Social Cognition

How Individuals Construct Social Reality

Rainer Greifeneder, Herbert Bless, Klaus Fiedler

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138124424
• eBook ISBN: 9781317300151
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Social cognition is a key area of social psychology, which focuses on cognitive processes that are involved when individuals make sense of, and navigate in their social world. For instance, individuals need to understand what they perceive, they learn and recall information from memory, they form judgments and decisions, they communicate with others, and they regulate their behavior. While all of these topics are also key to other fields of psychological research, it's the social world—which is dynamic, complex, and often ambiguous—that creates particular demands.

This accessible book introduces the basic themes within social cognition and asks questions such as: How do individuals think and feel about themselves and others? How do they make sense of their social environment? How do they interact with others in their social world? The book is organized along an idealized sequence of social information processing that starts at perceiving and encoding, and moves on to learning, judging, and communicating. It covers not only processes internal to the individual, but also facets of the environment that constrain cognitive processing.

Throughout the book, student learning is fostered with examples, additional materials, and discussion questions. With its subdivision in ten chapters, the book is suitable both for self-study and as companion material for those teaching a semester-long course. This is the ideal comprehensive introduction to this thriving and captivating field of research for students of psychology.

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1 Introduction

What is social cognition research about?

Herbert Bless & Rainer Greifeneder

Making sense: constructing social reality

What determines how we think and feel about our social environment? How do we form impressions about other people? What determines our social behavior? For the most part, the social environment of individuals is very complex and dynamic, with no two situations ever entirely alike. But individuals need to understand each and every situation in order to interact successfully with others. And while making sense of social situations often seems easy and simple on the surface, in actuality it poses an enormous challenge. As a consequence, individuals need a highly differentiated system of tools to accomplish this essential task.

To get a sense of the magnitude of this challenge, think of some very simple examples. Imagine yourself at a lively party, similar to the one shown in Illustration 1.1. Some people are standing around in groups carrying on lively conversations, others are dancing. Some of the guests you have known for a long time, others you have never seen or met before. Chatting with some guests, you hear about a person who helped a friend cheat on an exam. Walking through the room you overhear another person exclaiming, “Any time I start a new project, I know I will succeed.” In a different corner of the room two friends of yours are engaged in a loud argument, but you have no idea what it is about. Finally, the next day, on your way to class, you see a new acquaintance from the party standing in a group of people, but she does not greet you.

What would your impressions be about the different persons in all these situations? How would you feel? What would you do if you had to interact with them? Answers to these questions would be quite easy if individuals always reacted to a particular objective situation exactly the same way. But as we know from our own behavior, this is not the case. Because individuals are highly flexible in their responses to social situations, the usual answer to such questions is: It depends. Among other things, it depends on how the perceiver interprets the specific behavior he or she witnessed. For example, if you assumed that your new acquaintance simply did not see you, you would feel quite differently than if you assumed that she saw you and intentionally avoided greeting you. Depending on your interpretation, you would presumably respond very differently to this person the next time you met her. The notion that the same objective input can be interpreted in very different ways is similarly reflected in the other examples. You might consider the person who helped a friend on the exam dishonest because he was cheating, or helpful because he was supporting his friend. Similarly, someone who claimed that she was successful on every new project could be perceived as haughty and arrogant—or as self-confident.

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Illustration 1.1 To interact successfully with others, individuals need to make sense of their social world

Source: Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock.com

As these examples illustrate, the same stimulus input may result in different interpretations of a given situation. Individuals construct their own subjective social reality based on their perception of the input. It is this construction of social reality, rather than the objective input, that determines how individuals think, feel, and behave in a complex social world. For example, if you believe that your new acquaintance intentionally avoided greeting you, it is this subjective interpretation that guides your behavior—even if objectively your acquaintance simply did not see you. If you have ever had an argument with a friend over some misunderstanding, you will remember how two persons experiencing the same situation may construct very different subjective realities, depending on their own perspectives. Sometimes the differences in interpretations are so glaring, it is hard to believe that the two individuals were reacting to the same situation.

The assumption that individuals construct their subjective social reality and that this construction provides the basis for social behavior leads us to the very heart of social cognition research: How is an objective situation translated into subjective reality? How do individuals construct social reality? What processes mediate between a specific input situation and behavior? Why does the same input often result in different interpretations? How is the interpretation influenced by prior social experiences and knowledge? Social cognition research is thus concerned with the study of social knowledge and the psychological processes that are involved when individuals construct their subjective reality. The manifold processes pertain to how we encode information, that is, how we give meaning to a situation, how we store information in memory and later retrieve it, and how we form judgments and make decisions.

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Different perspectives on the social thinker

The examples from the party situation illustrate that an objective input, for example, the exact wording of an utterance, requires interpretation in order to give it meaning. On the one hand, this interpretation is determined by the input itself. On the other hand, we know from everyday experiences that individuals display considerable flexibility in how they interpret a particular situation. Given this flexibility, it becomes important which general motives are working in the background of individuals’ interpretative processes. For example, sometimes we need to arrive very quickly at interpretations and decisions, that is, we operate under enormous time pressure. In these cases, it is crucial that cognitive processes require little time and little effort. At other times, speed may matter less, but it is critical that our interpretation is absolutely correct and accurate. Finally, there may be situations in which our interpretative processes are driven in particular by our general motive to perceive the world as consistent. These three aspects—speed, accuracy, consistency, and combinations thereof—are reflected in different approaches and perspectives of social cognition research.

