Transcript of Audio Lecture
Welcome to lesson nine,
module one, social cognition. Social cognition will be broken up into
two parts; one in which we address high effort thinking and one in which
we address low effort thinking. This module will discuss low effort
thinking.
Please continue to slide
two. When we talk about how much effort you put into thinking, we tend
to dichotomize it into low and high efforts. Low effort thinking would
be the type of thinking or the amount of effort you put into thinking
about buying gum or maybe a soda. You buy the one you always buy, you
buy the one that’s closest to you, you buy the one that’s cheapest.
While high effort thinking would be kind of thought that one puts into
buying an automobile or a home. High effort thinking.
Let’s move on to slide
three. Often we run on automatic pilot and we can do this because we
have schemas. Schemas guide attention and guide memory. Schemas are a
general idea about the way things should go or should work. They
include things like stereotypes, but schemas are more broad and allow us
to have scripts about how to go to a restaurant or go to a library; what
is the process. For example, at the library one doesn’t sit at a
table and wait for someone to bring them a book, rather one selects a
book and then perhaps approaches the counter, presents the library card
to check out the book. Schemas guide our attention by drawing our
attention to those things that fit our schema. When we walk into
McDonald’s, we look for the line, who’s in line, where’s the end of the
line. Guides our attention, we pay attention to the last person in
line, paying very little attention to tables and if there is one.
It also guides memory. A study was done called the Library vs.
Waitress study for the purposes of this lecture, and what they did is
they showed people a videotape of a home. And they told them that the home was either the home of the
librarian or some subjects were told is the home of a waitress. After
they’d watched the videotape, they were asked to recall as many things
as they could from what they saw on the videotape that was in this
woman’s home. Those that thought the woman was a librarian, recalled
that there were reading glasses, that there were lots of books, that
there was a hair clip to put your hair into a bun and things of that
nature. Those in the waitress study, recalled a jar of change, a
bowling ball, chewing gum and a tip jar. Clearly they saw the same
videotape but recalled very different things because their schema of
what a librarian would have in her home versus what a waitress would
have in her home are very distinct.
Let’s move on to slide four.
We also have associations that allow us to engage in low effort
thinking. Often we use a behavior to make a trait inference.
For example if we see someone kick a dog, we assume that person is mean,
not that they’ve had a bad day or something about the situation.
We infer the trait mean as we believe that they will act in a mean way
later on. The same thing is true for generosity. If we see
someone giving change to a homeless person, we may infer that they’re
charitable. However, this may just be that they have extra change
that one day and would not do it again the following day. But we
do this, we use these associations between behaviors and traits to make inferences that we
then believe are permanent. Accessibility also guides our thinking.
For example, we use whatever it is on top in our mind, what is
foremost, what is forefront. For example, if you had just watched a
commercial regarding breakfast cereal and then you go to the store, you
might pay special attention to that box of breakfast cereal, one that you
maybe wouldn’t normally eat but since you’ve just seen a commercial,
it’s accessible to you. Another example is medical students often feel
like they are having all of the symptoms that are described in their
textbook. Those symptoms are accessible to when they’re trying to
interpret the physiological sensations they themselves are
having, they may interpret those as being symptomatic of some illness.
We also form expectations based on association. On page 60 of your
text, they describe the warm versus cold experiments and in which the
lecture is described using five adjectives. In half of the subjects, one
of the adjectives was warm while on the other half, warm was replaced
with cold. Those who saw the lecture described as warm, described the
lecturer as overall better, the lecturer as more competent, the
lecturer as more friendly. All those who saw cold thought that the
person was relatively unfriendly and did not lecture well.
