Social Psychology Chapter IV Social Cognition

First, social cognition

Social cognition, also known as social perception, refers to the process that people infer people or things according to the social information in the environment.

Basic assumptions of social cognition:

We regard people as a cognitive miser and think that people's cognitive resources are limited, and we will never pay when we don't need to pay.

People usually try to form an accurate impression of the world, and most of the time they can do it.

(1) classification

In the process of knowing others, people do not regard everyone as an independent individual, but always automatically classify them into a certain category. This process is classification, which is a spontaneous and immediate process.

Criteria for classification: People often classify others or things according to their similarity to the prototype.

People have a strong tendency to think that objects in a group are more similar than they actually are. When we divide people into different groups, we may exaggerate the similarities within the group and the differences between groups, thus forming a "homogeneity effect outside the group" and thinking that people outside the group are "similar", which makes us only like people who feel similar to ourselves, which leads to group preference.

(2) Schema

Schema refers to a group of organized and structured cognitive phenomena, which includes the knowledge of the cognitive object and the total knowledge in the total cognition of the object.

Classification of patterns:

Personal schema: refers to our cognitive structure of a specific individual.

Self-schema refers to people's cognitive structure of themselves, which is closely related to self-concept.

Stereotype: refers to our cognitive structure of a specific group, sometimes called group stereotype.

Role schema: refers to people's organized cognitive structure of a specific role.

Script: refers to people's schema of events or time sequence.

The importance of schema:

It helps us to interpret the newly acquired information and make effective inferences.

Provide some facts to fill the gaps in the original knowledge.

It can make people's expectations of possible future events structured, so as to be psychologically prepared for the future.

(3) Social cognitive rules

Social cognitive law:

Usability: it refers to judging according to the difficulty of a thing coming to mind.

Symbolism: people classify things according to their similarities with a typical thing.

Basal rate information: according to the relative proportion information of different types of members of the whole species.

Anchoring and adjustment: people take a number or numerical value as a starting point and make adjustments according to this starting point, but in fact this adjustment is never sufficient.

(d) the impact of social cognition on health

Social cognition and loneliness

In the process of social cognition, if people only pay attention to the negative aspects of life, they may experience more loneliness.

Social cognition and anxiety

People's cognition and control of the situation can make people avoid anxiety.

Social cognition and physiological diseases

For example, nervousness may have an impact on health:

Second, personal perception.

Human perception: when we first met a person, we formed an impression of this person based on limited information.

Personal perception involves three aspects:

The formation of impressions of others

What clues do individuals use to form an overall impression of others?

Deviations that may occur when an individual forms an impression on others.

(a) the impression of others.

The process of forming an impression on others, also called impression formation, refers to the process of summarizing and synthesizing a number of meaningful personality characteristics to form a characteristic with conclusive significance.

first impression

Our first impression of each other is called the first impression.

The evaluation dimension of our first impression of others;

Evaluation: refers to evaluating others or things from good and bad aspects.

Valence: refers to the evaluation of strength.

Initiative: refers to the evaluation from both positive and negative aspects.

Once people are evaluated in these three dimensions, no amount of evaluation can increase the information about this person. Meanwhile, the dimension of "evaluation" is the most important. Once a person is positioned in the evaluation dimension, the remaining two dimensions basically fall in the same direction.

The formation of the overall impression

With the deepening of our understanding of others, we will gradually form an overall impression of others.

Average model (average model)

The model holds that in the process of impression formation, we process information about others in a simple and average way.

Addition model (addition model)

It refers to people integrating other people's information fragments through accumulation rather than average.

Unfortunately, there are not many studies supporting the cumulative model.

The weighted average model (the weighted average model)

The way people form an overall impression of others is to average all the features, but give more weight to the important features.

Negative effect: Compared with positive information, negative information is given greater weight and has greater influence on the formation of impression.

Personal perception deviation

Halo effect

The evaluator's evaluation of a person's various characteristics is often influenced by his impression of a high-scoring feature, which is generally very high.

On the contrary, the negative halo effect is also called the fork tail effect.

Halo effect will also affect consumer behavior.

Positive deviation (positive deviation)

Also known as sympathy effect, it refers to people's tendency to evaluate others more positively than negatively when evaluating others.

There are two explanations for positive deviation:

"pollyana principle": it emphasizes the influence of people's good experiences on evaluating others, and thinks that people will feel happy when they are surrounded by beautiful things, such as kind people and sunny weather. Even if something bad happens afterwards, people will make a favorable evaluation of their environment based on their good experiences. Therefore, people's evaluation of most things is always above average, because happy things are easier to recall than unpleasant things.