Consistency seekers

One perspective maintains that individuals try to perceive the world just as they believe it is. In more general terms, individuals act as consistency seekers (S. T. Fiske & Taylor, 2017) who strive for consistency between their prior beliefs about the world and their interpretation of a specific new situation. Imagine someone who believes he is smart and has just learned that he did poorly in an exam. In order to create some consistency between his self-image as smart and the poor performance in the exam, he could, for example, discount the diagnostic value of the exam and argue that it tested unimportant peripheral abilities. This interpretation allows him to maintain his prior belief. Research has shown that the need for consistency is a major influence on the way individuals construct social reality. This need is incorporated into many theoretical approaches, most prominently in Festinger’s (1957) dissonance theory (see also Vogel & Wänke, 2016). The basic assumption in Festinger’s theory (as in many other consistency theories, see Abelson et al., 1968) is that inconsistencies in social thinking can create a negative, aversive feeling. For instance, the two cognitions “I am a smart person” and “I failed an important exam” are inconsistent and should therefore create an aversive state. This aversive state motivates individuals to reduce the inconsistency, for example, by changing one element of it (“After all, the exam wasn’t really that important”), or by adding additional elements (“I would have performed better had I not been partying all night before the exam”). The general notion that individuals’ processing of information is guided by their goal to obtain a particular outcome is reflected in various phenomena. For example, given that most individuals like to hold positive evaluations about themselves, their judgments often reflect their motivation to perceive the world as consistent with this positive self-view. Therefore, it is not surprising that individuals have been found to be unrealistically optimistic about their future (Shepperd, Waters, Weinstein, & Klein, 2015), and that they often hold positive illusions about themselves and their situation (Taylor & Brown, 1988). For a simple demonstration, one might ask all students in a classroom to take a look around and then estimate their relative position with respect to intelligence, physical attractiveness, or driving ability. Usually, significantly more than 50% of the students claim to be smarter, better looking, and better drivers than the average student in the classroom—which, at least at first glance, seems to contradict normative expectations that, by definition, 50% of the students should rank themselves below average. Such examples illustrate that our social thinking is in part influenced by our motivation to be consistent (see Dunning, 2015; Kunda, 1990, for conceptualizations along this line).

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Fortunately, or unfortunately, the social world is not always consistent with our expectations and our wishes. Individuals who strive only for consistency and therefore, for instance, alter inconsistent elements (e.g., “After all, the exam wasn’t really that important”) are prone to inaccurate constructions of social reality. To act successfully in a complex social world, however, accurate perceptions of the world are needed, and inaccurate constructions may turn out to be quite maladaptive (Festinger, 1954).

Naive scientists

The need to perceive the world accurately is captured in a second perspective on the social thinker. This perspective holds that individuals gather all relevant information unselectively and construct social reality in an unbiased manner. It maintains that the interpretation of the world is barely influenced by any form of wishful thinking, and conclusions are drawn in an almost logical, scientific manner. This perspective sees the human thinker as a naive or lay scientist, and it is articulated especially in attribution theories. Attribution theories address how people explain behavior and events (e.g., Jones & Davis, 1965; H. H. Kelley, 1987; H. H. Kelley & Michela, 1980). For example, to find an explanation for why you failed the exam, you might consider other students’ performance in this exam, your performance in other exams, and particular situational circumstances that might have caused the failure. The naive scientist perspective holds that we elaborate on the available information and process it in an unbiased manner in order to find out the cause of an event.

Illustration 1.2 In many situations, individuals are overwhelmed with information. Unable to perceive and use all information, they have to use strategies that can simplify and shortcut information processing

Source: Monotoomono/Shutterstock.com

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Cognitive misers

Research has shown that individuals can act like lay scientists under certain conditions. In many situations, however, individuals are not able or motivated to engage in systematic, elaborative thinking. Indeed, in daily life individuals often need to respond within a reasonable period of time or have to make their judgments very quickly. Moreover, even simple social interactions contain so much information to be processed that individuals are not always willing or able to act as a naive scientist. Instead, individuals have developed mental shortcuts that allow them to simplify their processing. This notion is captured in a third perspective, that of the social thinker as cognitive miser (S. T. Fiske & Taylor, 2017). It maintains that individuals, especially when they are under time pressure or confronted with an unusually complex situation, strive to simplify the cognitive processes (for an example, see Illustration 1.2). Like the naive scientist, the cognitive miser is aiming for high accuracy—but now under the constraint of strategies that are faster and require less effort. For example, when watching the numerous advertising spots on television, we are unlikely to process the provided information extensively. Instead, we may often rely on simplifications (e.g., “If this popular celebrity is in favor of the product, it must be good”). Although cognitive misers may sometimes come up with conclusions different from those posited by a lay scientist perspective that is based on a purely logical assessment of the information at hand, the evolved mental shortcuts often serve very well in everyday life. As we shall see, individuals have quite a number of potential shortcuts in their mental storehouse that can be applied to the numerous tasks they are faced with.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Social Cognition
• Praise
• Title
• Copyright
• Chapter Overview
• Detailed Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: What is Social Cognition Research About?
• 2 General Framework of Social Cognitive Processing
• 3 Perceiving and Encoding
• 4 Storing and Retrieving Information
• 5 Using Information: Controlled and Automatic Processing of Information
• 6 Using Information: Judgmental Shortcuts
• 7 The Interplay of Cognition and Feelings: Mood States
• 8 The Interplay of Cognition and Feelings: Fluency
• 9 Communicating Information
• 10 How the Environment Constrains Social Cognitive Processing
• Glossary
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index