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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 and nonsocial cognition is that the object of our thoughts—people—are also social thinkers. Consequently, while we are thinking about them, they are thinking about us (Fiske & Taylor, 1991, 2013; Moskowitz, 2005). Since we are aware of their thinking, we begin thinking about their thinking, and so on. For instance, say you are strolling along the sidewalk and eye a stranger walking toward you. As you are looking at him, he glances at you. You can’t help but wonder: Does he notice my wrinkled shirt? My bad hair? Your thoughts are affected by what you think his thoughts are, and his thoughts are in turn influenced by his judgments about you. In this way, our beliefs about others’ perceptions of us affect our beliefs and perceptions about ourselves. Cooley (1902) called this phenomenon the looking-glass self, by which he meant that we see ourselves in other people because they are reflections of ourselves; we imagine how others imagine us, and this in turn affects how we think about ourselves.
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,
