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).
As you know, one of our four principles of social psychology is that social behavior is purposive or goal driven. What, then, are its goals? For one thing, as Darwin has taught us, the overarching goals of any living organism are its survival and reproduction. However, since all normal human activity is ultimately intended to continue our gene pool, our discussion of the purposes of social behavior will generally focus on more immediate goals that themselves help to ensure survival and reproduction.
Humans need to successfully navigate the physical and social worlds in order to attain the means to survive and reproduce. Such navigation requires the capacity to accurately assess the opportunities and risks that we may encounter. However, although it is important, striving to be accurate comes with a price: the expending of our cognitive resources. Deep, careful processing designed to maximize accuracy requires more mental energy than does shallow, rapid processing (Kunimi & Kojima, 2014; Petty, Cacioppo, Strathman, & Priester, 2005). Given that our mental resources are limited (Mandler, 2013), we must conserve them so that they are available for the tasks where they are needed most. Hence social cognition has the two interrelated goals of accuracy and the conservation of mental resources, and there is often a trade-off between these two goals (Andersen, Moskowitz, Blair, & Nosek, 2007). That is, accurate processing tends to be resource-intensive, whereas rapid processing requires fewer resources and may be less accurate (Andersen et al., 2007). We only want to devote as much mental energy as is necessary to be as accurate as we need to be, but no more (Chaiken, Liberman, & Eagly, 1989). For instance, the amount of mental energy you decide to allocate to studying for your next social psychology exam will partially depend on the extent to which being accurate (getting a good grade) or conserving cognitive resources (to spend on other activities) is important to you (Petersen, Skov, Serritzlew, & Ramsøy, 2013).
In addition to the goals of accurate processing and conserving cognitive resources, social cognition serves the goal of self-enhancement or of helping a person maintain a positive self-image (Andersen et al., 2007; Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Kruglanski, 1989). People want to feel good about themselves and consequently may interpret information in ways that can enhance their self-image. For example, people often blame other people or events for their own failures, thereby preserving a positive view of the self. This third goal can affect how we search for and process information, as we’ll see later in this chapter and again in Chapter 4. The next section introduces one fascinating feature of our mental systems: that we must believe information before we can even
