 2004; Stevens & Fiske, 1995).
Through social interaction we garner emotional and resource support that fosters relationships
with potential mates, family and kin, and larger social networks. The need for social interaction
goes deep. Social networks within human and other animal species act as a buffer against stress
and protect health. Mother rats found to lick their babies had offspring that were more resistant
to and better buffered stressors relative to offspring from non-licking mothers. We now know
that that the act of licking releases oxytocin in a pup which likely acts as a buffer against stress
(Francis, Diorio, Liu, & Meaney, 1999; Liu, Diorio, Day, Francis, Meaney, 2000). In humans,
there are many documented cases of child abuse and neglect, such as the famous case of Genie,
which show that if raised without simple social interaction, a person will never develop normal
language or social skills (Candland, 1993; Curtiss 1977). Similarly, work on social rejection
shows how very basic it is. Human work by Eisenberger, Lieberman, and Williams (2003)
showed that the same regions of the brain (ventral prefrontal cortex) subserving actual physical
pain are the same regions activated when humans are targeted by social rejection. Thus, a sense
of the self as being included or excluded, and reaping the emotional and physical benefits of
inclusion are critical to mental and physical health and well-being.
Social Cognition
5
A dominant perspective in social anthropology, communications, and social psychology
is Relational Models Theory offered by A. P. Fiske (1992) in which most aspects of human
sociality are described by a 4-part model which includes: communal sharing, authority ranking,
equality matching, and market pricing. This theory describes the four primary ways in which
humans can and do relate to one another. Each principle in the theory clearly implicates the
finitude of resources along with the need to belong, negotiate, and maintain some sort of
legitimacy and equilibrium as underlying human organization. As such, societies must be
structured hierarchically in order to distribute these resources in an evolutionarily adaptive
manner. The principles of A.P. Fiske’s model are each echoed by one or more of the three most
dominant theories to describe social structure found in social cognition and social psychology:
Social Identification, Social Dominance, and System Justification. To demonstrate consensus
among the principles outlined in these theories, this section will be organized with the principles
outlined by the broadest and most interdisciplinary among them, A. P. Fiske’s Relational Models
Theory.
The four basic principles of A. P. Fiske’s (1992) anthropological Relational Models
Theory are: communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing.
Communal Sharing describes egalitarian relations between members of a dyad or group. In such
a communal group, individuals are equivalent. Further, members of a communal sharing group
are unified in protecting the group from out-group members. Social structures like these are
considered to be unique, uncommon, and temporally fleeting in modern social psychological
theory. To illustrate the latter principle of communal sharing as temporally fleeting, consider
Tajfel and Turner’s (1979) Social Identity Theory which describes the cognitive and motivational
crux of the division between the self and other. Their work showed the mere task of categorizing
Social Cognition
6
oneself and others into different groups led people to prefer other individuals from their in-group.
In particular, preferring one’s in-group, according to Tajfel and Turner (1986) is: (1) the extent
to which one feels similar to other in-group members, and (2) the extent to which the situational
context promotes comparison between oneself and others. For a moment, when one’s in-group is
novel, we see some evidence of A. P. Fiske’s communal sharing in that the self is equivalent to
other members of the in-group and a negative evaluation of any out-group member is
immediately and automatically evoked. Data supporting Social Identity Theory sparked the
beginning of what the field of social cognition now regards as a difficult, but accepted truth: that
the formation of in- and out-groups is an automatic, fundamental, and perhaps even adaptive
social necessity. Consensus among researchers studying intergroup relations is that we cannot
deny this part of our evolutionary history, but we can decide when we should act on it and when
we should curb it.
However strongly unified a particular in-group, Social Dominance Theory describes
human society as consisting of oppressive group-based hierarchical structures. According to the
theory, individual people possess varying levels of preference for social dominance (Sidanius &
Pratto, 1993; 1999). The key principle of the theory is that societies are stratified by age, sex and
group. Group divisions are based on ethnicity, religion, nationality, etc. Consistent with A. P.
Fiske’s (1992) notion of communal sharing and Turner and Tajfel’s (1986) Social Identity
Theory, Social Dominance Theory implies that communal sharing is higher within stratified
groups than between them. However, at the core of Social Dominance Theory and departing
from communal sharing, A. P. Fiske also describes how groups can be structured hierarchically.
A. P. Fiske’s (1992) principle of authority ranking is very similar to Sidanius and Pratto’s
(1993; 1999) theory of social dominance. Both theories describe how people have asymmetrical
Social Cognition
7
roles in a hierarchy. In Social Dominance Theory, human social hierarchies are configured in a
Nietzcheian manner with “good” groups at the top and “evil” reference groups at the bottom—
each of which needs the other to exist. More powerful social roles are increasingly likely to be
occupied by a “good” group member (e.g., white male). Evidence shows that males are more
dominant than females and they possess more political power; predictably, most high-status
positions are held by males (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). Prejudiced beliefs such as racism, sexism,
nationalism and classism are all manifestations of this same principle of social hierarchy. The
origin of social hierarchies is given an evolutionary explanation: prehistoric human societies
organized in hierarchies were more efficient at combat than non-hierarchical groups, giving a
competitive advantage to groups disposed towards social hierarchies (Sidanius & Pratto). Like
mitigating the automatic impact of the need to form in- and out-groups, one can exert conscious
will over one’s natural tendency to be socially dominance oriented. However, more likely and
perhaps with greater ease, one can generate rationales for why such social structures exist.
The notion of legitimacy in social hierarchy is at the core of A. P. Fiske’s authority ranking and
is a departure from Social Dominance Theory which does not necessarily imply that the structure
is legitimate (although parts of it can be). Authority ranking relationships are based on
perceptions of legitimate asymmetries in social structure and not on coercive power and, thus,
are not naturally exploitative. This aspect of authority ranking, justifying and/or legitimizing a
hierarchically organized social structure, is best described by System Justification Theory (Jost &
Banaji, 1994). Data supporting system justification theory show that humans are naturally
inclined to uphold a hierarchical structure by rationalizing its existence (e.g., Jost, Banaji, &
Nosek, 2004). System Justification Theory describes the human tendency to perceive and defend
the status quo as good, fair, legitimate, and desirable (Jost & Banaji). People will go to great
Social Cognition
8
lengths to rationalize events in life because they want to believe that the world is just (Lerner,
1980). Further, marginalized social groups are ironically most likely to justify the status quo of
the social system. In so doing, the theory makes sense out of previously counter-intuitive
findings showing that disadvantaged group-members often support the societal status quo even if
it is costly to them and/or their close in-group members.
Two additional principles of A. P. Fiske’s (1992) relational models theory do more to
describe the workings of a society than its structure. Equality matching describes how people,
dyads, collectives, or groups keep track (consciously or unconsciously) of costs and benefits so
that equilibrium between people or groups can be maintained. This principle describes how
communal sharing and otherwise cohesive in-groups maintain balance. Of note, this principle is
echoed by research in sociology and communications on the theory of social exchange (Blau,
1964). Market pricing is the final of four principles outlined by A. P. Fiske and describes
relationships that are defined by socially meaningful valuables (e.g., money, goods, a person’s
labor, etc.). A modern and socially acceptable example of this kind of relationship is one
between a tenant and a landlord. Slavery, prostitution, marriage for dowry and other such social
contracts are also examples of market pricing relationships. One compelling interpretation of this
principle is that at its core lies the notion of the “economic worth of an individual.” Market
pricing, then, lies at the core of differential valuation of people and accordant stratification in
society as described by both social dominance theory and authority ranking.
Together, these four theories offer the backdrop of human social structure. Most
fundamental, the need to belong to other social beings is the glue that unites them to describe
most every social relation. To summarize, the principal axes running through these four theories
are: (1) humans need to belong and can only successfully exist in social groups, (2) many social
Social Cognition
9
groups are hierarchically organized, (3) there is more cohesion and communal sharing within- as
opposed to across—stratifications, (4) groups lower in status receive fewer resources and are
liked less, and (5) everyone in the group rationalizes that a social structure’s hierarchy is
legitimate and just.
Our theoretical treatment of social group structure leaves wide open the question of how
we come to organize ourselves and one another. To begin examination of how, the study of
social cognition tells us to look at the minds of people. At the core of every single social
transaction is a thinking person thinking about other thinking persons; in two words, social
cognition. Because social cognition is the premise upon which all social relational exchange rests,
it is fair and critical to ask whether these processes recruit area of mind, body, and brain existing
uniquely for this purpose. Because the need to belong and the need for belonging groups to
organize is fundamental to survival, the notion that we evolved mechanisms to uniquely fit this
purpose would seem true. Thus, in the next section we ask the critical question, is social
cognition special?
Is social cognition special?
A social agent’s need for information about gender, kinship, and social standing of other
social agents is critical for adaptive reproduction and general survival. The ability to recognize,
assimilate, navigate and behave relative to socially important information requires relevant
neural systems. Thus, specialized cognitive and neural mechanisms have likely evolved to
uniquely process social information. Many recent and time-tested findings from both animal and
human study support the thesis that social cognition, thinking and feeling about social agents, is
indeed special.
