Social Thinkers

Models of the Social Thinker 1

Nanyang Technological University

HP3402 Social CognitionAssignment 2

Chun Win Ee U1530948L

Low Yi Fong Nethania Ann U1530470H

Sandra Ng Mei Wen U1530817G

Models of the Social Thinker 2

Introduction

Since its inception as a field, advances in Social Cognition has seen changes in the role of cognitive processes in the social thinker. These shifts may be encapsulated in different models of the social thinker, each serving as a metaphor capturing how cognition is construed in that epoch of research, as well as its corresponding theoretical assumptions and methodological focus. This paper aims to elucidate the theoretical and methodological shifts in the following models of social thinker: Cognitive Miser, Motivated Tactician and Activated Actor.

The Cognitive Miser

Theoretical Underpinnings

The Cognitive Miser model of social thinker posits that that humans are motivated to solve problems efficiently to conserve limited cognitive resources. Consequently, instead of being optimisers that approach interpersonal judgements thoroughly, thoughtfully and rationally to make the best possible decisions, people are instead satisficers who settle for adequacy, and thus may be susceptible to irrational biases in social inferencing. With efficiency as the key consideration in decision making, the cognitive miser uses mental shortcuts in appraising decision problems. Three lines of research within the Cognitive Miser model are discussed: Heuristics, Decision Frames and the Correspondence Bias.

Heuristics. Heuristics are mental shortcuts that decrease complexity in making judgements under uncertainty. In their seminal paper, Tversky and Kahneman (1974) introduced 3 commonly used heuristics: representativeness, availability, and anchoring and adjustment. The representativeness heuristic is the appraisal of probability that object A is a member of class B, by the extent to which A resembles B. New instances that resemble previously learned instances of a category are considered to be more likely to be from that category. The availability heuristic is the assessment of frequency of the probability of an event by the effortlessness of instances coming to mind. Instances that come more easily to mind are automatically considered to be more influential. The anchoring and adjustment heuristic is an estimation of value by starting from an initial value (‘anchoring’) that is adjusted to yield the subsequent value (‘adjustment’). Initial reference values inordinately affect one’s judgements, even if they may be irrelevant to the estimation.

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Decision Frames. A given decision problem may be framed in different ways and all else equal, the framing of a problem may affect decision making. A prominent theory describing how framing affects decision making is Prospect Theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979), which posits that decision making concerning risk involves two components: the frame of reference and subjective value function. The frame of reference suggests that individuals tend to be risk averse in a ‘gain frame’ and risk-seeking in a ‘loss frame’ (e.g. Tversky & Kahneman, 1981). The subjective value function describes how people are loss averse, subjectively feeling losses more than gains given the same magnitude of change in objective values.

Correspondence Bias. In the domain of making social judgements, people also deviate from optimality, perusing shortcuts that result in biases. The Correspondence Bias describes the tendency to overestimate dispositional influences in attributing causes of behaviour, and underestimating situational influences (e.g. Jones & Harris, 1967; Ross, Amabile & Steinmetz, 1977).

Methods and underlying assumptions

In line with theoretical assumptions that illustrate how people fall short of optimal decision making and are subject to irrational biases, methods under the Cognitive Miser model generally aim to compare descriptive models that describe how people actually behave against normative models that describe how people should ideally behave to reveal the ways in which people fall short. To do so, methods generally involve the use of problem scenarios and experimental paradigms.

Problem Scenarios. To reveal irrational biases in decision making, subjects are given problem scenarios that they have to evaluate and make judgements (e.g. Tversky & Kahneman, 1974; 1979; 1981). For instance, scenarios investigating heuristics have answers that normative models should choose, based on the given details. However, people often make choices that deviate, seemingly based on details that should be irrelevant. This discrepancy reveals the employment of heuristics. In a similar vein, research involving decision frames expose participants to same sets of decision problems, changing only the way they are framed. Systematic differences in judgements made by participants that read the different versions of the same problem reveal how framing affects decision making.

