How We Use Our Expectations
Once we have developed a set of schemas and attitudes, we naturally use that information to help us judge and respond to others. Our expectations help us think about, size up, and make sense of individuals, groups of people, and the relationships among people. If we have learned, for example, that someone is friendly and interested in us, we are likely to approach them; if we have learned that they are threatening or unlikable, we will be more likely to withdraw. And if we believe that a person has committed a crime, we may process new information in a manner that helps convince us that our judgment was correct. In this section, we will consider how we use our stored knowledge to come to accurate (and sometimes inaccurate) conclusions about our social worlds. Table 2.1 “How Expectations Influence Our Social Cognition” summarizes the concepts that we will discuss, some of the many ways that our existing schemas and attitudes influence how we respond to the information around us.
Table 2.1 How Expectations Influence Our Social Cognition
Cognitive Process | Description | Example |
Cognitive accessibility | Some schemas and attitudes are more accessible than others. | We may think a lot about our new haircut because it is important to us. |
Salience | Some stimuli, such as those that are unusual, colorful, or moving, grab our attention. | We may base our judgments on a single unusual event and ignore hundreds of other events that are more usual. |
Representativeness heuristic | We tend to make judgments according to how well the event matches our expectations. | After a coin has come up heads many times in a row, we may erroneously think that the next flip is more likely to be tails. |
Availability heuristic | Things that come to mind easily tend to be seen as more common. | We may overestimate the crime statistics in our own area because these crimes are so easy to recall. |
Anchoring and adjustment | Although we try to adjust our judgments away from them, our decisions are overly based on the things that are most highly accessible in memory. | We may buy more of a product when it is advertised in bulk than when it is advertised as a single item. |
Counterfactual thinking | We may “replay” events such that they turn out differently—especially when only minor changes in the events leading up to them make a difference. | We may feel particularly bad about events that might not have occurred if only a small change might have prevented them. |
False consensus bias | We tend to see other people as similar to us. | We are surprised when other people have different political opinions or values. |
Overconfidence | We tend to have more confidence in our skills, abilities, and judgments than is objectively warranted. | Eyewitnesses are often extremely confident that their identifications are accurate, even when they are not. |
Automatic Versus Controlled Cognition
A good part of both cognition and social cognition is spontaneous or automatic. Automatic cognition refers to thinking that occurs out of our awareness, quickly, and without taking much effort (Ferguson & Bargh, 2003; Ferguson, Hassin, & Bargh, 2008). The things that we do most frequently tend to become more automatic each time we do them, until they reach a level where they don’t really require us to think about them very much. Most of us can ride a bike and operate a television remote control in an automatic way. Even though it took some work to do these things when we were first learning them, it just doesn’t take much effort anymore. And because we spend a lot of time making judgments about others, many of these judgments (and particularly those about people we don’t know very well and who don’t matter much to us) are made automatically (Willis & Todorov, 2006).
Because automatic thinking occurs outside of our conscious awareness, we frequently have no idea that it is occurring and influencing our judgments or behaviors. You might remember a time when you came back from your classes, opened the door to your dorm room, and 30 seconds later couldn’t remember where you had put your keys! You know that you must have used the keys to get in, and you know you must have put them somewhere, but you simply don’t remember a thing about it. Because many of our everyday judgments and behaviors are performed “on automatic,” we may not always be aware that they are occurring or influencing us.
It is of course a good thing that many things operate automatically because it would be a real pain to have to think about them all the time. If you couldn’t drive a car automatically, you wouldn’t be able to talk to the other people riding with you or listen to the radio at the same time—you’d have to be putting most of your attention into driving. On the other hand, relying on our snap judgments about Bianca—that she’s likely to be expressive, for instance—can be erroneous. Sometimes we need to—and should—go beyond automatic cognition and consider people more carefully. When we deliberately size up and think about something—for instance another person—we call it thoughtful cognition or controlled cognition.
