Problem, 45
Neocortex Ratio, 48
Reductivism, 66
Social Neuroscience, 47
Review key terms with eFlashcards. edge.sagepub.com/barrett
Think Further!
Why is the brain considered to be inherently social?
Why is studying the brain crucial to understanding the foundations of social behavior?
If you could choose one structure of the brain to research in depth and learn more about its role in social behavior, which would it be and why?
In your opinion, which of the methods of social neuroscience represents the most significant advance in understanding the social brain?
If the fMRI were shown to be a valid and reliable way to detect deception, do you think it would be ethical to use it this way? Why or why not?
What is brain plasticity and why is this important for understanding the relationships among genes, evolution, and culture?
Suggested Readings
Baer, J., Kaufman, J. C., & Baumeister, R. F. (2008). Are we free? Psychology and free will. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Cacioppo, J. T., & Berntson, G. G. (2005). Social neuroscience: Key readings. New York, NY: Psychology Press.
Ito, T. A., Thompson, E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2004). Tracking the timecourse of social perception: The effects of racial cues on event-related brain potentials. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 1267–1280.
Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (2005). Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Vanman, E. J., Saltz, J. L., Nathan, L. R., & Warren, J. A. (2004). Racial discrimination by low-prejudiced Whites facial movements as implicit measures of attitudes related to behavior. Psychological Science, 15, 711–714.
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Chapter 3 Social Cognition
Figure skating pairs silver medal winners Jamie Sale and David Pelletier of Canada, left, look toward Russians figure skating pairs and gold medal winners Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze during and awards ceremony at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Monday, February 11, 2002. Canadian outrage forced figure skating’s ruling body to launch an inquiry into judging at the Olympics following Russia’s controversial victory over the Canadians in the event.
AP Photo/Doug Mills.
Learning Objectives
3.1 Identify the five ways in which social cognition is different from nonsocial cognition and explain why people cannot NOT believe whatever they hear.
3.2 Define and compare and contrast the two types of processing; identify the four criteria for automaticity and list the three types of automatic processes; describe priming and spreading activation and illustrate them with an example.
3.3 Explain heuristics and describe availability, representativeness, base 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.
