PS 102 Assignment #2

What are the advantages and disadvantages of the shortcuts we use in social cognition? Illustrate your answer with empirical studies.

The majority of us care about what people think of us and nearly all of us care about understanding other people and their behaviour. Social Cognition is something that explains both these processes. (Fiske & Taylor 2013) Social Cognition is concerned with how we think about the social world and in particular how we select, interpret, and use information to make judgements about the world. (Sanderson 2010) Sometimes there is unlimited information available for an individual to make a life decision. This makes it time consuming and complex, causing people to take shortcuts to make decisions/judgements. On the other hand, there might be very little data available for a person to make a judgement about someone or a life decision. This would also lead to people taking shortcuts in social cognition. While these shortcuts are helpful in many situations, they can also lead to many errors and biases.

In 1974, Tversky and Kahneman detailed heuristics which are mental shortcuts that allow people to solve problems with limited data and make judgements quickly. Heuristics are integral in daily life to save time and reduce the complexity of operations. An example of a relatively simple heuristic is reading the headlines of a newspaper on a busy day and deciding which articles to read. (Fiske & Taylor 2013) There are various types of heuristics that include representativeness, availability and adjustment and anchoring heuristics and they all have their respective advantages and disadvantages.

Representativeness heuristic generates inferences about probability. The social psychologist matches information about a specific event/instance from a general category to determine the likelihood of the fit. (Fiske & Taylor 2013) The question being asked is how relevant is A to B and based on the results, a judgement is made. An example would be judging a person’s occupation through their personal characteristics. For example, a person who is physically fit and good looking can be judged as a model/actor due to one’s stereotype of a model/actor. This is done by checking the similarity of this person with an actual model and checking how similar they are. This makes this heuristic a relevancy judgement. This is a fairly accurate method since relevancy is usually a good criterion to make probability judgements. (Fiske & Taylor 2013) Even if an exhaustive analysis is done with the information available it is likely that a similar judgement is concluded. However, there are some disadvantages of the representativeness heuristic as well. For instance, it is insensitive to sample size. People tend to make judgements based on small sample sizes which can lead to inaccuracy. (Tversky & Kahneman 1974) Another disadvantage is that people also tend to ignore prior probability of outcomes. Suppose the person in my example, lives in a city which is full of athletes. I tend to ignore the probability of him/her being an athlete and instead categorize him/her as a model.

The availability heuristic evaluates an event’s likelihood based on the memory of an individual, that is, how quickly instances come to one’s mind. People are influenced by the salience of events as opposed to their numerical frequency. (Sanderson 2010) For example, a person is likely to assess the risk of a heart attack among middle-aged people by recalling such occurrences among his/her acquaintances. (Tversky & Kahneman 1974) This is definitely a quick and easy judgement maker; however, a relatively inaccurate heuristic as it ignores the actual probability of an event and instead just relies on an individual’s memory. The inaccuracy of this method can be best explained by an example. Parents of small children are usually more concerned with their children getting a highly rare and publicized illness such as the Lyme disease. However, they are less concerned about other factors which pose a much greater risk such as their children not wearing seat-belts. Evidence has proved that they Lyme disease and other rare illnesses which parents are more concerned about result in far lesser deaths and injuries compared to these other factors which tend to be ignored. (Sanderson 2010) This is greatly due to the publicity of these diseases which tends them to come to the mind of parents first as compared to other factors that are riskier for their children. Parents, in this case face a search and a retrieval bias caused by the availability heuristic. They tend to “search” for the causes of this disease and protect their children from it as compared to protecting them from other factors. Another disadvantage of the availability heuristic arises from the nature and amount of information available. We often have more information about certain outcomes as compared to other outcomes. For instance, we often see being a football player as a very lucrative profession because we receive information about their wealth, popularity and success. However, we do not receive much information about the football players who have failed.

The anchoring and adjustment heuristic is when people reduce ambiguity by starting with a reference point (anchor) and adjusting it to reach a final conclusion. (Fiske & Taylor 2013) For example, if I want to predict the number of people who attended the football game between England and Germany at Wembley, I can look at the number of people who attended the England and Chile game the previous week and factor it up a little since it is a more competitive game. The anchor is obtained from the England and Chile game and adjusted based on the competitiveness of the England and Germany game relative to other games. This heuristic is very useful in some conditions. For example, when buying a house it makes sense to rely on an initial anchor. This is because it is based on a realistic anchor of the prices/value of other similar houses. (Sanderson 2010) This heuristic relies to some extent on evidence which is the anchor and estimations should be pretty accurate. However, this heuristic can lead to a bias called the anchoring bias. This is when people tend to rely too much on the anchor as a reference point which creates a bias. A sale at a store would be an example of an anchor bias. Suppose an individual likes shoes which were initially £200 but are now going for £100. It is more likely that he would buy it as compared to if they were labelled at £100 (with no sale). This is because of the anchoring effect which makes one feel they are getting the shoes at a good value. This can result in an individual in getting cheated. (Fiske & Taylor 2013)

Heuristics are just one kind of shortcut that humans take in order to make judgements and decisions. There are various other common shortcuts people use to make judgements. We use shortcuts commonly in forming impressions of people, for example. This is because minimal data is available about the person and one takes shortcuts in order to understand others. This is most commonly done by categorizing people and the traits of people.

