User:Lizbennett/SOCIAL THINKING

Cognitive processes
Social thinking is about using your cognitive powers of thinking and perceiving when developing the self’s attitudes and behaviours. The human brain is complex and around the size of a large grapefruit weighing about 3 lbs or 1.5 kgs. It has two main systems: the automatic system - which makes quick, fairly accurate judgements and decisions; and the conscious system which works more slowly and thoroughly but can make more precise judgements and decisions. As humans have evolved they have adjusted their thinking patterns and introduced discriminatory behaviour and shortcuts to conserve the time spent on thinking. This is known as being a cognitive miser describes the individual’s reluctance to do much extra thinking. Connected to this, is our ability to use shortcuts or heuristics especially where we are already preoccupied and to counteract this individuals have learned automatic thinking behaviours.

Three main types of goals guide how people think – to find the right answer to the problem or question, to confirm the desired answer to a problem and to read the good answer of decision quickly. This introduces the question of automatic and controlled thinking – is thought automatic or is it controlled? The four elements that distinguish automatic from controlled thinking are intention, control, effort and efficiency. Automatic thinking is not guided by intention, are not subject to deliberate control, do not involve effort and are highly efficient. It involves very little effort because it involves knowledge structures – organised packets of information that are stored in memory, usually known as schemas or scripts. These are developed from early childhood through experience and guide the way we process information.

Schemas and scripts influence the way individuals perceive, interpret, judge and respond to events. Priming - the planting or activating of an idea stimulates further processing of a schema – is often used as a technique to trigger automatic processes and behaviours. Framing of messages is also used as a technique to influence – positively and negatively. Thought suppression uses two processes. One an automatic process that keeps a lookout for a reminder of the unwanted thought and the second is a controlled process that redirects attention away from the unpleasant thought. When the controlled process is relaxed the automatic process still watches for cues and may flood the mind with the unwanted thoughts.

Attributions give meaning to why individuals demonstrate different attitudes and behaviour. Attributions are the causal explanations individuals give for their own and others’ behaviours and for events in general. Heider (1958) put forward an explanation that explanations fall into two major categories: (a) internal factors such as ability, attitudes, personality, mood and effort and : (b) external factors such as task, other people or luck. Weiner (1971) proposed a two dimensional theory of attributions for success and failure. The first was internal versus external and the second was stable versus unstable. The four possible combinations of internal-external and stable-unstable yield the four main types of attributions that people make when they see themselves or someone else perform. Internal, stable attributions involve ability and this is very important because it involves permanent aspects of the self with people motivated to conclude that they have high ability. Internal, unstable attributions involve effort and this is unstable because it could change. Interestingly collectivist cultures emphasise effort whereas individualistic cultures emphasise ability. External, stable attributions point to task difficulty – success indicates task was easy, failure indicates it was hard. External unstable attributions involve luck – which indicates that there is very little credit or blame due to the person.

Self serving bias the tendency to take credit for success but deny blame for failure occurs because individuals want to interpret events that make them feel good. That means, they can discount their failures and maximise their successes. This links with the concept that individuals learn to think in ways that will help them get along better with others and thus accepted by others. Individuals also look and notice information that confirms their beliefs and discounts or ignores information that disconfirms their beliefs. This is known as the confirmation bias. Individuals love observing others and at times use their biases to make assumptions. The actor/observer bias is the tendency for actors to make external attributions and observers make internal attributions, put simply the actors attribute their behaviour to the situation and the observers attribute the actor’s behaviour to the actor. Within this is fundamental attribution error which is the tendency for observers to attribute other people’s behaviour to internal or dispositional causes and to downplay situational causes. The explanation for this is that behaviour is more noticeable that situation factors, individuals assign insufficient weight to the situation, the use of cognitive miser’s concept and language is richer in trait like terms than in situational terms.

Attribution uses the covariation principle which indicates that for something to be the cause of behaviour it must be present when the behaviour occurs and absent when the behaviour does not occur. Kelley proposes the attribution cube theory that people use three types of covariation information – consensus – whether other people would do the same thing in the same situation; consistency – whether the person typically behaves this way in this situation and distinctiveness – whether the person would behave differently in a different situation. Heuristics are used during the cognitive process to make judgements and inferences about the uncertain outcomes including the likelihood and frequency of an event. The four most common heuristics used are representative, availability, simulation, anchoring and adjustment.

As the information age has progressed, information is more freely and readily available. One of the issues raised is information overload or having too much information to comprehend or integrate to make a decision or remain informed. Common cognitive errors by individuals include the following heuristics – confirmation bias, conjunction fallacy, illusory correlation, base rate fallacy, gamblers fallacy, false consensus effect, false uniqueness effect, and statistical regression, illusion of control, magical thinking and counterfactual thinking. The following strategies are used to reduce cognitive errors – debiasing by providing information to improve decision-making, encouraging individuals to rely less on memory, to use explicit decision rules, to search for disconfirmatory information and to use meta-cognition or reflective approach to examine and reflect on the thinking process.

