Social Psych Quiz 1: Ch. 3

When Do We Categorise?

1. Temporal primacy we categorise on the basis of the features we encounter first 2. Perceptual salience when difference becomes salient 3. Chronic accessibility categorisation in terms of some categories - e.g. race, gender - is so common that it can become automatized

Categorisation and prejudice

Gaertner and McLaughlin (1983) found that white participants were faster to name positive words after they had seen the racial category 'white' rather than 'black' People recall more positive than negative information about someone in their own group, but more negative than positive information about someone in another group (Howard & Rothbart, 1980)

Consequences of Categorisation

Heightened accessibility of stereotype consistent information and selective encoding of subsequently acquired target information (Cohen, 1981)

Q9: The tendency to be biased towards the starting value in making quantitative judgments is known as:

the anchoring heuristic

Q4:The tendency to exaggerate how common one's own opinions are in the general population is known as the:

the false-consensus effect

false consensus effect

the tendency to exaggerate how common ones own opinions are in the general population

Q6: When cognitively overloaded, individuals are more likely to:

use heuristics

Ross, Greene and House (1977)

'Would you walk around campus for thirty minutes wearing a large sandwich board saying EAT AT JOE'S!'? Estimate the number of students who would make the same choice as them Whatever choice the participant made, they estimated that majority of other people would make the same choice as them explanation: The availability heuristic provides an explanation for the false consensus effect Our own self-beliefs are easily recalled from memory making them most accessible (available) when we judge whether others agree with us

dual process theories

-Attempt to provide an integrative framework of impression formation processes 1. Brewer's (1988) dual process theory 2. Fiske and Neuberg's (1990) continuum model -Both models consider impression formation to comprise two distinct processes: categorisation and individuation

Dual Process Theory (Brewer, 1988)

-Either a heuristic (category) vs systematic (individuated) approach is used when forming impressions of others -Distinction maps directly on to the cognitive miser vs naïve scientist approaches

Haminton and Gifford (1976)

-Participants read information about people from group A (majority) or group B (minority) -Twice as much information about group A than group B, but same proportion of positive and negative information was the same -Asked to attribute behaviours to the groups -Despite there being no actual correlation between group membership and the proportion of positive or negative information provided, more undesirable behaviour were attributed to group B than group A

Continuum Model (Fiske & Newberg, 1990)

-Propose a continuum where one extremity is category-based (heuristic) processing and the other is attribute-based (systematic) processing -On this continuum people can be perceived as a representative of a group, or as an individual separate from any category membership People begin by trying to fit the target person into a category, but if there is not a good fit, will shift towards an individuated mode of perception This switch is known as decategorisation Decategorisation may represent a means of countering the negative implications of categorisation

category content: Why do we come to perceive some characteristics as typical of certain categories?

-Social learning and exposure -Illusory correlation

Why Do We Categorise?

-The ultimate heuristic -Saves us time and cognitive processing (Fiske & Taylor, 1991), frees up cognitive resources for other tasks (Macrae, Milne, & Bodenhausen, 1994) -Categorisation provides meaning (Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987) -Reduces uncertainty (Hogg, 2000) -Provides prescriptive norms for understand ourselves in relation to others (Hogg, 2002)

the cognitive miser

-processing resources are valuable so we engage in timesaving mental shortcuts when trying to understand the social world (Fiske & Taylor, 1991) -Vs Heider's Naïve Scientist ...

Conditions Promoting Heuristic Use (Macrae, Hewstone, & Griffifths, 1993)

1) Time constraints 2) Cognitive overload 3) Low importance 4) Little information regarding issue

Schwarz and Colleagues (1991)

Asked participants to recall 12 or 6 examples of their own assertive and unassertive behaviour Then asked to rate their own assertiveness -Participants who recalled 6 examples of their assertive (or unassertive) behaviour subsequently rated themselves as more assertive (or unassertive) than those who had recalled 12 examples -People attend to the difficulty of retrieving instances of certain behaviours rather than just the content

