Social Cognition: How people select, interpret,

Thinking Systems

Automatic Thinking (System 1): Quick, effortless, unconscious, involuntary, habitual, intuitive.

Controlled Thinking (System 2): Conscious, intentional, effortful, requires cognitive attention.

• Automatic thinking can be checked by controlled thinking.

Bottom-Up Processing: Data-driven, form conclusions based on stimuli

Top-Down Processing: TODO

Schemas

Schemas: Mental structures people use to organize knowledge about the social world.

• Multiple schemas for making judgments. The most accessible (chronic) schema is used.
• Priming: Temporarily make a schema accessible.
  • E.g. Adjectives priming - Donald (Higgins)
• Subliminal Priming: Priming that cannot be consciously detected.
  • E.g. Pope frowning vs self evaluation (Baldwin et al 1990)
  • Physical sensations can prime social judgements (embodied cognition)

Automatic Thinking Biases

Availability Heuristic: Tend to judge based on the ease which something comes to mind. (E.g. words with “K” at third letter > words starting with “K”)

Representative Heuristic: Tend to classify people based on match of typical stereotypes.

• Base-Rate Neglect: Tend to ignore base rate info. (E.g. Random person from 30% lawyers + 70% engineers, profile sound like lawyer, so people tend to say that he is more likely to be a lawyer)

Counterfactual Thinking: Mentally changing some aspect of the past, imagine possible outcome (E.g. Got 59%, “I must have passed if I changed that answer”)

• Silver metal winners are often less happy than bronze metal winners (”I could have done better” vs “I could have missed getting a metal”)
• E.g. Same seat vs different seat

Illusory Correlation: Perception of correlation when none exists / stronger relation than actual. Caused by confirmation bias.