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Social Psychology. Daniel W. Barrett
Читать онлайн.Название Social Psychology
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781506310626
Автор произведения Daniel W. Barrett
Издательство Ingram
People have special relevance for our goals. Let’s say that, as the stranger approaches, you recognize him as the husband of your boss, whom you met at a recent work party. Since you are due for your annual job performance evaluation and you hope for a raise, you worry just a little more about his impression of you and what he may say to your boss. How he thinks about you is particularly important to you and will change how you think about and handle your interaction. More generally, encounters with other people have a special relevance for us, in part because they can affect whether or not we achieve our goals, such as getting a raise or doing well on a group project in class (Fiske & Taylor, 1991, 2013; Moskowitz, 2005). Not all people are equally relevant for us, of course; the greater their potential impact on our goals, the more likely we are to devote our mental resources to thinking about them.
Thinking about people almost always involves social explanation. Virtually every time we think about other people we engage in some type of social explanation (Fiske & Taylor, 1991, 2013; Malle, 2011; Moskowitz, 2005). Perhaps you notice that your social psychology professor has not called on you for the past couple of classes despite the fact that you have repeatedly raised your hand and that she has called on you in the past. You may wonder whether she dislikes you or is not interested in what you have to say. This is natural, as all of us seek to understand why others behave as they do. We more commonly look for the meaning behind the behavior of other people than of nonhuman events, such as a flat tire or snow storm.
We think more about people than about nonpeople. There are clearly important qualitative differences—differences in how we process social versus nonsocial information. In addition, there is a quantitative one: People think more about people than about objects, animals, and plants (Lieberman, 2013). Consider your typical day. How much time do you spend thinking about your friends, family, and other people? About things like your car, home, or textbook? Most of us devote much more effort to pondering the intentions, motivations, and behavior of other people, including partners, friends, coworkers, and even complete strangers (such as celebrities, athletes, politicians, etc.). Thoughts about people (including ourselves) dominate our consciousness and consequently impact our social experiences more than thoughts about nonpeople.
Brains process people differently from nonpeople. The burgeoning field of social neuroscience has amply demonstrated important differences in brain activation between social and nonsocial cognition (Todorov, Fiske, & Prentice, 2011). As we discussed in Chapter 2, social thinking relies on neural regions that are not typically involved when we are engaging in nonsocial thinking (Lieberman, 2013; Mitchell et al., 2005; Parkinson & Wheatley, 2015).
Looking-Glass Self: Imagining how other people perceive and judge one’s self, which in turn can affect that sense of self
Think Again!
1 What are five ways in which thinking about people is different from thinking about things?
2 What does it mean when we say that thinking about people almost always involves social explanation?
3 Can you imagine what a person’s life would be like if he was not aware that other people think back at him?
The Nature Of Social Cognition
As we’ve said, social cognition is a set of interrelated processes that includes perceiving, attending to, remembering, thinking about, and making sense of ourselves and other people (see Figure 3.1). Each of these processes uniquely affects social cognition and has implications for the others. First, human perception actively works on stimuli by filtering and organizing information. Perception automatically categorizes what is perceived by placing it into groups or assigning an identity to it (Bruner, 1957). Second, our attention further screens information and, in general, the greater attention we devote to particular information—that is, the longer the information is held in short-term memory—the greater the likelihood that it will enter long-term memory. Although the layperson typically uses the word “attention” to refer to a conscious process, attention can also be nonconscious and automatic. For instance, if you are sitting on a park bench and a crow flies just overhead, the chances are you will reflexively look at it without making a conscious decision to do so. In addition, there may be stimuli in the environment that are subliminal in that they appear and disappear too quickly for your conscious mind to process them, but they nevertheless are attended to by your nonconscious mind and may affect your thoughts, feelings, and behavior.
Figure 3.1 Dynamic Processes of Social Cognition
Clearly, we are able to attend to only a subset of what we perceive. Memory further narrows the social world, because only a small portion of what we perceive can be stored. Stimuli that are remembered—even temporarily—become the “stuff” of thinking. How we make sense of ourselves and others is in turn affected by all of these processes: what we perceive, attend to, what is stored in long-term memory, and what occupies our working memory at that moment. Making sense of ourselves or others involves integrating the information available to us, such as relevant external aspects of the person (such as gender, race, age, etc.) as well as inferences about internal aspects (such as motivations, desires, traits, intentions, etc.) (Freeman & Ambady, 2014). We use this personal information and features of the situation to understand, explain, and potentially, to predict how people will respond in the future.
Some examples of social cognition include
noticing that a professor has his pants on backwards,
construing or interpreting that professor’s aberrant dressing habits as reflective of shocking absentmindedness,
drawing a conclusion about the motivation of a potential date who just cancelled dinner plans with you, and
trying to understand why a woman would kill herself and her three children by driving her car into a lake.
Social cognition may seem simple, because so much of it is automatic and effortless. In reality, it is a complex process and one that, due to resource and time constraints, can tax our mental system. Note too, that, like social experience itself, social cognition is dynamic (Freeman & Ambady, 2014; Moskowitz, 2005). Our thoughts are in perpetual flux as our perception, attention, and memory rapidly move from one focus or stimulus to another. Moreover, the social world is itself continuously changing as people adjust to their environment, move across contexts, and alter their situations, and as our relationships with the social world are modified. Partly as a result of the limits to what we can perceive, attend to, think about, and remember, social cognition is not a perfectly accurate process and is susceptible to a number of errors and mistakes, some of which we’ll describe in the next section. Figure 3.1 illustrates the complexity of social cognition, its primary components, and some of the factors that influence it. Later in this text, we will focus on how social cognitive processes impact social perception (Chapter 5) and the evaluation of individuals in the context of stereotyping and prejudice (Chapter 10).
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