Social Cognition
10
Social cognition is the study of mind and brain phenomena and processes that underlie
social perception, social judgment, and social influence in human and non-human animals. The
beginning of research on social cognition was a phenomenon-focused enterprise which
developed into both a phenomenonological and cognitive process-oriented approach. Early work
focused on making sense of others’ personality and behavior. Effects identified by this work
include systematically employed person-perception tendencies, some of which are shown to be
veracious and others erroneous. Attribution research was also among the first topics studied at
the dawn of social cognition. Work by Solomon Asch (1946) showed that impressions are
formed about others spontaneously. Other early work showed how attributions are made (Kelley,
1967) which was then followed by work which identified forces that influence attributional
processes. Social neuroscience has followed in the footsteps of social cognition in that some of
the first topics that have been studied are basic attributional process. This has been fruitful and a
good deal of information has been gleaned from this work even though it only began a short time
ago. For example, work in neuroscience by Mitchell, Banaji, and Macrae (2005), Saxe and
Kanwisher (2005) and others has shown that not only is trait attribution automatic,
uncontrollable, and effortless (e.g., Willis & Todorov, 2006), but certain brain structures such as
the medialPFC specifically subserve these attributions. At the nexus between social cognition
and social neuroscience grows the question: is social cognition special? With new MRI
technologies, we can now examine whether single or multiple processes converge when social
creatures make sense of other social creatures. There is compelling and fundamental evidence
that social cognition processes constitute a unique set of phenomena and may be located in
morphologically distinct areas that do not subserve other types of general cognition.
Neural and Molecular Substrates of Social Cognition in Non-Human Animals
Social Cognition
11
Evidence suggests that even at the most basic level, studying the simplest social creatures,
there is something unique about connecting to and interfacing with other social agents. Findings
from the animal literature suggest that certain social exchanges such as reproduction behavior
and parenting behavior can be traced to unique molecular and cellular mechanisms (Insel &
Young 2000, Pfaff, Frohlich, & Morgan, 2002). The specificity of social mechanisms rises to a
higher level of abstraction even in these simple animal species. For example, Lorenz (1935)
suggested that animals’ perceptual worlds include critical information about others’ behaviors
and the groups’ behaviors and that this perceptual and interpretative ability is likely critical to
survival. Indeed, recognition of key social exchanges must have been important in shaping
species’ phenotypes. In fact, the evolution of some species has been marked by uniquely
developed sensory systems that facilitate social interaction. One such system is the detection of
pheromones (Dulac & Torello, 2003). This system detects and recognizes species-specific
olfactory signals which transmit details about sex, reproductive status, mate location, social
status, and territory. Although scientific consensus believes in the basics of general mammalian
pheromone systems, the existence of such a system in humans is still debated (Meredith 2001).
Consistent with this work, infants of many species learn about parents and siblings from
imprinting processes. Learning this social information is critical for survival and reproduction.
Early preference acquisition has been studied in some detail. Research suggests that the more
complex the stimulus (e.g., sound, motion, structure), the stronger the imprinting process
(Bolhuis & Honey, 1998). Horn (1985) suggests there are particular sites in the brain responsible
for imprinting in baby chicks (the intermediate and medial hyperstriatum ventrale--IMHV).
Chicks with lesions in these areas could no longer imprint.
Social Cognition
12
As we begin to extract from animal models to human, we can look to non-human
primates for clues as to whether social cognition is a specialized set of processes. Indeed,
research shows that cells and fields in the monkey temporal cortex respond to faces (Tsao,
Freiwald, Knutsen, Mandeville, & Tootell, 2003). This link not only reflects what may exist in
the human brain, but suggests that having a “social brain” may not exclude other social species.
Neural Substrates of Social Cognition in Humans
The most basic evidence for the uniqueness (i.e., that certain brain regions evolved –
perhaps uniquely—to serve social cognitive processes) of social cognition in humans is evidence
from human neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. These disorders
are best described as deficits in normal social cognition which alter behavior (Lord, Cook,
Leventhal, & Amaral, 2000). Volumes of research on autism now show that individuals with
autism are generally unable to intuit the needs, wants, motivations, thoughts, intentions and
feelings of other social agents (e.g., Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985). On another and
extremely base level, research shows that humans kept in social isolation or separated from
others are at a serious risk for medical disorders and poor health (House, Landis, & Umberson,
1988). These data suggest that social interaction is critical for normal immune and bodily
function. Although this finding does not speak to the notion that social cognition is unique, it
certainly underscores the critical role that social cognition plays in sustaining a normal healthy
body.
In more recent work using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), findings from
the human literature strongly suggest that social cognition uses specialized mind and brain
locations and processes. For example, the fusiform gyrus (also known as the FFA or fusiform
face area) in the occipital-temporal junction is critical for face recognition as well as other
Social Cognition
13
complex visual percepts (Gauthier, Skudlarski, Gore, & Anderson, 2000, Kanwisher et al, 1997.
Patients with lesions in this area show face recognition deficits (e.g., prosopagnosia). This work
helped to lay the basis for localizing brain functionality toward social phenomena. The
application of fMRI to social phenomena has spawned volumes of articles on how, when, and
where the “social brain” exists. fMRI studies have now shown a number of brain regions to
specifically subserve social activity. Below is a table listing the brain regions and respective
social functions harvested from fMRI research about which there is some degree of consensus
and replication across paradigms (e.g., event-related vs. block design), lab groups, and imaging
centers. Parts of the table below were adapted from Adolphs (2001) and augmented by findings
from a number of studies published since 2001.
Social cognitive process
Affect regulation (corrective/inhibitory processes)
Regions in normal brain
dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex
ventral lateral prefrontal cortex
Biological motion (point of light displays)
left parietal cortex
right amygdala
right superior temporal sulcus
superior temporal sulcus
Cooperation with a partner
ventral bank of right occipital lobe
dorsal medial prefrontal cortex
Correlation with autism symptoms
cingulate gyrus
insula
medial prefrontal cortex
medial prefrontal cortex
Detecting emotional expression
superior temporal sulcus
superior temporal sulcus
Eye contact
right amygdala
Faces in social phobics
amygdala
Facial expressions focusing on the eyes
amygdala
Gaze and mouth movements in faces
superior temporal sulcus
Gaze discrimination
left amygdala
dorsal medial prefrontal cortex
Impression formation
Intentions (nonverbal)
Mental state attribution
right medial prefrontal cortex
dorsal medial prefrontal cortex
Social Cognition
14
orbitofrontal cortex
Processing social vocalizations in nonhuman primates
amygdala
Recognizing emotions guilt, arrogance, and fear
amygdala
Romantic attachment
anterior cingulated
medial insula
striatum
Social judgment
amygdala
Social exclusion
ventral prefrontal cortex
Theory of mind (both verbal and nonverbal)
cingulate gyrus
medial prefrontal cortex
Theory of mind (normals versus autistics)
left medial prefrontal cortex
Theory of mind (verbal)
left medial prefrontal cortex
Theory of mind (visual motion of simple shapes)
amygdala
left medial prefrontal cortex
superior temporal sulcus
Viewing faces of different race
amygdala
amygdala
Viewing others’ actions
motor cortex
superior parietal lobule
Viewing others’ hand actions
left frontal cortex
right superior parietal lobule
General face processing
FFA
General regulatory processes and decision making
OFC
In terms of sheer frequency, there appear to be at least three areas that systematically
show unique evidence of sociality. The most compelling evidence for an area of the human brain
which is recruited in social processes, though it does not specifically subserve, is the amygdala.
The amygdala appears to be engaged in the processing and sense-making of affective social
stimuli. For example, the amygdala has been repeatedly shown to be active when processing
threatening images and facial expressions of emotion including negative and positive emotions.
However, the amygdala is also implicated in non-social threat processing and system readiness.
A great deal of evidence also exists for areas of the medial prefrontal cortex—especially the
dorsal region. These areas of the PFC appear to subserve attributions—trait, intention, and
mental state attributions. Additionally, the ventral lateral and dorsal lateral areas appear to aid in
Social Cognition
15
down-regulating the amygdala’s negative responses. In fact, the ventral and dorsal regions of the
PFC can be thought of as affect regulation areas. These regions appear to strictly subserve social
cognitive processes. The superior temporal sulcus (STS) is also recruited for social tasks;
however, the pattern of activity is less clear. The STS is recruited when processing gaze, is less
active in autism, and is recruited in viewing motor activity in point of light displays. The precise
pattern of activity and the social cognitive processes the STS subserves seems to be an area ripe
for further research. Findings for the cingulate mimic the (lack of) clear pattern found with the
STS and is also, therefore, an area of the brain full of open social cognitive questions.
Drawing the Line Between Self and Other
One fascinating aspect about the process of engagement in social cognition lies within the
blurred distinction between self and other. Evidence in non-human primates has emerged which
suggests that we may see ourselves in others by simply watching them engage in similar
behaviors. The very same involved neurons fire in our own brain as we watch another engage in
a particular behavior. As such, the name of this system is self-reflective: the mirror neuron.
Recent work by Jason Mitchell and his colleagues offers a strong starting point for this emerging
research. Mitchell has shown that a very specific region of the medial PFC is engaged when
making judgments of similar others (Mitchell, Banaji, & Macrae, 2004; Mitchell, Macrae, and
Banaji, 2005). In fact, this precise area is also the area that research has shown to subserve
judgments about the self (see, e.g., Mitchell, Macrae, & Banaji, 2006).