The second explanation is limited to our evaluation of people. Sears pointed out that there is a sense of similarity between people, so people are more tolerant of others than other objects. People often have a better evaluation of themselves, so they have a higher evaluation of others.

(B) personal perception clues

mood

Emotion-The abilities of the six main emotions are consistent across cultures, and these emotions are shared by human beings.

The universality of expression has great survival value for human beings;

Allow us to express our feelings to others, so as to control their behavior.

We can also infer the psychological state of others through their emotions.

Nonverbal suggestion

There are two kinds of nonverbal cues: visual cues and verbal cues.

Visual cues: facial expressions, gestures, body posture and appearance behavior.

Superlanguage cue: all signals except dialogue.

The function of nonverbal suggestion:

Express emotion

Express attitude

Express personal characteristics

Auxiliary voice communication

The main verbal clues are as follows:

Interpersonal distance: When you want to be friendly, the interpersonal distance will be closer. Culture will also affect interpersonal distance.

Body posture: It is hooliganism to speak body language without culture.

Eye contact

Compared with verbal cues, nonverbal cues are more likely to reveal people's true feelings.

Third, attribution

Attribution refers to the process by which people infer the reasons for other people's behaviors or attitudes.

(A) Attribution theory of others' behavior

Haider attribution theory

Haider believes that everyone has an impulse to try to explain other people's behaviors in life, which can explain how people find out the causes of events in their daily lives.

Haider believes that people have two strong needs: one is a consistent understanding of the surrounding environment; The second is to control the environment, that is, to exert influence on the surrounding environment.

Haider believes that there are two reasons for the incident: one is internal factors, such as mood, attitude, personality and ability; The other is external cause. Stress, weather, conditions, etc.

Haider believes that people often use two principles when speculating about the reasons. One is the principle of covariation, that is, in many different situations, a specific cause is associated with a specific result. The second is the principle of exclusion. If there is no internal or external cause to explain the whole event, the attribution of the other party can be ruled out.

Weiner's attribution theory

Weiner also proposed stability and instability as another dimension factor:

? Instability and stability

Internal effort ability

External luck task difficulty

Weiner interprets success as his own reason and failure as luck, which is conducive to people's persistence. Later, Weiner improved the attribution model and increased controllability.

? Inside? External?

? Stability, instability, stability, instability

You can control a specific effort at a certain time for a temporary effort, and the teacher's prejudice comes from the accidental help of others.

Uncontrollable, specific ability, mood and emotional test difficulty, own luck.

Weiner's attribution theory aroused people's interest in attribution style training-how to help people develop more adaptive attribution style.

Attribution style theory

People's psychological attribution style is characterized by depression and optimism;

Depressed individuals often attribute negative events to internal, stable and overall factors, and positive events to external, unstable and local factors.

Optimistic attribution styles often attribute positive events to internal, stable and overall factors, and negative events to external, unstable and local factors.

Kelly's three-dimensional attribution theory

Kelly believes that the reasons at any time can be attributed to three aspects: actors, stimuli and environmental background.

Kelly believes that people need to use three kinds of information when attributing: consistency information, salience information and consistency information. In addition, Kelly also pointed out another principle that people will use in the attribution process-the discount principle: the role of specific reasons in producing specific results will be weakened by other possible reasons.

Example: Why do students sleep in my class?

Correspondence reasoning theory

Jones and Davis put forward the corresponding reasoning theory, which is applicable to the attribution of others' behavior. This theory tries to explain under what conditions we can attribute events to other people's internal characteristics, that is, personality, attitude, emotion and so on. Jones and others believe that we can correspond to a person's behavior and quality in the following situations:

Unexpected and non-compliance of behavior

Free choice of behavior

(2) Attribution to oneself

Attribute to sb's attitude

Bem believes that people can perceive few internal clues about their bad attitude, and they are vague, so people actually understand their attitude by observing their behavior under different pressures.

Attribution to one's own motives

If the motivation for doing something is too legitimate, then your own internal motivation will be reduced; On the contrary, if individuals are prevented from engaging in certain behaviors through threats, it may lead to an increase in people's intrinsic interest (drugs).

Attribute to sb.' s mood

People's intuition about their emotions depends on the degree of physiological activation they have experienced and the cognitive names they use.

(3) fundamental attribution error

Fundamental attribution error: People tend to attribute other people's behavior to internal characteristics such as personality or attitude, while ignoring the importance of their own situation.

Why is there an attribution error:

As a result of the situation, when we try to explain the behavior of others, our attention will focus on the individual and ignore the surrounding environment.

The fundamental attribution error also depends on a person's theory of mind.

Using fundamental attribution error will make one overestimate the knowledge of others.

Fundamental attribution error will also be influenced by its cultural background. Westerners emphasize human factors, while orientals emphasize environmental factors.