Although you might think that controlled cognition would be more common and that automatic thinking would be less likely, that is not always the case. The problem is that thinking takes effort and time, and we often don’t have too much of those things available. As a result, we frequently rely on automatic cognition, and these processes—acting outside of our awareness—have a big effect on our behaviors. In the following Research Focus, we will consider an example of a study that uses a common social cognitive procedure known as priming—a technique in which information is temporarily brought into memory through exposure to situational events—and that shows that priming can influence judgments entirely out of awareness.
Research Focus
Behavioral Effects of Priming
In one demonstration of how automatic cognition can influence our behaviors without us being aware of them, John Bargh and his colleagues (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996) conducted two studies, each with the exact same procedure. In the experiments, they showed college students sets of five scrambled words. The students were to unscramble the five words in each set to make a sentence. Furthermore, for half of the research participants, the words were related to the stereotype of the elderly. These participants saw words such as “in Florida retired live people” and “bingo man the forgetful plays.”
The other half of the research participants also made sentences but did so out of words that had nothing to do with the elderly stereotype. The purpose of this task was to prime (activate) the schema of elderly people in memory for some of the participants but not for others.
The experimenters then assessed whether the priming of elderly stereotypes would have any effect on the students’ behavior—and indeed it did. When each research participant had gathered all his or her belongings, thinking that the experiment was over, the experimenter thanked him or her for participating and gave directions to the closest elevator. Then, without the participant knowing it, the experimenters recorded the amount of time that the participant spent walking from the doorway of the experimental room toward the elevator. As you can see in the following figure, the same results were found in both experiments—the participants who had made sentences using words related to the elderly stereotype took on the behaviors of the elderly—they walked significantly more slowly (in fact, about 12% more slowly across the two studies) as they left the experimental room.
Figure 2.3 Automatic Priming and Behavior
In two separate experiments, Bargh, Chen, and Borroughs (1996) found that students who had been exposed to words related to the elderly
stereotype walked more slowly than those who had been exposed to more neutral words.
To determine if these priming effects occurred out of the conscious awareness of the participants, Bargh and his colleagues asked a third group of students to complete the priming task and then to indicate whether they thought the words they had used to make the sentences had any relationship to each other or could possibly have influenced their behavior in any way. These students had no awareness of the possibility that the words might have been related to the elderly or could have influenced their behavior.
The point of these experiments, and many others like them, is clear—it is quite possible that our judgments and behaviors are influenced by our social situations, and this influence may be entirely outside of our conscious awareness. To return again to Bianca, it is even possible that we notice her nationality and that our beliefs about Italians influence our responses to her, even though we have no idea that they are doing so and really believe that they have not. It is in this way that our stereotypes may have their insidious effects, and it is exactly these processes that may have led to a mistaken eyewitness account in the case of Rickie Johnson.
- We use our schemas and attitudes to help us judge and respond to others. In many cases, this is appropriate, but our expectations can also lead to biases in our judgments of ourselves and others.
- A good part of our social cognition is spontaneous or automatic, operating without much thought or effort. On the other hand, when we have the time and the motivation to think about things carefully, we may engage in thoughtful, controlled cognition.
References
Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(2), 230–244.
Ferguson, M. J., & Bargh, J. A. (2003). The constructive nature of automatic evaluation. In J. Musch & K. C. Klauer (Eds.), The psychology of evaluation: Affective processes in cognition and emotion (pp. 169–188). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.
Ferguson, M. J., Hassin, R., & Bargh, J. A. (2008). Implicit motivation: Past, present, and future. In J. Y. Shah & W. L. Gardner (Eds.), Handbook of motivation science (pp. 150–166). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Fisher, R. P. (2011). Editor’s introduction: Special issue on psychology and law. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20, 4. doi:10.1177/0963721410397654
Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (Eds.). (2002). Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate? New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Willis, J., & Todorov, A. (2006). First impressions: Making up your mind after a 100-Ms exposure to a face. Psychological Science, 17(7), 592–598.