As described in the identification of social cognition as a special process, it is
demonstrable that in the absence of social contact animals and humans tend to become ill and
can even die. Without critical social skills in place, such as the ability to determine others’
gender, status, and intention, animals and humans are not safe. This is a basic need. To say that
Social Cognition
16
basic social cognition is fundamental to adaptive social and physical functioning is no
understatement. Indeed, the fundamental master of social cognition is the self.
The self
The Master of Social Cognition is the Self
The most recent Annual Review of Psychology chapter published on the self (Banaji &
Prentice, 1994) noted that the study of the self is at center stage in psychological science. Banaji
and Prentice showed overwhelming evidence that the self directs both social cognition and social
behavior. In essence, they argued that the master of social cognition is the self. So whom does
the master serve? Evidence in this chapter suggest that the self is sustained by successful
satiation of the need for others. This is well illustrated by research on molecular factors involved
in self-sustenance reported elsewhere in this chapter. For example, evidence suggests that several
neurotransmitters are disproportionately involved in affiliative behavior. In a variety of nonhuman mammalian species, oxytocin and vasopressin mediate affiliative and sexual behaviors
(Young, Wang, & Insel, 1998). Voles show different mate affiliation (monogamous versus
polygamous) as a result of different oxytocin systems in their brains; Oxytocin-knockout mice
(i.e., mice rendered non-receptive to the effects of oxytocin) show abnormalities in their social
behavior, including a social memory impairment. Some of these chemicals appear to exert an
influence on humans as well. In humans, speculation exists that abnormalities in oxytocin
neurotransmission may contribute to the social pathology of autism (Insel, O’Brien, & Leckman,
1999). Serotonin is another neurotransmitter linked to social behavior, especially with regard to
social status and dominance in primates and in humans. As support for this, it is clear that SSRIs
influence social behavior in humans (Knutson, et al., 1998).
Social Cognition
17
The self is so critical to adaptive functioning; it is in part defined by and must be
maintained through attachment to other social creatures. Banaji and Prentice (1994) suggest the
two primary motives of the self are: self knowledge and self enhancement. Through social
interaction we gather knowledge and support in addition to garnering emotional and resource
support. The need for social interaction in sustaining the self goes even deeper. Humans and
other animals benefit from social interaction, which acts as a buffer against stress. As discussed
earlier in this chapter, animal work has shown that mother rats that lick their young vs. mother
rats who did not had offspring that were more resistant to and better buffered stressors. Data
suggest that the baby rats who receive licking behavior, a social attention, produced more
oxytocin which then acted as a buffer against stress. Additionally, as discussed earlier, are
documented cases of child neglect which show unequivocally that if raised without simple social
interaction and touch, a child will not develop normal language and social skills. Work on social
rejection shows it to be a root cause of a myriad of health problems. Human work by Eisenberger
et al. (2003) showed that the same regions of the brain (ventral PFC) subserving actual physical
pain are the same regions activated when humans are targeted by social rejection. Thus, a sense
of the self as “good” and “included” is critical to mental and physical health and well-being.
Because perceiving the self to be positive is adaptively critical, it seems that on average, people
should be genetically predisposed to hold a sense of themselves as good.
Indeed, current research suggests that high self-esteem, measured with implicit methods,
is universal (Yamaguchi, et al., (2007). Although research on cross-cultural differences in
cognition has shown that culture and language shape cognition, the adaptive utility of positive
self-regard appears to transcend cultural influence. It should be noted, however, that the panculturality of positive self regard is only detected with implicit, but not explicit measures. On
Social Cognition
18
explicit measures, members of Asian cultures (e.g., the Japanese), for example, do not report
high levels of self-esteem. Research indicates that such cultures value self-effacing behavior and
interconnectedness. Thus, singling out the “self as good” is to go against a cultural value.
However, on implicit measures, these same individuals show high levels of implicit self-esteem.
This dissociation exemplifies the way in which the same person’s biological needs and cultural
influences can lead to two opposing truths.
The dissociation between explicit and implicit reports of self-esteem is not restricted to
notions of the self. In fact, consensus among students of social cognition is now that thinking
about others comes in two forms: explicit, or controlled processing, and implicit or automatic
processing. The very idea that we efficiently, effortlessly, and automatically process social
phenomena makes total evolutionary sense and is entirely consistent with the preceding section
on the uniqueness of social cognitive processes. At the same time that the field of social
cognition was born 30 years ago, the research area of implicit social cognition was also born but
was not so named until Greenwald and Banaji’s (1995) treatise on the topic.
Implicit Social Cognition
Basic Architecture of Mind in Social Information Processing
When things are fundamental, they happen automatically and effortlessly. Such is the
case with the automatic thinking and feeling about others. Although discussed at length in this
volume, we wanted here to re-introduce the ideas of cognitive connectionist models of
information processing as they relate specifically to social information processing.
Conceptually, you can think of every idea, belief, concept, or category you can think of
as a single unit represented by a dot. Lines drawn to connect dots represent semantic,
experiential, and conceptual similarity such that more closely related dots are linked by thicker
Social Cognition
19
lines: the stronger the association between dots, the thicker the line. Collections of strongly
linked cognitive concepts and beliefs people have about the world are called schemas. A schema
organizes related information in a framework that allows the person to use that information
efficiently for thinking and feeling about and navigating through the social (and non-social)
world. In essence, a schema is a particular lens through which you see some aspect of the world.
Many types of cognitive representations fall under the general category of schemas—many of
these will be discussed in some detail. The list includes general views about the world,
stereotypes, contextual information about visual scenes and memories, social roles and
behavioral scripts. The earliest work on schemas was conducted by Bartlett (1932) who showed
individuals' schemas influenced judgment and memory in a schema-consistent manner. Sandra
Bem was one of the first social psychologists to pull the notion of schemas from cognitive
psychology into social processes. In her work, Bem discussed schemas at some length—one such
finding that really adapted schema research to social phenomena was her gender schema theory
(1981). In this theory, individuals hold varying depth of schemas about how important gender is
as a cognitive heuristic. Seeing the world through a lens of gender will drive thoughts, feelings
and behaviors in a gender-centric manner. For example, when a gender schematic person meets a
new person, gender is the most salient feature of that novel person and drives much of the
attribution and behavior associated with that meeting. Other work in developmental psychology
also helped to shape the folding of schema constructs into social psychology. For example, work
by Carol Dweck showed that children adopt a series of schemas (or implicit theories) to
understand the world (Dweck, Hong, & Chiu, 1993). All of this work suggests that human
thinking and feeling is guided by less conscious forces in addition to conscious ones.
Awareness and the Unconscious
Social Cognition
20
The most innovative effects to emerge from the early study of social cognition were the
effects of the unconscious mind. Tools borrowed from cognitive psychology allowed social
psychologists insight into the mind that was previously unattainable. Likewise, social cognition
integrated theory and method from social and cognitive psychology and social neuroscience
integrated methods from social and neuro psychology. Both of these new, integrative fields
allowed renewed and empirically derived insights into the unconscious mind. But this neoFreudian empirical inquiry, to a great extent, began with a seminal paper by Nisbett & Wilson
(1977). This paper was among the first compelling and conspicuous demonstrations that mental
processes are not always accessible to conscious introspection. Many effects and processes occur
outside of conscious introspection and we will discuss some of highlights of this social cognition
research.
How Does This Basic, Automatic, System Adaptively Learn?
To engage in these automatic processes, the system must learn to do so within the
constraints of an organism’s environment and social culture. There are at least three fundamental
principles in social cognition research that can be thought of as some of the more important
features of the socialized mind’s basic architecture: mere exposure, automatic evaluation, and
illusory correlation. Below, we review each of these “learning features” in some detail. This
review is not meant to be exhaustive, but a means of highlighting some of the most critical,
interesting, and perhaps irrational ways in which the mind learns and operates.
Mere exposure
This is a finding that frequency of exposure increases liking (Zajonc, 1968). Bornstein's
(1989) meta-analytic review, showed mere exposure effects are strongest when conditions reduce
subjects' memory for the effect-producing exposures. Increased perceptual fluency caused by
Social Cognition
21
multiple exposures is (mis)attributed to liking. One of the first demonstrations of how
information not consciously accessible can influence conscious phenomena was the mere
exposure effect (Zajonc, 1968). The mere exposure effect describes how repeated exposure to a
novel stimulus increases liking for that stimulus. For example, the more often a novel person is
seen, the more attractive that person appears to become. The mechanism by which the mere
exposure effect occurs is still uncertain; however, most research points to the possibility that
exposure leads to ease of cognitive processing which then leads to preference. And in preference,
comes a host of other positive associates.
Automatic Evaluation
Findings suggest that without intention, awareness, effort, or control, we evaluate the
goodness or badness of an object immediately after perceiving it. Evidence can be harvested
from research on evaluative priming (e.g., Fazio, 1986), implicit associations (e.g., Greenwald &
Banaji, 1995) and by research on amygdala activation (e.g., Cunningham, et al., 2003).
Illusory correlation
Illusory correlation is an effect whereby relations are perceived even when no relation
actually exists. One of the first bodies of research to bring this effect to the study of social targets
was done by David Hamilton and Robert Gifford (1976). Hamilton and Gifford showed that the
bias can be caused by two co-occurring events that appear to be unique or low in frequency.
Because of relative low frequency, the brain finds them to be salient. As such, they stand out and
their co-occurrence is more readily coded by the brain.
