ALHT106 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Iceberg, Cognitive Bias, Attribution Bias
Social Cognition
Lecture 1
• What is social cognition
o Studying group and social relations (interpersonal phenomena)
• Group dynamics (group norms and expectations, hierarchies, social roles, etc.)
• Social influence (persuasion, conformity, compliance, obedience, etc.)
• Relationships (friends, intimacy, mate selection, familial conflict, etc.)
o Studying the formation of the 'self' (intrapersonal phenomena)
• Self-concept (experience vs recollection, self-esteem, culture and gender, etc.)
• Social cognition and perception (e.g. impression formation, attraction,
stereotyping etc.)
• Attitudes and beliefs (preference formation, ego-defence, ideology, religion,
etc.)
• Attribution
o Innate tendency to explain certain events and actions, with reference to the
presumed will of other agents
o We intuitively describe the behaviour of other people as being reflective of internal
states of motivation, feeling or belief
o These immediate, intuitive explanations for seemingly voluntary acts are called
attributions, because we give casual credit for the action to some unseen but
inferred intentional motive
• I assume that people drinking water are thirsty
• I infer that someone smiling and waving at me is communicating
• When someone punches a foe, I assume it is out of hatred
o In addition to helping us explain cause and effect relationships in general, our
attributions are what make typical interpersonal engagements possible
o One of the most lifestyle-debilitating aspects of expressing as highly neurotypical
along the autism spectrum is an impaired ability to perform attributions in the social
domain
• Degree to which they have these automatic associations - disadvantage
• e.g. you see a smile, but don't intuitively infer that they're happy
o While attribution is involved in the social perception of facial expression signals, it
extends far beyond that to many other forms of everyday explanation, including
complex evaluations like "why there is crime in this neighbourhood" and "why the
Liberal Party keeps renewing mining subsidies"
o We use attribution any time we attach meaning to behaviour
o The specific elements of a social attribution often reduce to dichotomous
judgements
• Internal vs external
• Stable vs unstable
• Controllable vs uncontrollable
• Intentional vs accidental
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o Attribution bias
• We use the same cognitive apparatus, and indeed usually the same language
(of beliefs, motives, feelings and traits) to account for our own behaviour as
we do when describing and explaining others, but we do so in consistently
faulty ways
• Fundamental attribution error
▪ Tendency to disproportionately explain the behaviour of others
(especially less well known others) with reference to innate traits or
dispositions (stable, internal, intentional attributions)
▪ In contrast, particularly when we do something wrong, we are happy to
explain our own behaviour with mitigating circumstances
▪ e.g. when you merge too sharply on the motorway causing someone to
brake sharply
• I'd think: "Just a small slip up, oops"
• If someone does it to me: "how did they even get a license"
▪ Forms part of the 'conceptual bedrock for the field of social psychology'
• It's crucial in understanding not only a huge range of
interpersonal misunderstandings and escalations, but also
explains certain aspects of our normative self-image
▪ One of the best wats to 'train up' your compassion is learning to see the
mitigating circumstances in the lives of others
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• Biases and stereotypes
o FAE is only the tip of the iceberg of systemic cognitive biases that provide us with
specific 'mental shortcuts' that often yield positive (or at least acceptable) results,
but sometimes get us into reliable trouble
o In the social domain, the most influential suite of cognitive biases (of which FAE is
only one basic example) in the human mind are many Self-Serving Biases
• Disproportionately favours our own interests and support our self-esteem
• These biases are so universal and reliable that we usually only notice them in
their absence
▪ Depression - describes our lives in relatively bleak, stark terms that
imply we are not special
▪ Depression realism - often more accurate
o Actor-observer bias
• FAE along with self-serving biases
• As a form of ego-defence, we use stable, internal attributions for our
successes, but use unstable, external attributions for our shortcomings
• Reversing this pattern for others
• Example - failing exam
▪ Myself
• Didn't really study, doesn't reflect my ability
▪ Someone else
• I guess they're just not smart, don't make excuses
o Social categories and biases
• Social cognition is highly categorical in nature, and beyond just the simple
difference between 'self and other', we also intuitively divide the social world
up based on group membership
• Ingroup - a group you're in; outgroup - others are in
▪ Double standards we apply - self-serving biases to loved ones as well
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