Attitudes, beliefs and consistency
Attitudes exist in substantial part to help guide behaviour. They are ideas that often determine how people will act. They differ from beliefs which are pieces of information about something, facts or opinions. Attitudes are for choosing, and beliefs are for explaining. Beliefs and attitudes both serve interpersonal functions. People have attitudes so they can differentiate between what they like and what they don’t like. They help us to adjust to new situations, seek out things that reward us and avoid those things that punish us. Attitudes influence what individuals do and won’t do. Individuals often have different evaluation of the same attitudes which can be unrelated and can serve different functions. Attitudes can be private not shared with others and at times individuals may not be aware of all of their own attitudes. Having an attitude often increases the speed, ease and quality of decision making. A meta-analysis of 88 studies found that attitudes are certain, stable, consistent, accessible, and based on direct experience are especially effective in predicting behaviour. Different explanations are given to how our attitudes are formed. Mere exposure effect, classical conditioning, operant condition and social learning all help form our attitudes. As individuals reflect on their attitudes they can become more extreme or adopt them more strongly. Studies have should that individuals are more accepting of evidence represented by in group members than by out- group members.

Belief and doubt are separate from understanding, but believing immediately automatically accompanies understanding. When given information, the automatic system automatically believes the information it is given. The conscious system can override this belief by deciding that it is false. Belief perseverance is the finding that once beliefs form, they are resistant to change, even if the information on which they are based is discredited. To validate and understand things correctly, individuals should cultivate the habit of trying out the opposite theory to whatever theory encountered. Assumptive worlds are the view that individuals live in social worlds based on certain beliefs or assumptions about reality. When problems or trauma occur individuals usually cope with the trauma and then go back to functioning normally. Coping can take many forms from self blame or blaming others and usually is part of a grieving process. Broadly, cognitive coping is the idea that beliefs play a central role in helping people cope with and recover from misfortunes. Within this, there are different elements, like downward comparison where individuals compare themselves to other individuals who are worse off. Other beliefs in cognitive coping relate to self esteem and control, the belief that all things have some useful or higher purpose. Beliefs help individuals cope with trauma or make the trauma seem compatible or even consistent with their beliefs. Religious beliefs appeals to some individuals who look to it to explain grand or small issues, to provide social support, a sense of meaning, purpose and direction for one’s life and an environment that fosters the development of virtues such as honesty or integrity. Religious beliefs can help people cope with stress and traumatic events. Individuals with irrational beliefs are usually more anxious, cope less well with terminal illnesses, become depressed, may be paralysed when needed to perform important behaviours and have lower levels of self esteem.

Consistency theories have three elements – specify the conditions required for consistency and inconsistency of cognitions; assume inconsistency is unpleasant and therefore motivates people to restore consistency; and specify the conditions required needed to restore consistency. In general people choose the path of least resistance to restore consistency. Heider’s balance theory proposes the idea that relationships among one person, the other person and an attitude object may be either balanced or unbalanced. These relationships can either involve attitudes or evaluations (sentiment) or belongingness (unit). Cognitive dissonance theory proposes that inconsistencies produce psychological discomfort, leading people to rationalise their behaviour or change their attitudes. Within this theory is effort justification or the finding that when people suffer or work hard or make sacrifices they will try to convince themselves that it is worthwhile, even being demeaned or embarrassed. Inconsistency between attitudes and behaviours is shown in the gap between general attitudes and specific behaviours, behaviour aggregation combining across many different behaviours on different occasions; the prominence of the attitude in the persons conscious mind and influence and the accessibility of the attitude to the mind.

Social influence
Social influence is seen as two major categories – normative influence the going along with the crowd in order to be liked and accepted and informational influence which refers to going along with the crowd because you think the crowd knows more than you do. Usually with informational influence is produced by ambiguous situations, so that individuals do not know how to behave and crisis situation where individuals don’t have time to think for themselves. Humans have a fundamental need to be accepted and evolutionary theory proposes that humans survive better if they belong to a group. To live together individuals usually need to agree on common beliefs, values, attitudes and behaviours that reduce in-group conflicts and act for the common good, thus conforming and behaving in a certain way. When individuals deviate from group norms they are usually rejected and studies found that people would rather agree with the group even though they knew it was wrong rather than suffer social rejection. Groups are quick to vote out the deviate or non conformist with rejection more likely when there are one or two non conformists that when there is a large number of nonconformists. Public compliance – where an individual outwardly goes along with the group but maintains a private, inner belief that the group is wrong is often practiced by individuals in order to comply.

Commitment by individuals to beliefs, attitudes or even to the group puts them in a position where they then find themselves acting consistently with that commitment. Not only do they feel internal pressure but also external pressure to behave consistently with that commitment. There are many techniques that individuals and groups use to influence individuals, usually based on the principle of commitment, consistency, reciprocation, scarcity and capturing and disrupting attention. These techniques are based on the individual doing something they would not usually do and the techniques are based on neutralising the conscious rational mind in order to bypass it.