These critical features describe how the mind’s basic architecture morphs to
accommodate the demands of a person’s environment and culture. This idea will be brought
more fully to fruition in the section on elasticity and plasticity. But before we turn to these issues,
Social Cognition
22
let us briefly describe some of the byproducts of the mind’s basic architecture and its shaping by
culture and environment.
Byproducts of the Mind’s Architecture
Stereotypes. Cognitive representations can be beliefs, ideas, memories, or expectations.
In practice, stereotypes are systematically held cognitive representations about a person based
solely upon his or her membership in a particular group (e.g., age, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual
orientation, nationality, religious belief, physical appearance, profession, social class, physical
size, handicaps, etc.). Beyond broad categorical stereotypes, even more fine-grained stereotypes
exist within major social groups (e.g., within blacks, there are African Americans, Haitians,
light-skinned, thugs, etc.). Research suggests that stereotypes, like minimal group phenomena,
are difficult to avoid. Research and theory suggest that stereotypes are difficult to curtail because
holding quickly accessible and simple representations of the objects in the world is an efficient
use of cognitive resources. However, the information held in the mind can sometimes be flawed
as in the case of illusory correlation (see page x, this chapter). Another example is how we notice,
store, and remember best the most salient features of our social worlds. For example, information
that is most strange, different, pleasing or detestable about someone, or that which confirms what
we already (seem to) know is best retained and remembered and is more likely to be used in
social judgment and decision. Feeding stereotype is preference toward certain social groups over
others. These kinds of social group attitudes have a long history in social cognition and social
neuroscience.
Attitude and Social Group Bias. Thurstone’s landmark article in 1928 argued that
“attitudes can be measured.” This paper sparked the beginning of attitude measurement notably
lauded by Allport (1954) as social psychology’s “most central and indispensable topic.”
Social Cognition
23
Attitudes were then, and are now, defined as a personal evaluation of any real or imagined object.
For nearly 75 years, psychology relied upon people’s ability to indicate attitudes on some sort of
self-report scale. Meanwhile, cognitive psychology was beginning to understand a new (at the
time) aspect of the memory system, implicit memory (e.g., Neely, 1977). Research on implicit
memory suggested that people can form memories and associations about input that they have no
conscious recollection of, and/or that was not consciously perceptible upon presentation. In the
1980s and 1990s, methodological advances made it possible to measure these implicit memories
by measuring concept accessibility with projective, lexical decision, or other unobtrusive
measurements (e.g., Jacoby, 1994; Roediger, 1990; Schacter, 1987). Devine (1989) was one of
the first to apply the methods of implicit memory research to social psychological problems such
as stereotyping and prejudice. It was found that outside of conscious awareness, people were
holding associations between negative attributes and certain social groups—associations that are
now referred to as unconscious, or implicit, attitudes.
Implicit attitudes are defined as the semantic association between evaluative attributes
(e.g., “good,” “beautiful,” “bad,” or “ugly”) and attitude objects that can exist outside of
conscious awareness and/or conscious control (Banaji, 2001; Greenwald et al., 2002). Implicit
attitudes are thought to be somewhat fixed, like a personality trait (Bargh, 1997; Devine, 1989;
Dovidio & Fazio, 1992), but temporarily malleable due to changes in one’s social and/or
cognitive landscape (Blair, 2002; see section on elasticity and plasticity on page x of this
chapter). However malleable implicit attitudes might be, such attitudes do predict individual
differences in attitude-relevant behavior (Poehlman, Uhlmann, Greenwald, & Banaji, 2007).
Beginning with Devine (1989), social psychology began to explore the role that
unconscious attitudes played alongside explicit attitudes (i.e., Thurstone’s original conception of
Social Cognition
24
attitudes as measured by self-reported evaluations of attitude-objects). Following Devine’s
demonstration of the dissociation between explicit and implicit attitudes, Fazio, Jackson, Dunton,
and Williams (1995) demonstrated that individual differences in implicit attitudes could be used
to predict meaningful interpersonal variables. This same year, Greenwald and Banaji (1995)
published a paper outlining the conceptual framework for what would later become the Implicit
Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998; Greenwald, Nosek, & Banaji, 2003).
A fairly recent review (Fazio & Olson, 2003) detailed the distinction between explicit, or
controlled, and implicit, or automatic attitudes. Explicit, or controlled, attitudes are the attitudes
first measured by Thurstone. Explicit attitudes are, by definition, not only accessible to a person
in consciousness, but a person is willing to explicitly endorse such attitudes. To measure explicit
attitudes, responses are made on a Likert-type scale, feeling thermometer, or other self-reported
personal endorsement. Implicit, or automatic attitudes, are rooted in drawing out (with some
methodology—typically via one of a class of reaction time tasks which will be discussed
extensively later) the common meaning between two concepts in one’s semantic memory. This
association, if measured under appropriate conditions, is very difficult (if not impossible) to
control, and most agree that it is at least possible for the actor to be unaware that s/he holds such
associative information.
Race-bias is defined here as majority group members’ negative attitudes toward minority
group members based on group membership. Findings that nearly half of Black Americans (47%)
feel that they were treated unfairly in at least one of five common situations (e.g., shopping at the
store) in the past month because they were Black (www.gallop.com) indicates clearly that racebias is alive, well, and present in the most common of life’s everyday activities. In addition,
targets of race-bias are more likely to be arrested, and convicted and incarcerated once arrested
Social Cognition
25
(Blumstein & Beck, 1999), are less likely to receive aggressive treatments from health-care
professionals (Schulman, Berlin, Harless, Kerner, Sistrunk, Gersh, Dube, Taleghani, Burke,
Williams, Eisenberg, & Escarce, 1999), and Black Americans with more “Afrocentric” facial
features receive harsher punishments than White Americans (Blair, Judd, & Chapleau, 2004).
Green, et al., (2007) found that physicians’ bias against blacks predicted treating blacks less than
whites for acute myocardial infarction. Indeed, even in the most important values of American
life—freedom and health, race-bias appears to be alive and well.
The implicit, or automatic system is deeply efficient. Some of the principles upon which
it rests make evolutionary adaptive sense. Some may at one time have made sense but are now
rendered inappropriate by modern society which has different collective needs for adaptive and
harmonious survival. And sometimes, because of its efficiency and automaticity, the system can
be broadly irrational.
Errors and Biases in Social Cognition
Despite the best intentions, the most rational of goals, a person cannot easily override the
unfolding of unconscious, or implicit, processes. Because the motivators of implicit thought,
feeling, and behavior lie below the reaches of introspective access, sometimes such cognitions
are rendered irrational in conception and/or execution. In this next section, we list a few of the
most intriguing cognitive errors and biases that operate within the rules of the efficient mind, but
are nonetheless irrational. Because of the mind’s architecture and rules, errors arise that are
rational in the sense that they are following the rules of a well-defined system subserved by
piping laid over millions of evolutionary years. However rational the intent, the errors are at
minimum, extremely interesting and at worst, deeply socially disavowed. Because each finding
Social Cognition
26
deserves clear and thorough treatment, we have organized the next section by listing each error
of rationality and its major finding.
Fundamental attribution error. A centerpiece of this broad area of attribution work (and
arguably a founding pillar of social cognition) is that people often attribute a social agent’s
behavior to his or her dispositions instead of the situations or contexts in which the agent is
behaving. This work grew out of early experiments conducted by Jones and Harris (1967) and
the general effect has come to be known as the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE; Ross, 1977)
or the correspondence bias (Gilbert & Malone, 1995). Later theorizing and research on how the
human mind spends cognitive energy to perceive and process social agents found that humans
can be considered cognitive misers — avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of cognitive effort.
Research applying the cognitive miser principle to the FAE found that it does appear to take
more cognitive energy to consider both the person’s behavior and the situational context in
which it exists than to consider the person and his or her behavior alone. To this aim, researchers
found that taxing available cognitive resources increased the likelihood of the
FAE/correspondence bias (Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull, 1988).
Confirmation bias. With these expectations we have some cases in which information can
either be confirmed or disconfirmed. Confirmation bias is a tendency to seek out information to
confirm a pre-existing schema, belief, implicit theory, or expectation. Whether a confirmation
bias produces a cognitive error is driven by the veracity of the pre-existing expectation. Among
the earliest investigators of this phenomenon, Wason (1960) showed that people will actively
seek out information to confirm their hypothesis and weight it more heavily—discounting
information that is inconsistent with their hypothesis. Emerging findings from neuroscience
(Westen, Kilts, Blagov, Harenski, & Hamann, 2006) has shown particular brain regions to
Social Cognition
27
subserve confirmation bias. Specifically, area associated with reasoning (orbitofrontal cortex),
conflict monitoring and resolution (anterior cingulate cortex) and making judgment about moral
transgression (posterior cingulate cortex). These findings are extremely interesting—especial the
role of the anterior cingulated cortex as it is most frequently implicated conflict resolution. What
this implies is that on some, perhaps unconscious level, people know there is a conflict to be
resolved. Of course, any time information is compared a potential conflict must be resolved.
However, it is extremely interesting to imagine that some part of the human system is aware that
the person is stretching to match a pre-existing hypothesis to the available data.
Halo effect. Thorndike (1920) coined the term “halo effect” after observing that positive
trait ratings were more correlated with each other than what should be expected if experience
was the only determining factor. Subsequently, the halo effect came to describe the phenomenon
by which judgment of a novel attribute is influenced by already known but irrelevant information.
