PSYC 381 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Married People, Negativity Bias, Impression Formation
26 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Chapter 8
1. What is impression formation and how does it differ with age? What is the
negativity bias and why is it important? (pp. 282-284)
• The basic goal of the social cognition approach is to understand how people make sense
of themselves, others and events in everyday life
• Impression formation: or the way people form and revise first impressions
• Hess and Pullen suggest that older adults may rely on life experiences and social rules of
behavior when making their interpretations, whereas younger adults may be more
concerned with situational consistency of the new information
• Older adults also let their initial impression stanf because negative information was more
striking to them and thus affected them more strongly This is called the negativity bias
• The decline in cognitive functioning limits the ability of older adults to override them
impact of their initial impressions
• If young adults receive new info about a person that contradicts their original impression
→ they’re likely to adjust that initial impression. But if older adults are more selective in
the information they choose to use in forming their judgments.
• When older adults take their time to make a social judgment → they process information
just like young adults. But when you give them a time limit they have difficulty
remembering the information they need to make their social judgment.
2. What is social knowledge? Provide original examples of how it is used. Why is
knowledge accessibility important? Describe the processing capacity explanation for
age differences in social judgement biases. (pp. 285-286)
• Social cognitive researchers use information processing models to describe how
individuals make social judgments
• We all make snap judgments but then we reconsider and evaluate possible circumstances
and revise initial judgments. This takes processing resources
• If we are busy thinking about something else we wont be able to revise our initial
judgments
• Older adults consistently hold onto their intial judgements by considering other factors
• They exhibit lower levels of cognitive processing resources → it is possible this decline
in resource capacity might impact social judgment processes.
• In the case of impression formation → older adults may have limited cognitive resources
to process detailed information presented under after the initial impression is formed.
3. What are social beliefs and how do they change with age? How do beliefs affect
social judgements, memory, and problem solving? Provide original examples. (pp.
286-288)
• Social beliefs and how they change with age:
(1) First we must examine the specific content of social beliefs
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
(2) We must consider the strength of these beliefs to know under what conditions they
may influence behaviour
(3) We need to know the likelihood that these beliefs will be automatically activated
when a person is confronted with a situation in which these beliefs are being violated
or questioned.
How do beliefs affect social judgments, memory, and problem solving?
Textbook examples: Younger and older adults might believe that individuals shouldn’t live
together before marriage →these rules probably trigger an emotional reaction and related goals
tied to the content of that situation.
Marriage is more important than your career
Own examples:
• Must have a boy to carry on the family name
• Females must change name after marriage
4. What are causal attributions? Be sure your answer includes a definition of the two
major types. What is the correspondence bias and how is it affected with age? (pp.
289-292)
• Causal Attributions can be behavioural explanations that reside within the actor. This
is called dispositional attribution.
• Or the explanation can reside outside the actot. This is called situational attribution
• Correspondence bias: Produce informational distortions when making causal
attributions about problem solving. Youth rely more of dispositional information in
explaining behaviour and ignore compelling situational information.
• When the target events were ambiguous as to what was the specific cause of the
outcome. All adults tended to make interactive attributions but older adults did so at a
higher rate
• Middle aged adults scored higher on dialectical attributional reasoning multiple
explanations such as dispositional and situational factors and how these factors can be
incorporated into a workable explanation of behaviour.
• Correspondence bias in older adults only occurred in negative relationship situations.
• Older Americans showed a greater correspondence bias than younger Americans
• However both younger and older Chinese performed similarly and showed less
correspondence bias.
• When there is a plausible motivation for the targets behaviour, older adults can
correct their judgments to be less biased than in a standard attitude attribution
paradigm.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
5. Define each of the following and describe how they influence information processing.
Also include a description of how they are related to age. (pp. 293-296)
a. personal goals:
• Personal goals consist of underlying motivations for our behaviour and how we perceive
our own ever changing environment.
• Selective optimization with compensation (SOC) is an important theoretical model. As
we continuously update our personal goals to match our appraisal of available resources
to obtain those goals
• Younger and older were asked to memorize a list of words while simultaneously
maintaining their balance
• Older adults chose to forgo aids that would improve their memory and instead chose to
use aids designed to optimize walking performance
• Memory performance versus balance older adults displayed a preference for their
physical safety even if it meant that they would perform badly on a cognitive test.
• Although we cannot compensate for all of the resource limitations that come with
advancing age we can invest those resources we have into those goals that maximize an
independent lifestyle and a positive sense of well being.
b. emotion
• Maintains that emotional goals become increasingly important and salient as we grow
older
• Older adults avoid negative information and focus more on positive information when
making decisions and judgments and when remembering events
• This phenomenon has received much attention in the literature and is called a positive
images than negative ones whereas younger adults remember both positive and negative
images equally well.
• With respect to memory, found no evidence for reduced negativity effect in older adults
when remembering a list of words with negative, positive, and neutral valence.
• Emotional goals appear to help older adults in that they can create a supportive context
for their cognitive functioning.
• The interface between emotions and cognition suggest that the distinctiveness of
emotions helps older adults to reduce the number of false memories produced.
• However, emotions may impeded information processing
• For example situations that are highly arousing and require a great amount of executive
control processing may lead to older adults to be poorer at remembering and processing
information
c. cognitive style
• Another type of motivational goal that can influence our thinking comes from our
cognitive style or how we approach solving problems
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
What is the negativity bias and why is it important? (pp. 282-284: the basic goal of the social cognition approach is to understand how people make sense of themselves, others and events in everyday life. If young adults receive new info about a person that contradicts their original impression. They"re likely to adjust that initial impression. But if older adults are more selective in the information they choose to use in forming their judgments: when older adults take their time to make a social judgment they process information just like young adults. Provide original examples of how it is used. Describe the processing capacity explanation for age differences in social judgement biases. (pp. 285-286: social cognitive researchers use information processing models to describe how individuals make social judgments, we all make snap judgments but then we reconsider and evaluate possible circumstances and revise initial judgments.
