UNIT 3
In this unit we will discuss thinking in general. We will look at basic patterns in human information processing, hidden biases in the way people think, stereotyping, social identity, and a framework called Image Theory that helps explain political perceptions and actions.
We’ll begin with some terms and definitions:
Cognition
A collective term for the psychological processes involved in the acquisition, understanding, and use of knowledge.
Cognitive System
The organization of that knowledge which is then used to process information and to learn.
Cognitive processes
All information processing activities of the brain, ranging from the analysis of immediately important information to the assessment of subjective experiences. (Perception, memory, attention, problem solving, language, thinking, and imagery.)
People as perceivers
There are a number of theories about how people perceive the world around them. These theories are not competitive, but focus on different questions about how people make sense of the social and physical environments.
Consistency and Balance Theories
This collection of theories argues that people are motivated to reduce inconsistency among their cognitions. People like to believe that their world makes sense. For example, if your best friend and your significant other detest each other that is not consistent, or out of balance. We would assume that if you like two people they should like each other. When they can’t stand one another, you have a big problem since you cannot be with each of them at the same time.
One theory that addresses dilemmas like this if Fritz Heider’s Balance Theory. According to Balance theory a cognitive system is composed of 2 objects (people), the relationship between them, and the perceiver’s evaluation of them.
If you assume that each evaluation is positive or negative, and that they are of equal strength, there are four possible outcomes:
All evaluations are positive
One evaluation is positive, 2 negative
2 positive and 1 negative
All negative
A system is balanced if the evaluations are all positive or if the negatives cancel each other out.
So, for example if:
John and Susan like each other and they both like chocolate chip cookies.
John and Susan dislike each other, John likes cookies, Susan does not.
John and Susan dislike each other and each dislikes the cookies.
John and Susan dislike each other and both dislike the cookies.
To use a political example, substitute John, Susan and cookies with the Soviet Union, the United States, and China during the Cold War. Which triangles are balanced?
What do people do when faced with inconsistencies? They try to restore balance by changing whichever evaluation is easiest to change. This is not always possible (think of the best friend and significant other example), in which case they simply have to live with the inconsistences.
Dissonance Theory, originally formed by Leon Festinger, is a related theory that focuses on inconsistencies between what one believes and how one behaves. What happens when people behave in a way that is contrary to their beliefs? Typically, they:
Either revoke the behavior (ie, deny that the behavior occurred or minimize its occurrence by deeming it an exceptional event), or
Change the attitude that the behavior was contrary to.
One famous example is the grasshopper experiment, conducted by Phillip Zimbardo in 1965. In the experiment there were two groups of subjects, each asked to eat grasshoppers. However, one group was asked to do so by a polite authority figure, but the other was asked to do so by a impolite, unpleasant experimenter. About half of the participants in each group complied and ate
the insects (they were fried). Which group decided they actually like eating grasshoppers? When asked what they thought of the fried grasshoppers, it was the group with the grumpy experimenter which had a largest number of subjects reporting that they liked the grasshoppers. How does Dissonance Theory explain this? The people who ate grasshoppers at the request of the nice guy maintained their dislike of the insects and thought they were participating in an unpleasant taste test to help out a nice guy. The others had to change their evaluation of the insects. Otherwise they would experience dissonance having complied with the request of an arrogant and unpleasant experimenter.
The Naïve Scientist: Attribution theories
A second set of theories asks questions about how people make cause and effect evaluations. People try to explain their own and other’s behavior by looking for cause and effect. They just don’t do it very well.
An attribution is the inference a person makes about the internal state of another person or him/herself. How do we make attributions? We observe overt behavior.
Fritz Heider, one of the earliest attribution theorists put it this way – we “extract out the environment.” We use our own experiences with the environment to decide how it affects people.
One of the most important patterns discovered by attribution studies is the Fundamental Attribution Error. People are more likely to attribute others’ behavior to their general internal dispositions (personality traits or attitudes) than to the situation they are in.
Cognitive Miser: Heuristics
A third approach to people as perceivers argues that people are limited in their capacity to process information, so they take shortcuts whenever they can. They do this by using heuristics which are mental shortcuts used in processing information about others. Two of the most important heuristics are:
The Representativeness Heuristic which is a probability judgment. For example, medical professionals are commonly seen with stethoscopes. If you see someone with a stethoscope you will assume that it is quite probable that that person is a medical professional.
The Availability Heuristic which involves predicting the likelihood of something based on the ease with which they can think of instances or examples of it. For example, if the news reports a number of scandals with politicians lying, one is more likely to believe the politician visiting your Political Science class is a liar too.
Cognitive Categories or Schema: Stereotypes and Images
A fourth perspective on people as perceivers looks at how they organize and simplify the social and political world they live in. The basic premise of this approach is that the world is too complex for us to recognize and respond to all of the information we receive about multiple topics minute by minute. Therefore, we have to have a way of organizing and simplifying the environment. We do that by creating cognitive categories and schemas.
A cognitive category represents knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among those attributes.
The post UNIT 3 In this unit we will discuss thinking in general. We appeared first on PapersSpot.