For example, attractive people are judged as kinder, more interesting, more sociable, and happier
(Dion, Berscheid, & Walster, 1972). More recently, Down & Lyons (1991) showed defendant
attractiveness to predict smaller fines and lower bail levels in real-world cases. This is the
phenomenon by which a stimulus seen as positive in one regard will benefit by all kinds of
positive attributions made to it. The idea here is that positive concepts, ideas, and schemas are all
closely linked in the perceiver. If a perceiver encounters a stimulus deemed “good” in one regard,
other positive traits and qualities will automatically be attributed to the stimulus.
False consensus effect. This effect, first demonstrated by Lee Ross and colleagues (Ross
Greene, & House, 1977), shows the tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which
others agree with their thoughts and feelings. This kind of bias is considered to be an “egocentric
bias” a general class of biases which are at the core of many social cognitive processes. Recall
Social Cognition
28
the previous discussion of Jason Mitchell’s work. Mitchell and his colleagues (2004; 2005; 2006)
find that people will attribute their own traits to others—which is an example of egocentric bias.
The region of the brain in Mitchell’s work engaged when making these attributions is the medial
PFC. This may imply that the more activity in this region, the more likely people will engage in
egocentric processing for a given social task.
Endowment effect. The endowment effect is the findings that people value things more if
it is their property (Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1990). Such objects are valued more than
similar objects that are not owned. Experiments showed that valuation of objects such as mugs,
pens, and chocolate bars increased sharply as soon as one is given the object.
Misattribution. Some of the most interesting bias effects have emerged from research on
misattribution. In this work, attitude and/or feeling activated by an object, situation, or internal
state can be (mis)attributed to another. For example, Schwarz and Clore (1983) showed
judgments of life-quality for subjects interviewed over the telephone were better when subject
was in a sunny versus rainy region of the country. Schwarz, Strack, and Mai (1991) showed that
subjects’ responses to marital satisfaction influenced life-quality judgments when marriage
question came first and vice-versa. Calling attention to the source (weather) eliminates the effect
(rationality).
Each of these effects demonstrates ways in which the basic principles of the automatic, or
implicit, mind can lead to irrational outcome. This may seem inconsistent with a major thrust of
this chapter—that the social mind, which needs to belong, has evolved to efficiently process self
and other for purposes of successful adaptation and survival. However, as soon as higher-order
mental processes, subserved by cortical structures and referred to as explicit or controlled, are
considered, it should become clear how rational errors can be caught and corrected given
Social Cognition
29
sufficient effort and/or attention. Further, the basic architecture of the mind is not without
tremendous flexibility—able to ride and control the tides of everyday social life. In the next
section we will discuss the elasticity and plasticity of the human social mind.
Elasticity and Plasticity
The social judgments and decisions we make about others are pushed and pulled by
forces of which we may sometimes not be aware and over which we may have little or no control.
In each section below, we describe important results bearing on issues of complexity and
boundary conditions to social cognition. Woven throughout each description, is discussion about
how sometimes, interestingly, these phenomena can be dissociated from consciousness and/or
intended goals. Since approximately 2002, researchers have considered the seemingly rigid and
automatic nature of the mind to be more or less malleable—both in terms of temporary (elasticity)
and long term (plasticity) change.
Elasticity
The bulk of the research conducted on the malleability of implicit social cognition has
shown evidence for short-term change, or elasticity. In the past few years more than 40 studies
have amassed which demonstrate that implicit attitudes and beliefs are flexible in the face of
motivational, strategic, and situational forces. Blair (2002) was among the first to clearly argue
the notion that automatic mind processes such as stereotypes and attitudes are malleable or
elastic. The papers reviewed by Blair and additional publications since then show that automatic
processes can be generally influenced by a person’s conscious or unconscious motives and goals,
and different aspects of the environment or situational context. For example, research suggests
that personal motivations, such as the motivation to not appear prejudiced, can change implicit
attitude and/or their behavioral manifestations (e.g., Dasgupta & Rivera, 2006; Lowery, Hardin,
Social Cognition
30
& Sinclair, 2001). Additionally, implicit attitudes can change after practice or training (e.g., Blair,
Ma, & Lenton, 2001; Ito, Chiao, Devine, Lorig, & Cacioppo, 2006; Kawakami, Dovidio, Moll,
Hermsen, & Russin, 2000). And other studies show that implicit attitudes and beliefs can be
changed by shifting the social context (e.g., Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001; Macrae,
Bodenhausen, & Milne, 1995; Wittenbrink, Judd, & Park, 2001).
Blair (2002) specifically concluded that five features of the self or social environment can
effect change in implicit attitude or belief. These features are: (1) the self’s social motives, (2)
conscious and specific strategies to overcome automatic processes, (3) attentional focus, (4)
features of the situational context, and (5) characteristics of a social target. Shifts in these
influences can change an implicit or automatic thought and its behavioral sequelae. Elastic
changes are temporary; however, plastic changes can be permanent. But evidence suggests that
plastic changes, although likely accompanied by permanent anatomical and/or neural network
changes, are likely to be governed by the same rules as elastic changes.
Plasticity
Longer-term changes in implicit attitudes and beliefs are possible. Although only a
handful of studies have examined and shown such changes, there is a great deal of evidence from
neuroscience which suggests that longer-term changes are possible. One example of such a study
was conducted by Dasgupta and Asgari (2004) in which they found that when women at an
exclusively female college were exposed to female professors, they were less likely to express
automatic stereotypic beliefs about women. Although only a small handful of studies have shown
longer-term changes in implicit processes, educational research focuses on meaningful learning
and the promotion of knowledge transfer between people and within a person across situations.
Greeno (2006) discussed a situated approach to learning emphasizing the role of situational
Social Cognition
31
context on changes in complex cognitive system. He reviews research which, like Blair (2002)
suggests that factors such as motivation, goals, and situational context can effect changes in
complex cognitive systems.
However, long-term changes such as those observed in learning are brought about by
structural changes in the brain. Thus, in order to understand how permanent social cognitive
change might be effected, it is important to understand basic neuronal plasticity. Neuronal
plasticity is the capability of synapses to modify their function in a usually adaptive response to
environmental stimuli (Cotman & Nieto-Sampedro, 1984), including innocuous (such as normal
everyday experiences) and noxious stimuli (such as damage to the brain). An example of an
adaptive synaptic change would be that the brain would change to learn that the category “dog”
is associated with the fluffy, large, panting entity that makes sounds such as “ruff.” You are now
able to recognize that the label “dog” is associated with the category. You are then able to
communicate about the category, learn new things about it, and behave toward it. An example of
a maladaptive change in synaptic activity would be one that associates a loud crash with the dog
so that where you were once unafraid of the kind household pet, you are now afraid of it because
the brain has associated it with the fear response elicited by the crash that the presence of the dog
was paired with. You are now afraid of the dog, and you may generalize this fear to dogs in
general, which may prevent you from being able to interact with dogs or visit places where dogs
are kept. In both the adaptive and maladaptive example of neuronal plasticity, the brain has
changed in its response to some stimulus. Such stimuli can come from within or from outside the
person. .
Scientist used to think that only young brains were capable of synaptic change and that
brains were fixed after the first few years of life. We now believe, however, that neuronal
Social Cognition
32
plasticity is maximal during development and present in certain parts of the brain throughout life
(Cotman & Nieto-Sampedro, 1984). Plasticity can happen in both the peripheral and central
nervous system in both subcortical and cortical brain structures.
Current research on neuronal plasticity has identified four broad classes of neuroplasticity
that can be researched in mammals, namely in humans (see e.g., Grafman, 2000; Thompson,
2000): compensatory masquerade, cross-modal reassignment, homologous area adaptation, and
map expansion. Compensatory masquerade is a process typically associated with humans that
describes the novel use of an established cognitive process to perform a task that is usually
dependent on a different cognitive process that is now impaired. To illustrate, imagine an
individual suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, where that individual has lost short-term memory
capacity and cannot, therefore, depend on her or his memory to recall the grocery list. Imagine
that the individual makes out the list and attaches it to the calendar on the day that the shopping
is to take place (which has been every first Tuesday of the month for many years, and is
therefore in the on-term memory). The individual has then, used a different but established
process to compensate for the short-term memory process on which the task used to be
dependent but on which it can no longer depend.
Cross-modal reassignment is a process associated with the introduction of new sensory
information into a brain region that has been deprived of the sensory information normally
associated with it. For example, imagine a blind person whose visual system receives little or no
input. In cross-modal reassignment, the brain region typically assigned to receive visual input
would receive other types of input, perhaps in an effort to keep the cells alive, or alternatively
because the inhibitory processes usually engaged in sighted individuals is not engaged in order to
stave off competing brain systems.
Social Cognition
33
Homologous area adaptation is typically used to describe the process by which damage to
a particular brain region and its cognitive operation(s) is compensated for by shifting those
dependent cognitive operation(s) to another brain area or the homologous area on the opposite
hemisphere. It is thought that neighboring and homologous cortical regions have both primary
and secondary assignments, and when a particular brain region has been damaged and its
dependent cognitive process has been assigned to be a secondary assignment to another region,
the primary process can inhibit the secondary process, which usually yields an imperfect
compensation for the damage. To illustrate, imagine a young individual who suffers a severe
right parietal lobe brain injury. The left parietal lobe may assume some of the processes
originally dependent on the right parietal lobe, but new information that would have been
assigned to the left parietal lobe will not be learned very well because the region on which it has
been genetically programmed to depend has been assigned to a different set of cognitive
processes. That individual may have perfectly normal spatial processing, but when s/he begins to
learn arithmetic, they may not be able to because the region on which arithmetic reasoning
depends has been primarily assigned to other processes (example adapted from Grafman, 2000).