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Experimental Paradigms. Two prominent experimental paradigms have been used to investigate the correspondence bias: Jones & Harris’ (1967) attitude attribution paradigm, and Ross, Amabile & Steinmetz’s (1977) quiz show paradigm. In the former, subjects read an essay that was either Pro- or Anti-Castro, and told either that participants could choose their position, or had no choice in being assigned the topic. Participants’ evaluations of the author’s actual attitudes were affected by the essay position even when they knew that authors were assigned the topic, demonstrating the correspondence bias. In the quiz show paradigm, participants demonstrated the bias when they were contestants answering questions generated by their counterparts, in rating them higher in general knowledge and themselves lower, despite knowing from previous experience the advantage that the questioner holds.

The Motivated Tactician

Theoretical Underpinnings: A shift from Cognitive Miser

In contrast to the Cognitive Miser where the sole consideration of the social thinker is merely to conserve cognitive resources resulting in the indiscriminate use of mental shortcuts, the Motivated Tactician possesses a variety of cognitive strategies, selecting which to use in accordance with the situation and his goals, motives and needs (Operario & Fiske, 1999). Information and decision-making processes are driven or inhibited by one’s motivation and needs; needs of greater importance induce more effort and deliberation in processing. Dual process theories are central to this model of social thinker, distinguishing between an automatic, efficient process, and a more deliberate, effortful one. Such models feature in the domains of attribution, persuasion, stereotypes and control of prejudice.

Attribution. Gilbert, Pelham & Krull (1988) provide a stage-based model of attribution that posits that categorising behaviours and characterising them into dispositional terms are automatic processes, while correcting for situational factors is a controlled process that is contingent on the perceiver’s motivation and ability to do so.

Persuasion. Two prominent models of persuasion are the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM; Cacioppo & Petty, 1984) and the Heuristic Systematic Model (HSM; Chaiken, 1980). The ELM posits that there are two paths to persuasion: a central route that entails indepth and thoughtful analysis of the central message and the strength of its arguments, and a peripheral route that does not, instead relying on peripheral factors. The route chosen is

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contingent on one’s motivation and ability to pay attention; one is more likely to employ the central route when they are motivated and able to do so, and the peripheral route when they are not. In contrast, the HSM proposes two different processes: systematic processing, which employs deliberate processing of message content, and heuristic processing, which employs the use of simple rules and heuristics. Attitudinal change is contingent on acceptance of message argument and conclusions, respectively. While motivation and ability determine which process is engaged, both are able to co-occur and exert influence on judgement.

Stereotypes and Control of Prejudice. Payne (2001) demonstrated the racial bias in perceiving weapons is influenced by two processes; racial primes affect perceptions of weapons through automatic processing without implicating controlled processing, while instituting response deadlines stifled the ability to control responses, without affecting the automatic bias.

Methods and Underlying Assumptions

In line with the theoretical shift, a methodological shift may also be observed between the Cognitive Miser and Motivated Tactician models. While the methodological focus of the former was to reveal how people exhibit irrational biases and fell short of normative standards, the focus of the latter was on distinguishing between automatic and controlled processes in social inferencing. The following section will discuss a few methods that have been used to identify and discriminate between dual processes: disrupting the controlled process and process dissociation.

Disrupting the Controlled Process. While the automatic process may be relatively spontaneous and effortless, the controlled process is assumed to be effortful and requires the use of cognitive resources. Thus, by using up the requisite cognitive resources, individuals fail to engage the controlled process, thereby disrupting it and leaving only the effects of automatic processing. Following this line of reasoning, Gilbert, Pelham & Krull (1988) demonstrated that inducing cognitive busyness disrupts the controlled process of correcting for situational constraints in attribution, while the relatively automatic process of characterisation was left unaffected.

Process Dissociation. The Process Dissociation Procedure (PDP; Jacoby, 1991)disentangles the influence of automatic and controlled processes on responses by comparing

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patterns of errors in responding when both automatic and controlled responses are in the same direction, versus when they are in opposition. For instance, Payne (2001) used the PDP to determine that the presentation of Black faces only influenced automatic estimates and not controlled estimates, while the addition of response deadlines served to affect controlled estimates and not automatic estimates, thereby demonstrating a double dissociation of the influence of automatic and controlled responses on implicit prejudice.