Schema is one such shortcut we use to categorize people. It is a set of interrelated cognitions such as thoughts, beliefs and attitudes that help us make sense of a person/situation based on limited information. (Hogg and Vaughn, 2011) Stereotypes are an extremely common example of a schema. A stereotype I hold for example is that Indian students are very good at Maths and Science and are more likely to become engineers. Stereotypes have their benefits and flaws. They help people understand how to behave in a social situation. For example, bowing is the way to greet someone in Japan. This would help the person culturally fit in and not feel awkward. However, they have their disadvantages too. Schemas are resistant to change even if there is sufficient evidence that they are not true. This is because an impression of a certain group is already formed in a person’s mind. They tend to ignore or alter information that does not go with their impression. (Aronson et al., 1999) Schemas also tend to distort what we see and remember. There is a tendency for people to view the world, wherein their side are heroes and the other side is the villain. This is very common for football supporters. As a Manchester United supporter I am more likely to ignore wrong decisions by the referee gone in Manchester United’s favour and highlight a wrong decision that went in the favour of the opposing team.

Solomon Asch developed a configural model in 1946 in which he explained a shortcut we use to generate first impressions of people. According to Asch (1946) we concentrate on central traits of people which have a disproportionate effect on the configuration of final impressions of people. The other traits, which he called peripheral traits, have an insignificant influence on the configuration of final impressions. (Hogg and Vaughn, 2011) Asch illustrated these two different traits through an example. He presented a group of students with two identical lists of personality adjectives of two people and asked them to form an impression of the people. It was the same list for both the people apart from one adjective. In one list, he put warm and in the other he put cold. The other words in the list included intelligent, skilful, industrious, determined and cautious. This one single change made a big difference. Participants with the ‘warm’ list gave a far more positive response as compared to the participants with the ‘cold’ list. In the second experiment, he only used the words polite and blunt instead of warm and cold (the rest of the list was the same). He observed that this did not lead to such different impressions. Thus, he concluded that the word warmth is seen as a central trait and politeness is a peripheral trait. (Hewstone et al., 2012) The advantage of categorizing a person’s trait in such a manner is that it reduces the amount of time taken to form an impression and to know how to approach a person as the central trait is highlighted. For instance if a person is warm, we can start a conversation and if a person is cold it is better we avoid the conversation. However, this model might deceive us when making an important decision. The peripheral traits might be more important in a certain situation such as hiring a person for a job. The productivity of someone is determined by how intelligent, industrious and skilful is, but one might still decline a perspective candidate because he gave the first impression of being cold. This could possibly lead to a loss of a perspective good employee for a company due to the way in which we make first impressions.

Lastly, another common shortcut we use in everyday life is intuition. We rely on our gut feeling rather than objective information. For example, employers believe that they can judge a candidate better through an interview even though they have objective measures such as test scores, education and prior experience available to judge them. (Sanderson 2010) Intuition can be advantageous in this example to identify whether the candidate lied in his resume for example and can lead to a more holistic analysis. However, people tend to only rely on their intuition and this could lead to people ignoring essential information in making judgements.

Shortcuts used in social cognition do have their drawbacks and it is essential that we use these shortcuts cautiously and in the correct situation. However, it is nearly impossible to process all the information present without these shortcuts as this would be extremely time consuming and lead to extremely complex operations which can lead to more inaccuracies than using shortcuts. Shortcuts in social cognition are integral to make judgements of people and a situation as they help us make judgements when there is a lot of information available and also when there is very little information available. The drawbacks need to be considered and we should try to avoid the traps and biases in order to come with an accurate judgement.

References
Aronson, E., Wilson, T. D., & Akert, R. M. (1999). Social psychology (3rd ed.). New York: Longman.
Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (2013). Social cognition: from brains to culture (2nd ed.). London: SAGE.
Hewstone, M., Stroebe, W., & Jonas, K. (2012). An introduction to social psychology (5th ed.). Chichester, West Sussex: BPS Blackwell.
Hogg, M. A., & Vaughan, G. M. (2011). Social psychology (6th ed.). Harlow, England: Prentice Hall.
Sanderson, C. A. (2010). Social psychology. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley ;.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (n.d.). Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. JSTOR. Retrieved November 24, 2013, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1738360 .