Lecture 3: Social Thinking (Reflections)

In Lecture 3: Social Thinking, we examined an array of cognitive mechanisms we use for interpreting and acting on our social environments.

I suggested that these cognitive mechanisms provided the underlying architecture for the occurrence of more observable social phenomenon, including extreme events such as genocide, which can be seen as "perfect storms" of social psychological variables coming together within particularly cultural contexts.



In this lecture, we consider the role of our cognitive mechanisms in the formation and changing of attitudes, and their application in social influence and persuasion.

Key Concepts

• Social Cognition
• Cognitive Miser (and the duplex mind)
• Knowledge structures
  
• Schemata
• Scripts
  
• Stereotypes
  
• Priming
• Framing
• Attributions
• Internal vs. external
• Correspondence Bias (or Fundamental Attribution Error)
• Actor-observer bias
  
• Self-serving bias
  
• Heuristics
• Social Perception
• Attitudes
• Mere-exposure effect
• Cognitive dissonance
  
• Influence and persuasion
• Compliance and conformity
• Normative
• Informational
• Minority

Social Cognition

Humans are cognitive misers in that we use our conscious mind relatively little, with most of the processing being done by the automatic mind (also see duplex mind). The automatic mind uses a variety of adaptive, cognitive shortcuts to reduce cognitive load. These schemas, scripts, stereotypes, heuristics, and so on, all serve to efficiently process complex environmental and social information, and help to provide a sense of control and predictability over our social environment.

For observed events and behaviours which are common (i.e., fit norms, schemata and scripts), our automatic mind does most of the processing. For unusual events and behaviours humans tend to want to find explanation (attribution).

There appears to be a natural tendency to connect observed behaviour with an actor's disposition. This is called correspondent inference. When we infer an actor's disposition from a behaviour and its consequences and play down possible situational explanations we demonstrate what is know as the correspondence bias or the fundamental attribution error (FAE).

We are more likely to make a FAE when dealing with others than with ourselves. We give more credence to situational explanations for our own behaviour than we do when interpreting the behaviour of others. This is the actor-observer effect.

We further demonstrate self-serving bias by tending to attribute our successes to dispositional causes and our failures to external causes; whereas we tend to do the opposite when explaining other people's behaviour.

The ultimate attribution error occurs when we use these biases in the context of groups, e.g., we tend to make self-serving attributions about our in-groups (the groups to which we belong and identify with) and out-groups.

Heuristics, schemata, scripts, stereotypes, etc. can be usefully thought of as algorithmic "nets" or "filters" which we use to catch certain kinds of information and which help us to navigate typically encountered social environments. The occurrence of unusual events is more likely to flag conscious awareness which (if cognitive capacity is available) and can then trigger consciousness thinking and consideration. However, we tend to prefer and attend more to information which is consistent with our expectations, making it difficult to change existing, largely automatic cognitive processing of our social environment.

Whilst the extent to which these cognitive biases occur is somewhat innate, it also varies across cultures. For example, the FAE is fair more prevalent in the US than in India.


Attitudes

Attitudes were the first major area of study in cognitively focused social psychology.

Attitudes are valenced dispositions we experience towards people, objects, ideas, and events. Attitudes are the basic experience of like (attraction) or dislike (revulsion) which we experience in varying strengths to just about everything.

Attitudes tend to become polarized (become more exaggerated) over time.

Attitudes can manifest in thinking (cognition), feeling (emotion), and behaviour.

Attitudes are acquired via:

• Mere-exposure effect
• Classical conditioning
• Operant conditioning
• Social learning

and thus are shaped by all past experiences and by group memberships and social identity.

Attitude research has been criticised for the lack of relationship to actual behaviour. Attitudes are most likely to predict behaviour:

• when the attitude is specifically related to a specific behaviour
  
• over time and situations (as opposed to behaviour in a specific situation at a specific time)
• when the behaviour is freely chosen
  

People like to have consistent cognitions, particularly when it comes to beliefs and attitudes. It tends to cause psychological distress to hold opposed concepts in mind. This can give rise to cognitive dissonance, particularly, for example, when one's behaviour is inconsistent with one's attitude. Dissonance can be dealt with by:

• Changing attitude
• Changing behaviour
• Using defence mechanisms to deal with the dissonance (i.e., push awareness of the dissonance out of the conscious mind)

This desire for consistency appears to actually be that we like other people to have a consistent view of us.

Influence and Persuasion

Influence refers to ways in which an individual's attitudes and behaviour is altered by their perceptions of the social environment.

Normative influence occurs when your behaviour conforms with the majority, i.e., you do what everyone else does (e.g., Asch's Conformity Experiment). Going along with the majority, however, doesn't mean that your private attitude is consistent with the majority. It just means that your external behaviour fits with normative behaviour.

Informational influence occurs particularly in situations which are ambiguous or you are under cognitive load or you lack expertise. In such situations not only is your behaviour likely to conform with the majority, you are also likely to believe that other people are correct.

Influence techniques consist of various ways in which people can be manipulated into changing attitudes/behaviours, e.g., foot-in-the-door (start with a small request, then build up).

Minority influence occurs when even a single individual is a dissident (i.e., goes against the norm). Particularly when a minority is consistent in its alternative message, it can have a disproportionate influence on swaying the majority.

Persuasion is the intentional use of psychological influence techniques in order to get a person or group to adopt a desired behaviour (e.g., purchase a produce) or change an attitude (e.g., become pro-abortion).

The successfulness of an attempt at persuasion can be seen as relying on:

• From Whom (credibility, likability)
  
• Message Content (reason, emotion)
  
• Audience

There are two basic routes to persuasion:

• Alpha strategies (increasing the strong, compelling, credible argument)
• Omega strategies (reducing/removing barriers/resistance)