Map expansion is the process of neuroplasticity that refers to the flexibility of the
(typically normally functioning) brain to acquire new information, and is the type of
neuroplasticity that is central to the focus of the current chapter. Map expansion is a term used to
describe current research suggesting that the size of cortical maps assigned to specific cognitive
processes increase in size with practice of that social cognitive process or with frequent exposure
to a stimulus. There is also evidence to suggest that some cortical maps rapidly enlarge in
individuals who are trained to be or are naturally adept at a skill that is used on a routine basis
Social Cognition
34
(Rosenzweig & Bennett, 1996). The process of map expansion is the class of neuroplasticity
under which the synaptic changes associated with learning are classified.
In an attempt to describe what might be happening in the brain during learning, Hebb
(1949) proposed that learning may involve changes in neural functioning effected by two cells
that are active at the same time. A useful description was offered by (LeDoux, 1996). Imagine
three cells organized in the shape of a triangle with each cell representing an angle of the triangle
where the base of the triangle is at the bottom and the tip is pointing upward. The lower left
corner of the triangle is cell “A” and cell “B” is the right lower corner of the triangle, both “A”
and “B” are connected through each’s synapse to cell “C” which is the third cell at the top tip of
the triangle. Hebb hypothesized that if cell “B” had the ability to make cell “C” fire but “A” did
not, and if both cells “A” and “B” fired at the same time making cell “C” fire, that the “B-C”
connection would be further strengthened as would the “A-C” connection, and that cell “A”
would be enough to fire cell “C” alone (where it was not able to ellicit a response from “C”
before) because it had fired in unison with cell “B”, which was capable of eliciting a response
from cell “C.” Hebb’s hypothesis is best brought to life by an example of a conditioned fear
response.
Hebb’s hypothesis remains as the first accurate advance in understanding how the brain
changes in response to environmental stimuli, and it wasn’t until 30 years later when researchers
such as Bliss and Lomo (1973) found evidence to suggest that Hebb’s postulate was, in fact,
correct. Bliss and Lomo found that the communication between neurons across synapses (in
rabbits) is strengthened by repeated electrical stimulation, a phenomenon that was thereafter
named long term potentiation describing the strengthening of a synapse (Johnston, 1997), and
Social Cognition
35
associative long term potentiation is used to describe the association of a new connection to an
already existing synapse like the one illustrated in the discussion of Hebb’s postulate.
Hebb’s postulate is embraced by social cognition as the best way to understand plastic
changes in the human social mind. But what is unique to the study of plasticity in human social
cognition is the exact forces which effect changes that are either temporally constrained
(elasticity) or unconstrained (plasticity).
Person-Initiated Elasticity and Plasticity
Elasticity and plasticity can be facilitated by organic forces, as well. Prefrontal cortex is a
relatively massive area of the brain which assimilates and integrates signal from many
subcortical areas which subserve basic process like emotional feelings such as the amygdala.
Although different parts of the brain are primarily engaged in executing different types of
tasks—cognitive, emotional, etc., prefrontal cortex is the structure recruited to regulate the effort
of these other areas. For example, the amygdala associated with threat response may become
active when a person sees a snake; however, it is prefrontal cortex’ job to down-regulate the
amygdala telling it that the snake is only a picture on the computer screen. However, when PFC
is spending time and effort down-regulating the amygdala, it has less “muscle” to spend
regulating other subcortical and cortical regions. Some of the most compelling work done in this
area has been by Kevin Ochsner and colleagues (e.g., Ochsner, Bunge, Gross, & Gabrieli, 2002;
Ochsner, Ray, Cooper, Robertson, Chopra, Gabrieli, & Gross, 2004). In this work, an area of the
PFC, the orbitofrontal cortex, is in charge of many general executive functions such as making
decisions. If the PFC is generally taxed by down-regulating the amygdala, its ability to engage in
complex cognitive tasks will be diminished. For evidence of this effect in response to social
groups automatically eliciting negative affect, see work by Cunningham, Johnson, Raye,
Social Cognition
36
Gatenby, Gore, and Banaji (2004). The process of deliberately trying to stop thinking about
certain thoughts is referred to as thought suppression (Wegner, 1988). The very act of
suppressing a though, ironically makes that thought more accessible. Wegner’s (1994) Ironic
Process Theory accounts for this effect. Recent neuroimaging work suggest the dorsolateral PFC
may subserve thought suppression, whereas the bilateral anterior cingulated cortex may be
implicated during occurrences of unwanted thoughts.
Additionally, work by Baumeister and colleagues (e.g., Baumeister, Bratslavsky,
Muraven, & Tice, 1998) showed that depletion of cognitive or “ego” resources as they described
them, tax the rest of the system. In this work, thinking, feeling, and motivational resources are
one in the same “muscle,” and taxing any one part of the system will tax the whole system. Other
work also finds evidence for this. For example, if one is trying to suppress emotional facial
expressions, they will perform more poorly on cognitive tasks such as memory recall (Richards
& Gross, 1999). Social neuroscience has only just begun to examine resource depletion and such
findings may illuminate how all of these historically separate systems appear experimentally to
be one in the same.
Concluding Comments
The boundaries to our knowledge about “thinking people thinking about other thinking
people” are expanding rapidly and there remain many questions. What is the full breadth of its
nature? What are all of its functions? Which areas of the mind and brain are used in which
processes? What does elasticity and plasticity functionally look like in the brain? What are all of
the impacts on decision making? What are its implications for health in general? These are but a
few that we seek to answer. In finding these answers, will we discover ourselves, how we relate
to the world and to others, and what makes us unique, both as a species and as individuals.
Social Cognition
37
There are a few truisms we can employ. Humans are intensely social animals, people
need people. Humans are organized around this concept in many ways, both psychologically and
physiologically. The structure of our society is clearly oriented toward groups. How we think
about our group orientation echoes our own self-perception. Self-definition is a basic human
need. To fulfill this need and to make sense of and organize the world around us, we have
developed an ability to intuit and decipher others. Such social perceptions create the endless
range of belief, feeling, and regulation. The fundamental aspects of social cognition are, at once,
vast, critical, and special.
Social cognitive processes are both conscious and unconscious. We have both explicit
and implicit thoughts and feelings. The last two decades of research into social cognition has
underscored that the unconscious mind is a powerful, sometimes uncontrollable force in our
social cognitive process. Unchecked, this automaticity prompts us to make errors in judgment,
misattributions, and can render us socially ineffective and maladaptive. Yet, we do evidence
methods of control and balance to these inherent behaviors. The processes of the mind and the
areas of the brain that serve to offset this automaticity are complex, interrelated, intriguing, and
again, the work of social cognition remains unbounded and clearly must encompass a range of
disciplines and methodological tools. As the field progresses and the range of work done
expands, it will doubtless prove fruitful not only in and of itself, but for a host of other scientific
areas of inquiry.
Social Cognition
38
References
Adolphs, R. (2001). The neurobiology of social cognition. Current Opinion in
Neurobiology, 11, 231–239.
Allport, G. (1954). The nature of prejudice. New York: Doubleday.
Asch, S. E. (1946). Forming impressions of personality. Journal of Abnormal & Social
Psychology, 41, 258 – 290.
Banaji, M. R. (2001). Ordinary prejudice. Psychological Science Agenda, American
Psychological Association, 14, 8-11.
Banaji, M. R., Baron, A., Dunham, Y., & Olson, K. (in press). Some experiments on the
development of intergroup social cognition. In M. Killen and S. Levy (Eds.) Intergroup.
Relatonships: An integrative developmental and social psychology perspective. Oxford University
Press.
Banaji, M. R., & Greenwald, A. G. (1995). Implicit gender stereotyping in judgments of
fame. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 181- 198.
Banaji, M. R., & Prentice, D. A. (1994). The self in social contexts. Annual Review of
Psychology, 45, 297-332.
Bargh, J.A. (1997). The automaticity of everyday life. In: R. Wyer (Ed.). Advances in
social cognition. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1 – 62.
Bargh, J. A., & Pietromonaco, P. (1982). Automatic information processing and social
perceptions: The influence of trait information presented outside of conscious awareness.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43, 437-449.
Social Cognition
39
Bargh, J. A., & Thien, R. D. (1985). Individual construct accessibility, person memory,
and the recall-judgment link: The case of information overload. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 49, 1129-1146.
Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a 'theory of
mind'? Cognition, 21, 37-46.
Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M. (1998). Ego depletion: Is
the active self a limited resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1252-1265.
Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal
attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117, 497-529.
Bem, S. L. (1981). Gender schema theory: a cognitive account of sex typing.
Psychological Review, 88, 354-364.
Blair, I.V. (2002). The malleability of automatic stereotypes and prejudice. Personality
and Social Psychology Review, 6, 242 – 261.
Blair, I. V., Judd, C. M., & Chapleau, K. M. (2004). The influence of Afrocentric facial
features in criminal sentencing. Psychological Science, 15, 674 – 679.