The foot in the door technique is based on commitment and consistency, in which one starts with a small request in order to gain eventual compliance with a larger request. The low ball technique is also based on commitment in which one first gets the person to comply with a seemingly low cost request and only later reveals hidden additional costs. The bait and switch technique is based on commitment, in which one draws people in with an attractive offer that is unavailable and then switches them to a less attractive offer that is available. The labelling technique is another way of inducing compliance where one assigns a label to an individual and then requests a favour that is consistent with the label. This technique is also based on commitment and consistency and uses the individuals self concepts. Legitimization of paltry favours technique similarly, is based on the requester making a small amount of aid available.

The appreciation of reciprocity is deeply rooted in human nature where an individual feels guilty if someone does them a favour and they cannot repay it in some way. This loads up the threat of guilt feelings and increases compliance rates. Two techniques – door-in-the-face technique starts with an inflated request and then retreats to a smaller request that appears to be a concession. The request must not be too extreme so that it is seen as unreasonable and does not work if the requests made are done by separate individuals. That’s not all technique is similar, this is also based on personal obligation where one first makes an inflated request but before the person can answer yes or no, sweetens the deal by offering a discount or bonus. The techniques used with the scarcity principle are based on the product or service diminishing and so the individual’s chances to buy or be included are limited.

Individuals often try to catch the attention of others using the pique technique which uses a novel request to catch their attention. Similarly the disrupt-then-reframe technique is based on one disrupting critical thinking by introducing an unexpected element, then reframing the message in a positive light. Both these techniques try to capture or distract the individual with the pique technique placing emphasis on the individual thinking about the request more deeply and in the disrupt-then-reframe technique the individual is distracted and don’t pay too much attention to the original request or conversation.

Persuasion
Persuasion is an attempt to change an individual’s attitude. Aristotle proposed three components of persuasion being the speaker, the subject of the speech and the hearer to whom the speech is addressed. He suggests that the three elements necessary are emotional appeal, intellectual appeal and charisma. The key source of the message must usually be credible and likable. Credibility is based on expertise and trustworthiness of the source with likability based on similarity and physical attractiveness. Often convert communicators or individuals are perceived as credible sources because they are arguing against their own previously held attitudes and behaviours. The message given is usually based on facts or appeals to the emotions of the listener and often uses humour and/or fear as a slant.

Research has indicated that people who are in a good mood are more receptive to persuasive messages and fear appeals can change attitudes if they don’t induce too much fear and if the audience is told how to avoid the fearful outcome. The message must resonate with the audience’s intellect, need for thinking and concerns for now and in the future. The easiest people to persuade are young children followed by adolescents and young adults. By this stage attitudes are set in place and resistance to persuasion is evident. Cultural difference also plays a role with people from individualistic cultures placing more emphasis on the individual where the collectivist culture place more emphasis on the group. Alpha and Omega strategies are also used to persuade – when people are willing and able to listen to a message, strong arguments are more persuasive than weak arguments and vice versa.

Resisting persuasion is often much more difficult to put into practice. There are a number of techniques which can be used as resistance. One of these is the negative attitude change where we do exactly the opposite of what one is being persuaded to do. Others deal with delaying decisions in order to rationalise, reword the request in the individuals favour and pay attention to what other credible individual’s behaviours.

My Personal Reflections
Communication takes many forms and levels from verbal to non verbal and small talk to in depth complex discussions. During these engagements a mixture of automatic and controlled thinking with their various schemas and scripts are used. Within this, a feedback loop checks whether our audience understand the message and respond and this helps to adjust language, tone, speed and type of message with the ultimate desire to keep the interest of the listener. Deborah Tannen’s “9 to 5” describes the differences between conversation styles of men and women and how these can either help or limit promotional opportunities. The male rituals of bantering or avoiding the one-down position are common with women tending to downplay their authority and avoid boasting. The way in which men and women use their styles are used to judge their confidence, leadership and authority.

The use of body language often discriminates or confirms the message being given with eye avoidance, body position and stance and gestures being the key. In some cultures, eye avoidance is normal and acceptable. Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Blink” describes the concept of thin-slicing where we recognise patterns and make snap judgements and we do this process of editing unconsciously. He suggests that by trusting our instincts a snap judgement can be far more effective than a cautious decision and gives the example of a simulated war to bring his point home.

The messages we use can captivate or turn off the audience. Social influence is used neatly in these messages, using reciprocity and interest to draw attention and then persuasion to influence the decision or outcome. Tied in with this is our need to comply, be part of the group and reciprocate when it is our turn. A good salesman can push all these buttons and usually the average Joe will comply even though in a rational moment a different decision may have been made.

References

Baumeister, R.F. & Bushman, B.J. (2008). Social Psychology and Human Nature. 1st Ed. Thomson Learning Inc.

Tannen, D. (1994). Talking from 9 to 5. Virago

Gladwell, M. (2005). Blink The Power of Thinking without Thinking. Penguin Books