Now we’re going to do a
priming demonstration. As you look at the following
pictures, I want you to think about the term jump rope, think about the
term romance and tell me what you see. In picture A, most people see a
young girl, especially if you’re young yourself or even primed to
support jump ropes and picture B is a set of flowers. However, you
might also see an old woman in picture A, which is very difficult for
some people to see. You have to look carefully and back away from
the picture in order to see it. And in B, the flowers actually
spell the word sex, which may not be associated with romance for some
individuals. This is a prime example of how what is accessible to you
is shown in the pictures. For some folks, sex jumps right out of the
flowers. For those folks, sex is a highly accessible construct.
Let’s move on to the
next slide. In picture A, we follow the red line from the top, you’re
outlining the older woman’s forehead, a bump or a wart on her nose, a
very long nose, and then dips down into an under bit now, as though she’s
not wearing her dentures, and a rather pointy chin, with a high laced
collar surrounding her jaw line. The eye is the young girl’s ear, so if
you start at the top, you’ll see the young girl, we have her forehead,
the first indentation would be her eyes, a small pert little nose, a
very smooth profiled cheek, jaw line, down to neck where she’s wearing a
necklace, or a choker of some sort, further her neck all the way down to
her lace collar. I hope that’s clear and in fact it’s written in red in
the picture B. Here, you can see the outline of both the young and the
old faces as well as the letters in the flowers that spells sex. Let’s
do another one. Everyone knows what the letter F sounds like, so in the
next demonstration, I want you to count the number of F's in the
sentence. Now think F. Finished files are the results of years of
scientific study combined with experience of years. Now quickly count
the Fs, it’s a very simple exercise, and write that number down. Feel
free to pause this if you need more time. You should have six Fs. Many
people only find three, the first few times they count, some can get up
to four, but very, very few people see all six Fs immediately. The Fs
that people miss are the Fs at the end of the word of, because they make
an um sound instead of the natural F sound, or softer F sound and so we
don’t count the ums because it does not fit our stereotype or our schema
of what an F should sound like. So even when we’re given visual
information, we still cannot see the Fs that may more v like sounds.
Let’s go on to slide eight.
Chronic accessibility is also one of the things that happen when we are
using low effort thinking. First, we like to remember information
related to our favorite traits. For example, college students often have
a favorite trait of major or a favorite trait of intelligence and so we
find that they remember things about people they meet that are related
to intelligence, what college other kids go to, what their majors are,
maybe what a GPA is, however my sister who is certainly not in college,
she remembers things about people that are related to interior design as
she sells furniture and so she may remember something about their living
room, something about their taste, whether they’re tastefully dressed or
not. We remember information that is related to our favorite
traits. While she probably wouldn’t have any
idea what college they went to or take notice of any degrees someone has
hanging in their home. Chronic accessibility comes about because we
have repeated use of the same concept when interest in another person’s
behavior. For example, if your daily life is filled with experiences in
which people are judged based on intelligence or their ability to do
course work, this may become chronically accessible to you. While
for
mechanics dexterity and the ability to do manual labor and to figure out problems
with engines would become more chronically accessible, and for those people,
chronic accessibility, the favorite trait would then be something like
manual dexterity. Let’s do one more exercise.
In the next two slides
you’re going to have a series of anagrams or word scrambles. As you
unscramble each word, do them in order and once you’re done, compare
your answer to the very last scramble in slide nine to the last scramble
in slide ten.
Here’s slide nine. The
five words, all of them scrambled. Pause this, take a minute, and
unscramble the words in order. Once you’ve done that, you should have
panel, turtle, do you have those, good; keep going, you have elephant,
cougar, and probably ape. Now do the next set. Move on to slide ten.
Again, pause this, take
your time. Once you finish here, you should have tomato, bean, carrot,
and asparagus and probably pea. You’ll notice that given the exact same
simile in each of these slides, e/a/p, in one page you called it ape, in
another it was unscrambled to spell pea. Probably because we had
activated a schema regarding animals in the first case and vegetables in
this case. These are all examples of the way in which our mind does
short term thinking in order to solve problems of everyday living.
Thank you for listening
to lesson nine, module one. Please continue with lesson nine, module
two.
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