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rate fallacy, base rate, and anchoring and adjustment.

       3.4 Define reliability, validity, internal validity, and external validity and illustrate each with an example.

       3.5 Explain what is meant by motivated reasoning and how it is illustrated by belief perseverance, confirmation bias, and biased assimilation.

       3.6 Summarize the basic differences between cognition in the East and in the West.

      Believing Is Seeing

      Do you see what I see? This seems like a simple question, but is it? A recent analysis of international media reporting of a 2002 Olympic skating scandal provides a nice illustration of how people can see the same thing differently and specifically the influence of preexisting loyalties on the perception of a single event (Stepanova, Strube, & Hetts, 2009). In the 2002 winter Olympics, the Russian skaters Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze were awarded the gold medal in the figure skating pairs competition, and the Canadians Jamie Salé and David Pelletier received the silver. However, shortly after the event, reports of “vote trading” among the judges led to an investigation and additional scrutiny of the performances of the skating pairs. In the tradition of Hastorf and Cantril’s (1954) examination of the Princeton-Dartmouth football game, Stepanova, Strube, and Hetts (2009) analyzed 425 newspaper reports of the controversy from Russia and the United States to determine what, if any, biases might have been present. Recall that Hastorf and Cantril (1954) found that both media reports and observations by fans of the Princeton-Dartmouth game demonstrated clear differences in perceptions of the fairness of the game that aligned with fan loyalties. Stepanova et al. (2009) analyzed 169 Russian and 256 U.S. articles using native-speaking Russian and American coders. They found that media reports in the two nations were consistent with East West loyalties: That is, the Russian reports construed both the skating event and the overall scandal in a pro-Russian, anti-West manner, whereas the U.S. stories reflected a pro-Canadian, anti-East interpretation. Of additional interest is that the U.S. media often acknowledged the bias (but demonstrated it nonetheless), but the Russian news outlets did not. The Stepanova et al. (2009) research is notable for two reasons: It updated and replicated the Hastorf and Cantril study, and it examined how construal can vary across cultures.

      As mentioned in Chapter 1, prior to the 1950s psychologists and laypeople alike thought that there was one “reality” that all of us see and understand in essentially the same manner. However, research starting in the 1950s punctured this somewhat naïve perspective, leading to a new appreciation for the role of individual construal in social perception (Freeman & Ambady, 2014). The broader point here is that the ways in which individuals come to know and understand the world are affected by a multitude of forces, including desires, feelings, and goals, which can constrain and alter our seemingly unbiased perceptions (Bruner, 1957; Hahn & Harris, 2014; Ross, Lepper, & Ward, 2010). In this chapter we will survey research on social cognition—a topic discussed in both Chapters 1 and 2—and will place special emphasis on how our thinking processes are biased in both obvious and subtle ways.

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       Take a quiz to find out what you’ve learned.

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      Think Ahead!

      1 How might social cognition be different from nonsocial cognition?

      2 To what extent are your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors influenced by nonconscious processes?

      3 Do people reason differently across cultures?

      The Psychology Of Social Thinking

      In order to successfully navigate our complex social world, we must be able to make sense out of it. For most people, sense making has been seen as relatively uncontroversial, and the world was an objective reality that people could largely agree on. In other words, people generally believed that we “saw” objects, people, and events as they “really were.” However, with the advent of the “New Look” in cognitive psychology around the middle of the 20th century, psychologists began to explore ways in which our minds go “beyond the information given” and actually construct the world as we process it (Bruner, 1957). They recognized that our sensory processes do not passively funnel information to our mental systems but instead actively work on and change that information, in effect representing it in an altered form. As we further explore our mental processes in this chapter, we will highlight two of our four core assumptions of social psychology. One is the role of individual construal in perceiving and making sense of our social worlds. The second is the principle of the cultural embeddedness of social cognition—that is, how cultural background can influence basic reasoning processes.

      The gyri of the thinker’s brain as a maze of choices. A gyrus is a ridge on the cerebral cortex. It is generally surrounded by one or more sulci (depressions or furrows).

      Science Source.

      As defined in Chapter 1, social cognition is the study of mental processes associated with making sense of oneself and others (Fiske & Taylor, 2013). These processes include both conscious and nonconscious thinking as well as perception, attention, and remembering (Moskowitz, 2005). These social cognitive processes are particularly relevant to three of our enduring questions of human nature: free will, rationality, and the self. For instance, we’ll discuss how apparently voluntary behaviors are affected by nonconscious, involuntary processes that may undermine our exercise of free will. We will also describe some of the biases in social cognition that lead us to question our ability to engage in rational or objective thought. In addition, we’ll describe some mental shortcuts that people take to save time and energy and how they can reduce judgmental accuracy. Not surprisingly, the self plays a central role in social cognition, in part because our interpretations frequently reflect our need to bolster the self, as we will discuss more in Chapter 4. As you would expect, this chapter focuses primarily on the individual level of explanation, although both evolutionary and contextual influences will be incorporated.

      Thinking About People Versus Thinking About Things

      People tend to think more about people than about things.

      ©iStockphoto.com/laflor.

      ©iStockphoto.com/PeopleImages.

      Are People Different Than Things? The “Social” in Social Cognition

      Is thinking about people the same as thinking about nonpeople (such as objects, plants, animals, etc.)? In other words, is social cognition simply a subset of general cognition, or is it significantly different? People are obviously not things, but does it matter when it comes to mental processing? Social psychologists agree that people differ from things in several ways that have important implications for those processes (Jenkins & Mitchell, 2011; Mitchell, Heatherton, & Macrae, 2005; Moskowitz, 2005). Consider the following:

       People think back (and we think about their thinking). Probably the biggest difference between social

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