Shared Distinctiveness

Because both the minority group characteristics and negative characteristics were relatively infrequent; both were distinctive and stood out Consistent with the use of the representativeness heuristic; the low number of negative behaviours came to be seen as representative of the smaller group

classical view

Bruner, Goodnow, & Austin (1956) - category membership determined via defined features i.e., an animal with three body divisions, six legs, an external skeleton, and a rapid reproductive system = INSECT if one or more of these attributes is missing, the animal is something else BUT ... many categories have uncertain or 'fuzzy' boundaries (Rosch, 1978) and do not fit in with a strict classification system e.g., a German shepherd dog is more 'dog-like' than a Chihuahua despite having the same 'dog' attributes Not all-or-nothing categorization, but members are more or less typical of a category (Labov, 1973) Prototypes are the most representative members of a category (Barsalou, 1991) categorization of less typical members may be slower/errorful because they are less available

category stucture

Categories vary not only in terms of content but also structure - in terms of intra-category variability: heterogeneous categories - perceived to be made up of many sorts of people homogenous categories - perceived to be made up of only a few types of people who are all very similar to each other

The Motivated Tactician

People are flexible social thinkers who choose between multiple cognitive strategies (i.e., speed/ease vs accuracy/logic) based on their current goals, motives, and needs (Kruglanski, 1996) There are a number of factors that determine whether we use these heuristic or systematic strategies of social inference, whether we act like naïve scientists or cognitive misers ...

Q1: Assuming that someone wearing a white coat and stethoscope is a doctor is an example of which heuristic?

Representativeness heuristic

Q2: The base rate fallacy is an error resulting from the use of which heuristic?

Representativeness heuristic

Q10: Kruglanksi (1996) suggested that people are motivated tacticians and are strategic in their allocation of cognitive resources. As such, they can decide to be a cognitive miser or a naïve scientist depending on a number of factors. Which of the following is not one of these factors?

Social desirability

plous

Survey during the Cold War Asked either: is there a greater than 1% chance of a nuclear war occurring soon? Or: is there less than a 90% chance of a nuclear war occurring soon? Participants who received the 1% question anchor estimated a 10% chance of nuclear war, while those who received the 90% anchor estimated a 25% chance

Q3: Schwarz and colleagues (1991) asked participants to recall 12 or 6 examples of when they had been either assertive or unassertive. It was found that participants who recalled 6 examples of their own assertive behaviour subsequently rated themselves as more assertive than people who had recalled 12 examples of their own assertive behaviour. Such results demonstrate the use of which heuristic?

The availability heuristic

Illusory correlation

The belief that two variables are associated with one another when in fact there is little or no actual association (Haminton & Gifford, 1976) Process by which specifically negative stereotypes can come to be associated with minority groups

Outgroup Homogeneity Effect

The general tendency to perceive outgroup members to be more homogeneous than ingroup members

Park & Rothbart (1982)

The outgroup homogeneity effect is also apparent in how people structure their memory People remember more about someone they encounter from their own group than another group -It is suggested the effect may exist because we are more familiar with people within our category (Linville et al., 1989) -However: The OHE is observed for groups people have equal exposure to (e.g. gender; Crisp & Hewstone, 2001) The OHE is observed even for artificial groups created in the laboratory where there is no prior contact (Wilder, 1984

Social Categorisation

The process of understanding what something is by knowing what other things it is equivalent to, and what other things it is different from (McGarty, 1999: 1)

The Availability Heuristic

The tendency to judge the frequency or probability of an event in terms of how easy it is to think of examples of that event (Tversky & Kahneman (1973) -Related to the concept of accessibility

Q7: Social category boundaries are best described as:

fuzzy

The Representativeness Heuristic

judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes; may lead us to ignore other relevant information

heuristics

mental shortcuts -Two most commonly used heuristics = representativeness and availability

Q8: A prototype refers to the _________________ of a category.

most representative member

Q5: The tendency to be biased towards the starting value in making quantitative judgments is known as:

the anchoring heuristic

base rate fallacy

representativeness heuristic is prone to error -a tendency to ignore statistical information in favour of representativeness information

anchoring heuristic

tendency to be biased towards the starting value or anchor in making quantitative judgements (Wyer, 1976)