Download Social Cognition and Emotion

INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY
Chapter 12
Social Cognition and Emotion
At the end of this Chapter you should be able to:
Learn the importance of perceiving and understanding others
Learn the importance of perceiving and understanding ourselves
Understand the Attitudes
Learn about Emotion
Perceiving and understanding others
Social Cognition: How we perceive and think about ourselves and each other; how
we process and make meaning about our encounters
One focus: why did someone else act as they did?
others’ actions – and about our own
We make attributions about
Attribution
Kelly: early social psychologist
 According to Kelly… we specifically look for ways that events co-vary: “cause
and effect”
 Or: Causal attributions
2 types of attributions
 Situational attributions and Dispositional attributions
Attributional styles also vary by culture
 E.g., individualistic and collectivistic
Fundamental Attribution Error
In an individualistic culture, the most common error made is the fundamental
attribution error: a bias to explain others’ behavior by attributing it to their
disposition, our own to our situation
In collectivistic cultures:
behavior
focus on group actions / contextual cues to explain
Person Perception and Cognitive Schemas
Cognitive schemas: shortcuts when limited information is available
Schemas: operate when trying to explain why people behave the way they do
Implicit theories of personality: our schemas for …
 How we remember other people
 How we perceive them
 How we interpret what they have done
Stereotypes
One type of schematic thinking
 Stereotypes often are used when we think about identified groups of people:
e.g., Greeks, women, old people, etc.
Origins of stereotypes: explicitly and implicitly communicated to us by others
Used more often when we have little or no exposure in daily life to that group
Effects of stereotypes:
Self-fulfilling prophecies
 We often pick up on others’ expectations for us (dictated by a stereotype) and
behave in that way
Stereotype threat
 When a stereotype about us is made salient, in a “performance” situation, we
often feel under threat – which holds performance down
 Poor performance then may confirm stereotype
Combating prejudice
“Robbers cave” experiment (Sherif, 1966):
 When groups compete, prejudice and hostility grow
 When groups collaborate/cooperate to achieve an important task, prejudice
and hostility decrease
 To achieve this:
 Status must be held equal for all members
 Contact must be sustained for a long time
Perceiving and understanding ourselves
Social psychology: also concerned with how we perceive ourselves
 We are “actors” in the drama of the social world
 We seek to understand our own behavior as well
Self-Schema
An implicit theory of ourselves
 Beliefs about our traits
 Knowledge about ourselves, including (but not limited to) …
- gender
-
our physical characteristics,, our values
-
How self-schema operates seems to differ by culture and context
Attitudes
Attitude: belief, feeling, predisposition to act in a certain way
Cover a wide range of topics about which we may feel quite strongly:
power, abortion, bilingual education, etc.
nuclear
Measuring Attitudes
How to quantify an attitude?
 Questionnaires typically used
 Degree of agreement / disagreement with a specific attitude measured with a
number
 Can be examined with implicit or explicit measures
 Associationist links, priming, speed of reaction: all means of examining
implicit attitudes, particularly prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory
behavior
Do Attitudes Predict Behavior?
Strength of attitude, specifics of wording when asking about attitude
 both very important variables
 small changes in these two variables may result in big differences in observed
behavior
Attitude Formation
Occur as a result of…
 Classical conditioning
 Advertising
for expensive car always accompanied by beautiful
surroundings/people
 Operant conditioning
 If a reward given for behavior, attitude for that behavior will change
 Observational learning
Attitude Change
Central route to persuasion: we attend to the message, the message-bearer, and
make decisions accordingly
Peripheral route to persuasion: context in which information is given is capable of
determining our attitude
Cognitive Dissonance
Festinger & Carlsmith (1959): Under different conditions of reward, people justify
behavior with different explanations
“Insufficient justification”: the notion that we try to justify our own behavior; if we
cannot justify it, we experience dissonance between beliefs and actions
We try to resolve that “cognitive dissonance” through the process of bringing
attitudes in line with our behavior
Emotion


Emotions encompass: changes in behavior, changes in subjective experience,
and changes in physiology
Emotions: briefer and more targeted than moods
Theories of emotion: developed for over a century
Common sense notions: we feel an emotion and then take action: feel fear, then
run!
James-Lange Theory of Emotion
Posited the reverse:
 Emotional experiences cause emotional behavior
 See a bear, run, “feel” our behavior as fear only after we run
 Support: facial feedback theory
 The configuration in which we hold our facial muscles influences the
emotion we then claim as our experience
James Lang theory: We see a dangerous object (attacking
bear); this triggers a bodily response (running, pounding
heart), and the awareness of this response is emotion
(fear).
Cannon-Bard Theory of Emotion
Critique of James-Lange: our bodily experiences happen too slowly to be the source
of our emotions
Cannon-Bard: physiological and experiential responses occur simultaneously
Both are triggered by changes in brain-state
Cannon-Bard theory: A stimulus (such as a bear) triggers
changes in the brain, and this brain activity then causes
changes in both physiology and experience
Emotional Responses
Behavioral components of emotional responses
Often examined for cross-cultural similarities:
 Patterns of facial displays: some emotions seem to be displayed in consistent
fashion: cross-cultural psychology
 Rules for facial displays: many different rules for how and when emotions may
be displayed on the face: cultural psychology
Functions of Emotion
Help set up the body for reaction to threat/danger: “fight or flight” reaction and the
accompanying emotion of fear
Help recover from stress
Aid in marking important memories
Signal social intent/connection
Emotion Regulation
Two primary forms:
 Cognitive reappraisal: decrease emotional response by re-interpretation of
stimuli
 Suppression: Decrease in emotional reaction by decreasing strength of facial
expression or denying other behavior appropriate to that emotion (e.g.,
refusing to frown or cry when sad)