Chapter 3
Social Cognition:
How We Think About the
Social World
Chapter Outline
I. On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort
Thinking
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
• Social cognition is the study of how
people select, interpret, and use
information to make judgments
about themselves and the social
world.
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
• People use mental shortcuts to
simplify the amount of information
they receive from the environment.
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
• Social cognition is pragmatic,
adopting different procedures
depending on the person’s goals and
needs in a situation.
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
• People as Everyday Theorists:
Automatic Thinking with Schemas
Schemas are mental structures people use to
organize their knowledge about the social
world around themes or subjects: schemas
affect what information we notice, think
about, and remember.
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
• People as Everyday Theorists:
Automatic Thinking with Schemas
Schemas act as filters, screening out
information that is inconsistent with them.
Although we may notice and remember
glaring exceptions, usually we attend only to
schema-consistent information.
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
• People as Everyday Theorists:
Automatic Thinking with Schemas
Accessibility: the ease with which schemas
can be brought to mind.
Priming: the process by which recent
experiences make schemas, traits, or
concepts come to mind more readily.
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
• People as Everyday Theorists:
Automatic Thinking with Schemas
Perseverance effect: the tendency for
people’s beliefs about themselves and their
world to persist even when those beliefs are
discredited.
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
• People as Everyday Theorists:
Schemas and Their Influence
Self-fulfilling prophecy: whereby people have
an expectation about what another person is
like, which influences how they act toward
that person, which causes that person to
behave in a way consistent with the original
expectation.
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
• Mental Strategies and Shortcuts
Judgmental heuristics are mental shortcuts
people use to make judgments quickly and
efficiently.
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
• Mental Strategies and Shortcuts
The availability heuristic is a mental rule of
thumb whereby people base a judgment on
the ease with which they can bring something
to mind.
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
• Mental Strategies and Shortcuts
The representativeness heuristic is a mental
shortcut whereby people classify something
according to how similar it is to a typical
case.
Base rate information is information about the
frequency of members of different categories
in the population. It usually is not considered
when people are using mental shortcuts.
On Automatic Pilot: Low-Effort Thinking
• Mental Strategies and Shortcuts
The anchoring and adjustment heuristic is a
mental shortcut that involves using a number
or value as a starting point, and then
adjusting one’s answer away from this
anchor.
One example of anchoring and adjustment is
biased sampling, whereby people make
generalizations from samples of information
they know are biased or atypical.
Chapter Outline
II. Controlled Social Cognition:
High-Effort Thinking
Controlled Social Cognition: High-Effort
Thinking
• Controlled thinking is conscious,
voluntary, and effortful unlike
automatic thinking which is
nonconscious, effortless, and
involuntary.
Controlled Social Cognition: High-Effort
Thinking
• The Motivated Social Thinker
In many studies, people make judgments that
are of little importance to them. When the
importance is increased, people may use
more sophisticated strategies, are more
accurate, and are more likely to notice facts
that conflict with their schemas.
Controlled Social Cognition: High-Effort
Thinking
• Ironic Processing and Thought
Suppression
Being preoccupied reduces our ability to
engage in thought suppression, or the
attempt to avoid thinking about something
we would just as soon forget.
Controlled Social Cognition: High-Effort
Thinking
• Ironic Processing and Thought
Suppression
According to Wegner, thought suppression
depends on two processes: “monitoring”
(searching for evidence that the unwanted
thought is about to intrude) and “operating
process” (finding a distraction).
Controlled Social Cognition: High-Effort
Thinking
• Counterfactual thinking is mentally
changing some aspect of the past as
a way of imagining what might have
been.
Chapter Outline
III. A Portrayal of Social Thinking
A Portrayal of Human Thinking
• People as “flawed scientists”:
Though people are brilliant thinkers,
they are often blind to truths that
don’t fit their theories and sometimes
even treat others in ways that make
their theories come true.
Chapter Outline
IV. Improving Human Thinking
Improving Human Thinking
• Teaching Reasoning Skills
Often we have more confidence in our
judgements than we should. To try to
improve reasoning skills, we need to
break through this overconfidence barrier
and make people more aware of the limits
of their cognitive abilities.
Study Questions
What is social cognition? What do
researchers in this area study?
Study Questions
What are the advantages of
automatic thinking? When is
this type of thinking
problematic?
Study Questions
Why are schemas so important to
study? What role do they play in
people’s understanding and
interpretations of themselves
and the social world? What are
examples of cognitive processes
that are influenced by schemas?
Study Questions
What functions do schemas
serve? Why does their use
sometimes have adaptive value?
How is their use maladaptive?
How do accessibility and priming
affect schema use?
Study Questions
What is the relationship between
schemas and the perseverance
effect?
Study Questions
Why does the self-fulfilling
prophecy occur? What function
does it serve? How can it affect
resistance to schema change?
Study Questions
How do cultures influence schema
content?
Study Questions
Why do people use judgmental
heuristics? What are three
heuristics that people use to
make judgments? When people
rely on these heuristics what
kind of information are they not
taking into account?
Study Questions
What are the effects of motivation
on judgment formation? How is
automatic thinking different from
controlled thinking? What effects
does cognitive load have on
these two types of thinking?
Study Questions
How do automatic processing and
controlled processing interact to
allow for successful thought
suppression?
Study Questions
What is the relationship between
the occurrence of counterfactual
thinking and emotional reactions
to events?
Study Questions
What is perhaps the best
metaphor for the social thinker?
Why?
Study Questions
What can we teach people so that
they overcome the
overconfidence barrier and
increase their reasoning ability?