Blair, I.V., Ma, J., & Lenton, A. P. (2001). Imagining stereotypes away: The moderation
of automatic stereotypes through mental imagery. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
81, 828 – 841.
Blau, P. M. (1964). Exchange and power in social life. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons
Inc.
Social Cognition
40
Bliss, T. V. and Lomo, T. (1973) Long-lasting potentiation of synaptic transmission in
the
dentate area of the anaesthetized rabbit following stimulation of the perforant path. Journal of
Physiology 232, 331-356.
Blumstein, A., & Beck, A. J. (1999). Factors contributing to the growth of the U.S. prison
populations. Crime and Justice, 26, 17 – 43.
Bolhuis J. J., & Honey, R. C. (1998). Imprinting, learning and development: from
behaviour to brain and back. Trends in Neuroscience, 306–311.
Bornstein, R. F. (1989). Exposure and affect: Overview and meta-analysis of research,
1968 – 1987. Psychological Bulletin, 106, 265 – 289.
Brewer, M. B. (1979). Ingroup bias in the minimal intergroup situation: A cognitivemotivational analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 86, 307-324.
Brewer, M. B. (1988). A dual process model of impression formation. In T. Srull &
R.Wyer (Eds.). Advances in Social Cognition. Vol. 1, Earlbaum, 1 – 36.
Candland, D.K. (1993). Feral children and clever animals: Reflections on human nature.
New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Cotman, C. W., & Nieto-Sampedro, M. (1984). Cell biology of synaptic plasticity.
Science, 225, 1287-1294.
Cunningham, W. Johnson, M. K., Raye, C. L., Gatenby, C., Gore, J. C., & Banaji, M. R.
(2004). Separable neural components in the processing of black and white faces. Psychological
Science, 15, 806-813.
Curtiss, S. (1977) Genie: a psycholinguistic study of a modern-day “wild child” NewYork: Academic Press.
Social Cognition
41
Dasgupta, N., & Asgari, S. (2004). Seeing is believing: Exposure to counterstereotypic
women leaders and its effect on the malleability of automatic gender stereotyping. Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology, 40, 642 – 658.
Dasgupta, N., & Greenwald, A.G. (2001). On the malleability of automatic attitudes:
Combating automatic prejudice with images of admired and disliked individualas. Jouranl of
Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 800 – 814.
Dasgupta, N., Rivera, L. M. (2006). From automatic antigay prejudice to behavior: The
moderating role of conscious beliefs about gender and behavioral control. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 91, 268-280.
Devine, P.G. (1989). Stereotypes and prejudice: Their automatic and controlled
components. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 5 – 18.
Dion, K., Berscheid, E., & Walster, E. (1972). What is beautiful is good. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 24, 207 – 213.
Dovidio, J. F., & Fazio, R. H. (1992). New technologies for the direct and indirect
assessment of attitudes. In: J. Tanur (Ed.). Questions about questions: Meaning, memory,
experession, and social interactions in surveys. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundations, 204 –
237.
Downs, A., & Lyons, P. M. (1991). Natural observations of the links between
attractiveness and initial legal judgments. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 17, 541 –
547.
Dulac, C., & Torello, A. T. (2003). Molecular detection of pheromone signals in
mammals: from genes to behaviour. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 551–562.
Social Cognition
42
Dweck, C. S., Hong, Y.Y., & Chiu, C.Y. (1993). Implicit theories and individual
differences in the likelihood and meaning of dispositional inference. Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin, 19, 644-656.
Eisenberger, N. I., Lieberman, M. D., & Williams, K. D. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An
fMRI study of social exclusion. Science, 302, 290–292.
Erber, R., & Fiske, S. T. (1984). Outcome dependency and attention to inconsistent
information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47, 709–726.
Fazio, R. H. (1986). How do attitudes guide behavior? (pp. 204-243). In R. M. Sorrentino
& E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Handbook of motivation and cognition: Foundations of social behavior.
New York: Guilford.
Fazio, R. H., Jackson, J. R., Dunton, B. C., & Williams, C. J. (1995). Variability in
automatic activation as an unobtrusive measure of racial attitudes: A bonafide pipeline? Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 1013 – 1027.
Fazio, R. H., & Olson, M. A. (2003). Implicit measures in social cognition research:
Their meaning and use. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 297 – 327.
Fazio, R. H., & Zanna, M. P. (1978). Attitudinal qualities relating to the strength of the
attitude-behavior relationship. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 14, 398 – 408.
Fiske, A. P. (1992). The Four Elementary Forms of Sociality: Framework for a Unified
Theory of Social Relations. Psychological Review, 99, 689-723.
Fiske, A. P. (2004). Relational models theory: A contemporary overview. In: N. Haslam.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 3 – 25.
Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (1991). Social Cognition, 2nd ed. New York, NY: McGrawHill.
Social Cognition
43
Francis, D., Diorio, J., Liu, D., & Meaney, M. J. (1999). Nongenomic transmission across
generations of maternal behavior and stress responses in the rat. Science, 286, 1155-1158.
Gauthier, I., Skudlarski, P., Gore, J., & Anderson, A. (2000). Expertise for cars and birds
recruits brain areas involved in face recognition. Nature Neuroscience, 191–197.
Gilbert, D. T. (1998). Ordinary personology. In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, & G. Van Heck
(Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (Vol. 2, 4th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill, 89–150.
Gilbert, D. T., & Malone, P. S. (1995). The correspondence bias. Psychological Bulletin,
117, 21-38.
Gilbert, D. T., Pelham, B. W., & Krull, D. S. (1988). On cognitive busyness: When
person perceivers meet persons perceived. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54,
733 – 740.
Grafman, J. (2000). Conceptualizing functional neuroplasticity. Journal of
Communication Disorders, 33, 345-356.
Green, A. R., Carney, D. R., Pallin, D. J., Ngo, L. H., Raymond, K. L., Iezzoni, L., &
Banaji, M. R. Implicit Bias among Physicians and its Prediction of Thrombolysis Decisions for
Black and White Patients. (Journal of General Internal Medicine)/Manuscript accepted pending
minor revisions.
Greeno, J. G. (2006). Learning in activity (pp. 79-96). In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), The
Cambridge handbook of: The learning sciences. NY: Cambridge.
Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (1995). Implicit social cognition: Attitudes, selfesteem, and stereotypes. Psychological Review. 102, 4-27.
Social Cognition
44
Greenwald, A. G., Banaji, M. R., Rudman, L. Farnham, S., Nosek, B. A., & Mellott, D.
(2002). A unified theory of implicit attitudes, stereotypes, self-esteem, and self-concept.
Psychological Review, 109, 1, 3-25.
Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual
differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 74, 1464 – 1480.
Greenwald, A.G., Nosek, B.A., & Banaji, M. R. (2003). Understanding and using the
Implicit Association Test: I. An improved scoring algorithm. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 85, 197 – 216.
Hamilton, D. L. (1981). Cognitive processes in stereotyping and intergroup behavior.
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Hamilton, D. L., & Gifford, R. K. (1976). Illusory correlation in interpersonal perception:
A cognitive basis of stereotypic judgments. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 12, 392
– 204.
Hastie, R., Landsman, R., & Loftus, E. F. (1978). The effects of initial questioning on
subsequent eyewitness testimony. Jurimetrics Journal, 19, 1-8.
Hastie, R., Ostrom, T. M., Ebbesen, E. B., Wyer, R. S., Jr., Hamilton, D. L., & Carlston,
D. E. (1980). Person memory: The cognitive basis of social perception. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum
Associates.
Hebb, D. O. (1949). The organization of behavior: A neuropsychological theory. New
York, NY: Wiley.
Horn, G. (1985). Memory, imprinting and the brain: An inquiry into mechanisms. Oxford:
Clarendon.
Social Cognition
45
House, J., Landis, K., & Umberson, D. (1988). Social relationships and health. Science,
41, 540–545.
Insel, T. R., O’Brien, D. J., & Leckman, J. F. (1999). Oxytocin, vasopressin, and autism:
is there a connection? Biological Psychiatry, 45, 145-157.
Insel, T. R., & Young, L. J. (2000). Neuropeptides and the evolution of social behavior.
Current Opinion in Neuorbiology, 10, 784 – 789.
Ito, T. A., Chiao, K. W., Devine, P. G., Lorig, T. S., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2006). The
influence of facial feedback on race bias. Psychological Science, 17, 256-261.
Jacoby, L. L. (1994). Measuring recollection: Strategic vs. automatic influences of
associative context. In: C. Umilla (Ed). Attention and performance, XV. Cambridge, MA:
Bradford, 661 – 679.
Johnston, D. (1997). A missing link? LTP and learning: Neuroscience. Science, 278, 401402.
Jones, E. E. and Harris, V. A. (1967). The attribution of attitudes. Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology, 3, 1-24.
Jost, J. T. & Banaji, M. R. (1994). The role of stereotyping in system-justification and the
production of false consciousness. British Journal of Social Psychology, 33, 1-27.
Jost, J. T., Banaji, M. R., & Nosek, B. A. (2004). A decade of system justification theory:
Accumulated evidence of conscious and unconscious bolstering of the status quo. Political
Psychology, 25, 881-919.
Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J., & Thaler, R. (1990). Experimental test of the endowment
effect and the Coase theorem. Journal of Political Economy, 98, 1325-1348.