The Activated Actor

Theoretical Underpinnings: From Cognitive Miser to Motivated Tactician to Activated Actor

While the Cognitive Miser emphasised the usage of mental shortcuts to conserve cognitive resources, and the Motivated Tactician emphasised how motivational and situational influences may influence which cognitive strategies are employed in processing social information, the Activated Actor brings into prominence the role of the social environment in provoking goals and shaping responses - goal-based actions are no longer seen as fully deliberate, but situationally activated.

Thus, central idea behind the Activated Actor model of Social Thinker is that social environment contains cues that prime goals that may not reach conscious awareness but nonetheless affects the way we respond to the world. Under the activated actor model, some of the responses that have been investigated are stereotypes, prejudice and social tuning which will be briefly touched upon in the following sections.

Stereotypes. The Stereotype Content Model (SCM; Fiske et al., 2002) is a general model of stereotyping that is based on the major proposition that structural relations between groups in society affect the actor’s perceptions of warmth and competence – outgroups that are not in competition with the ingroup are perceived as relatively warm, while outgroups that are high in status are perceived as competent. Thus in essence, social structures and relations in the form of status and competition serve to activate trait inferences, which in turn influence interpersonal and emotional responses (North & Fiske, 2012).

Prejudice. The presence of racial cues may influence the perceptual identification ofweapons (Payne, 2001). Participants in a racial priming paradigm are faster to identifyweapons when primed with a black face as opposed to a white face, and are also less accurate

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in doing so under time constraints. The presentation of black racial cues result in thespontaneous activation of automatic responses.

Social Tuning. Social tuning is the spontaneous adjustment (“tuning”) of an individual’s attitudes toward the apparent attitudes of persons that they interact with (Hardin & Conley, 2001). When individuals interact with someone that they possess a high affiliative motive for, they demonstrate a contextual change in their automatic attitudinal responses to be in line with that of their partners’ apparent attitudes (Huntsinger et al., 2016). Studies investigating the saying-is-believing paradigm also demonstrate that an audience’s apparent attitudes and communication success feedback also influence memory of target persons (e.g. Echterhoff, Higgins & Groll, 2005).

Methods and Underlying assumptions

While methods for the Activated Actor model bear resemblance to those from the Motivated Tactician in continuing to discriminate between automatic and controlled processes (e.g. research on affiliative social tuning; Huntsinger et al., 2016), an incremental evolution would be the measurement of fast, automatic, implicit associations outside of volitional control.

Consequently, in line with theoretical underpinnings of the Activated Actor that emphasises how cues in the social environment automatically activate responses outside of conscious awareness that influence behaviour, a key focus of the methods involve assessing implicit associations between concepts and implicit attitudes. This section will elaborate on the Implicit Association Test (IAT) for the former and the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) for the latter.

IAT. The IAT (Greenwald, McGhee & Schwartz, 1998) has been used to measure implicit attitudes, identity and stereotypes by assessing the strength of associations between concepts. The IAT is a response competition task based upon the assumption that pairing concepts that are associated through experience should be easier; consequently, comparing the speed to respond to another type of pairing may reveal the relative strength of associations of the concepts paired. IAT is especially well suited to measure stereotypes and attitudes, especially when self-presentation may affect explicit measures (e.g. in the case of prejudice, which is commonly seen as socially unacceptable.

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AMP. The AMP (Payne et al, 2005) measures implicit attitudes through misattributions that individuals make about their own affective reactions. People are first tasked to make evaluative judgements in an ambiguous situation, where they are first exposed to an attitude object that serves as a prime, and following which they are to evaluate a target that is ambiguous in how it should be evaluated. Individuals demonstrate a systematic bias in how they evaluate the target due to the affective misattribution from the attitude object. Consequently, the evaluations serve as the projection of implicit attitudes toward the object on the target. The systematic bias in evaluations persist despite attempts to correct it, thus making it ideal for situations where people are motivated to control their attitudes.

Conclusion

As research in Social Cognition advances, the understanding of the role that cognition plays in the social thinker evolves. Models of social thinker serve as metaphors that capture this shift in understanding; from the energy-saving and satisficing Cognitive Miser, to the Motivated Tactician that uses different strategies based on his motivation and ability, and finally to the Activated Actor that has situationally evoked responses. Such metaphors crystallise an evolving perspective of the social thinker, and provide coherence to research epochs in Social Cognition.

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