PSYC1030 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Fundamental Attribution Error, Daniel Kahneman, Impression Formation
PSYC1030 Lecture Three: Social Cognition
• People often create their own theories as to why people think and behave the way they
do. However, it isn't always done a systematic way, the intuitive explanations are
sometimes incorrect
• One goal of social psychology is to understand how people think and behave on social
settings by systematically testing theories about thinking and behaviour. To be able to
understand them, one needs to know how to perceive, process, and organise
information about other people.
• While there are important group-related phenomena, groups don’t have the same
effect on everyone
• The area of psychology that helps people to understand the underlying cognitive
processes that explains group processes is known as social cognition. It makes use of
the theories and methods of cognitive psychology and applies them to social
psychological phenomena
Impression Formation
• Impressions are an important part of everyday life, they help navigate various social
settings, and help evaluate people who communicate with us or to us
e.g. election candidates can give people positive or negative impressions based on
their behaviour and appearance, leading to potential votes or failure
• Impressions also matter outside the impressions that individuals make about other
people. While they are busy making evaluations about other people, others are also
busy forming impressions about them. Impressions can affect the opportunities and
experiences that they can have
e.g. being offered a job position that is desired or others wanting to talk to the
individual in social instances
• Social media is the biggest and most self-evident way that people try to manage what
kind of impression they make upon other people. When uploading a new profile
picture or writing a new post, most people are concerned about how other people
might perceive them
• Impression formation is generally understood to be the process by which people
combine information about others to make overall judgements about those others
• There were originally two models on how people formed impressions of other people
• The algebraic model. Anderson (1965) was the main advocate for the algebraic model
of impression formation, where impressions are formed on the basis of the mechanical
combination of information that we know about a person. Anderson proposed there
could be three ways in which such information could be combined
-summative model
One could arrive at an overall impression of someone simply by adding up all the
reactions, or likeability ratings, of another person’s behaviours etc. and arrive at an
overall score
e.g. meeting someone at a party that has 3 likeable attributes and 2 traits that are less
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appealing but the person still decides to like this person because they had 3 likeable
traits
-averaging model
When one makes an overall impression of someone by averaging likability ratings by
taking the overall sum of ratings and divide by the number of ratings
e.g. 5 (traits) ÷3 (likability rating) =0.6, so still a positive rating
-weighted averaging model
This theory was based on the idea that each attribute that a person possesses is
associated not only with a likability rating, but also with a weight that represents how
important that attribute is in a particular context
e.g. being funny and polite might be good traits to have in a social setting but not
something you'd particularly want in a brain surgeon, you'd weight attributes clever
and skillful better.
So one could use these weights to modify the likability ratings: for each attribute,
multiply the likability rating with its associated weight.
e.g. take +3 for funny and multiply it by three, and so on with the other attributes, add
all the ratings and divide them by the number of traits, finding the average
These three models where tested by systematically varying each of these bits of
information under controlled settings in the lab. His research surprisingly suggests
that weighted averaging is the best match for the impressions that people actually
formed. While weighted averaging model describes the impressions that people form,
it doesn't necessarily tell us the process people use to arrive at such impressions.
• Configurational model is based on Gestalt principles, or the idea that the whole is
greater than just some of the parts. According to this model, people combine
information they receive about someone into an overall impression that is quite
different from the simple sum of reactions to individual items of information about
that person. The reason why this happens is because the people's traits are not all
used in the same way to form an impression. Asch (1946) thought there were two main
types of traits or characteristics:
-central traits: which are more influential and give meaning to…
-peripheral traits: which take on different meaning in the context of different central
traits
e.g. the difference in likeability ratings to similar traits in two people, with the
exception of the central traits differing from cold to warm
Schemas
• More recently, the idea of schemas has been supplanted by the concept of schemas
(Kunda and Thagard, 1996)
• While there are some important caveats to how schemas about social categories are
used to form impressions depending on the target (Hamilton and Sherman, 1996),
there is good evidence that schemas are centrally involved in the impression formation
process
• Schemas are cognitive structures that represent our knowledge about a concept or
type of stimulus. They are formed on the basis of past experience, and they are
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