Social Cognition
46
Kanwisher, N., McDermott, J., & Chun, M. (1997). The fusiform face area: a module in
human extrastriate cortex specialized for face perception. Journal of Neuroscience, 17, 4302–
4311.
Kawakami, K., Dovidio, J. F., Moll, J., Hermsen, S., & Russin, A. (2000). Just say no (to
stereotyping): Effects of training in the negation of stereotypic associations on stereotype
activation. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 78, 871-888.
Kelley, H. H. (1967). Attribution theory in social psychology. Nebraska Symposium on
Motivation, 15, 192 – 238.
Knutson, B., Wolkowitz, O. M., Cole, S. W., Chan, T., Moore, E. A., Johnson, R. C.,
Kringelbach, M., O’Doherty, J., Rolls, E., & Andrews, C. (2003). Activation of the human
orbitofrontal cortex to a liquid food stimulus is correlated with its subjective pleasantness.
Cerebral Cortex, 13, 1064–1071.
LeDoux, J. (1996). The emotional brain: The mysterious underpinnings of emotional life.
New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.
Lerner, M. (1980). The Belief in a Just World. New York: Plenum Press.
Liu, D., Diorio, J., Day, J. C., Francis, D. D., & Meaney, M. J. (2000). Maternal care,
hippocampal synaptogenesis and cognitive development in rats. Nature and Neuroscience, 3,
799-806.
Lord C., Cook, E., Leventhal, B., & Amaral, D. (2000). Autism spectrum disorders.
Neuron, 28, 355–363.
Lorenz, K. Z. (1935). Der Kumpan in der Umwelt des Vogels. Journal of Ornithology, 83,
137–215.
Lowery, B. S., Hardin, C. D., & Sinclair, S. (2001). Social influence effects on automatic
Social Cognition
47
racial prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 842 – 855.
Macrae, C. N., Bodenhausen, G. V., & Milne, A. B. (1995). The dissection of selection in
person perception: Inhibitory processes in social stereotyping. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 69, 397 – 407.
Meredith, M. (2001). Human vomeronasal organ function: a critical review of best and
worst cases. Chemical Senses, 26, 433–445.
Mitchell, J. P., Banaji, M. R., & Macrae, C. N. (2005). The link between social cognition
and self-referential thought in the medial prefrontal cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
17, 1306-1315.
Mitchell, J. P., Macrae, C. N., & Banaji, M. R. (2004). Encoding-specific effects of social
cognition on the neural correlates of subsequent memory. Journal of Neuroscience, 24, 49124917.
Mitchell, J. P., Macrae, C. N., & Banaji, M. R. (2005). Forming impressions of people
versus inanimate objects: Social-cognitive processing in the medial prefrontal
cortex. NeuroImage, 26, 251-257.
Mitchell, J. P., Macrae, C. N., & Banaji, M. R. (2006). Dissociable medial prefrontal
contributions to judgments of similar and dissimilar others. Neuron, 50, 655-663.
Neely, J. H. (1977). Semantic priming and retrieval from lexical memory: Roles of
inhibitionless spreading activation and limited-capacity attention. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: General, 106, 226 – 254.
Neuberg, S. L., & Fiske, S. T. (1987). Motivational influences on impression formation:
outcome dependency, accuracy-driven attention, and individuating processes. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 431-444.
Social Cognition
48
Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports
on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84, 231 – 259.
Ochsner, K. N., Bunge, S. A., Gross, J. J., & Gabrieli J. D. E. (2002). Rethinking feelings:
An fMRI study of the cognitive regulation of emotion. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14,
1215-1229.
Ochsner, K. N., Ray, R. D., Cooper, J. C., Robertson, E. R., Chopra, S., Gabrieli, J. D. E.,
& Gross, J. J. (2004). For better or for worse: Neural systems support the cognitive down- and
up-regulation of negative emotion. NeuroImage, 23, 483-499.
Ostrom, T. M. (1984) The sovereignty of social cognition In R. F. Wyer & T. K. Skrull
(Eds.) Handbook of Social Cognition. Vol 1. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.
Pfaff, D. W., Frohlich, J., & Morgan, M. (2002). Hormonal and genetic influences on
arousal—sexual and otherwise. Trends in Neuroscience, 25, 45–50.
Poehlman, T. A., Uhlmann, E., Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (submitted).
Understanding and using the Implicit Association Test: III. Meta-analysis of predictive validity.
Richards, J. M., & Gross, J. J. (1999). Composure at any cost? The cognitive
consequences of emotion suppression. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 1033–
1044.
Roediger, H. L. (1990). Implicit memory: Retention without awareness. American
Psychologist, 45, 1043-1056.
Rosenzweig M. R., & Bennett, E. L. (1996). Psychobiology of plasticity: Effects of
training and experience on brain and behavior. Behavioral and Brain Research, 78, 57-65.
Social Cognition
49
Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the
attribution process (pp. 173-220). In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social
psychology (Vol. 10). New York: Academic Press.
Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The false consensus effect: an egocentric bias
in social perception and attribution processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 13,
279-301.
Santos, L. R., Nissen, A. G. & Ferrugia, J. (2006). Rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta)
know what others can and cannot hear. Animal Behaviour, 71, 1175-1181.
Saxe, R., & Kanwisher, N. (2005). People Thinking about Thinking People: The Role of
the Temporo-Parietal Junction in 'Theory of Mind' (pp. 171-182). In J. T. Cacioppo & G. G.
Berntson (Eds.), Social neuroscience: Key readings. New York: Psychology Press.
Schacter, D. L. (1987). Implicit memory: History and current status. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 13, 501 -518.
Schulman, K. A., Berlin, J. A., Harless, W., Kerner, J. F., Sistrunk, S., Gersh, B. J., Dubé,
R., Taleghani, C. K., Burke, J. E., Williams, S., Eisenberg, J. M., & Escarce, J. J. (1999). The
effect of race and sex on physicians' recommendations for cardiac catheterization. New England
Journal of Medicine, 340, 618 – 626.
Schwarz, N., & Clore, G. L. (1983). Mood, misattribution, and judgments of well-being:
Information and directive functions of affective states. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 45, 513-523.
Schwarz, N., Strack, F., & Mai, H. P. (1991). Assimilation and contrast effects in partwhole question sequences: A conversational logic analysis. Public Opinion Quarterly, 55, 3 – 23.
Social Cognition
50
Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (1993). The inevitability of oppression and the dynamics of
social dominance (pp. 173-211). In P. Sniderman, P.Tetlock, and E.G. Carmines (Eds). Prejudice,
politics, and the American dilemma. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 173 – 211.
Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (1999). Social dominance: An intergroup theory of social
hierarchy and oppression. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, E. R. (1984). Model of social inference processes. Psychological Review, 91, 392413.
Smith, E. R., & Lerner, M. (1986). The development of automatism of social judgments.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 246-259.
Smith, E. R., & Miller, F. D. (1979). Attributional information processing: A response
time model of causal subtraction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 1723-1731.
Stevens, L. E., & Fiske, S.T. (1995). Motivation and cognition in social life: A social
survival perspective. Social Cognition, 13, 189-214.
Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1986). The social identity theory of group relations (pp. 7-24).
In S. Worchel & W. G. Austin (Eds), Psychology of intergroup relations. Chicago, IL: Nelson, 7
– 24.
Thorndike, E. L. (1920). A constant error in psychological ratings. Journal of Applied
Psychology, 4, 25-29.
Thurstone, L. L. (1928). Attitudes can be measured. American Journal of Sociology, 33,
529-554.
Triplett, N. (1898). The dynamogenic factors in pacemaking and competition. American
Journal of Psychology, 9, 507-533.
Social Cognition
51
Trope, Y. (1986). Identification and inferential processes in dispositional attribution.
Psychological Review, 93, 239 – 257.
Tsao, D., Freiwald, W., Knutsen, T., Mandeville, J., & Tootell, R. (2003). Faces and
objects in macaque cerebral cortex. Nature Neuroscience, 6, 989–995.
Wason, P. C. (1960). On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 129-140.
Wegner, D. M. (1988). Stress and mental control. In S. Fisher & J. Reason (Eds.),
Handbook of life stress, cognition, and health. Chichester: Wiley, 685 – 699.
Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control. Psychological Review, 101,
34–52.
Westen, D., Kilts, C., Blagov, P., Harenski, K., & Hamann, S. (2006). The neural basis of
motivated reasoning: An fMRI study of emotional constraints on political judgment during the
U.S. Presidential election of 2004. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 1947-1958.
Willis, J., & Todorov, A. (2006). First impressions: Making up your mind after 100 ms
exposure to a face. Psychological Science, 17, 592-598.
Wittenbrink, B., Judd, C. M, & Park, B. (2001). Spontaneous prejudice in context:
Variability in automatically activated attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
81, 815-827.
Word, C. O., Zanna, M. P., & Cooper, J. (1974). The nonverbal mediation of selffulfilling prophecies in interracial interaction. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 10,
109-120.
Social Cognition
52
Yamaguchi, S., Greenwald, A. G., Banaji, M. R., Murakami, F., Chen, D., Shiomura, K.,
Kobayashi, C., Cai, H., & Krendl, A. (2007). Apparent universality of positive implicit selfesteem. Psychological Science.
Young, L. Y., Wang, Z., & Insel, T. R. (1998). Neuroendocrine bases of monogamy.
Trends in Neuroscience, 21, 71-75.
Zajonc, R. B. (1968) Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 9, 2, 1-27.