Basic Attribution Processes

Naive psychologist: people use rational, scientific-like, cause-effect analyses to better understand the world.

Heider's three principles:

1. Our own behaviour is motived rather than random thus we look for the causes and reasons of other people's behaviour and uncover their motives.
2. In order to predict and control the environment, we seek stable and enduring properties of the world around us. (Personality traits and enduring abilities in people, or stable properties of situations)
3. When attributing causal factors, a difference between personal (internal attribution) and environmental (external attribution) factors are made.

Jones and Davis's theory of correspondent inference

Correspondent inference: the causal attribution of behaviour to an underlying disposition or personality trait

Five sources of information are drawn upon in order to make a correspondent inference:

1. Freely chosen behaviour is more indicative of a disposition
2. Non-common effects (effects of behaviour that are relatively exclusive to that behaviour rather than other behaviours. Outcome bias (the belief that the individual intended to produce the outcome of a behaviour)
3. Socially desirable behaviour are likely controlled by norms so socially undesirable behaviour provides a basis for making a correspondent inference
4. Confident correspondent inferences are made when the consequences are personally significant (hedonic relevance)
5. Confident correspondent inferences are made when the behaviour is personally beneficial or harmful (personalism)

Kelley's covariation model

Covariation model: people assign cause of behaviour to the factor that covaries most closely with the behaviour.

People decide whether or not to attribute a behaviour to internal dispositions (e.g. personality) or external environmental factors (e.g. time constraint). The three classes of information required to make this decision are:

1. Consistency information [Always (high consistency) versus sometimes (low consistency)]
2. Distinctiveness information [Always (low distinctiveness) versus specific/situational (high distinctiveness)]
3. Consensus information [Everyone behaves likes this (high consensus) versus the individual only (low consensus)]

Discount: when there is not a consistent relationship between variables a third factor is sort to be the cause.

Causal schemata: beliefs or preconceptions (based on previous experience and knowledge) about the way certain types of cause interact in order to produce an effect.

Affect and Emotion

Research on affect and emotion is interested in how feelings influence and are influenced by social cognition. Where different situations can evoke different emotions and how the same situation can evoke different emotions in different people.

Affect
When there is a demand on an individual they use the resources available to them to deal with the demand. If the resources available equal or exceed the perceived demand, the individual will be motivated and challenged. Avoidance behaviours will however be felt by the individual if the resources are felt to be inadequate to meet the demand. (This can play a major role in producing anxiety in individuals)

Affect-infusion model: the effects of mood on social cognition/social judgements reflect current mood.

There are four ways in which people process information about one another (Forgas):

1. Direct access (directly accessing the schemas or judgments stored in memory
2. Motivated processing (forming a judgement on the basis of specific motivations to achieve a goal
3. Heuristic processing (rely on cognitive short cuts or heuristics)
4. Substantive processing (carefully and deliberately make a judgement from numerous sources

Process of Social Inference Summation

Social inference addresses the inferential process that is used to identify, sample and combine information in order to form impressions and make judgements. There are two processes used for social information:

1. The top-down deductive process that relies on general schemas or stereotypes and;
2. The bottom-up inductive process that relies on specific instances.

Normative models: the ideal processes for making accurate social inferences

Behavioural decision theory: the collective of normative models

Gathering data and sampling the information collected is the first step of making inferences. During this stage people tend to rely too much on schemas, which can cause information to be lost or exaggerated.

Regression: the tendency for the initial inference of an instance to be exaggerated or poorly judged in comparison to subsequent instances.

Base-rate information: factual and statistical data about an entire class of events (base-rate information is often ignored and can play a role in racial and unjust stereotyping, e.g. media coverage of extremist catholic protesters where individuals who view or read the story begin to attribute this behaviour and value to all catholics when it is the behaviour and values of the minority).

Illusory correlation: the belief that two stimuli or events are correlated to a high degree when there may only be a small or no correlation.

• Associative meaning: an illusory correlation where items are seen as belonging together on the basis of prior knowledge
• Paired distinctiveness: an illusory correlation where items are seen as belonging together because they share an unusual feature

Person Memory

Cognitive psychologists mainly use the associative network (when information stored in our memory are categorised by associative links such as traits, beliefs and behaviours) model of memory.

• Not all links are as strong as each other
• They are strengthened by cognitive rehearsal and when there are numerous links to a specific idea
• Each link assists in the activation of the other links through association increasing its retrieval

Note: long-term memory (the majority of information stored that can be accessed and brought to your conscious) and short-term memory (small amounts of information occupied by your attention at the present time).

The majority of person-memory contains information about traits

• These traits are based on inferences made from the behaviour and situations of individuals
• These inferences revolve around making causal attributions to behaviour
• This information is stored into to categories of socially desirable (e.g. friendly) and competence (e.g. intelligent)

When making judgements about others, people tend to rely on incoming information based on schemas to produce impressions. They are much less likely to use the information they have stored to make impressions and are influenced by the goals and purposes of the interaction. This suggest that the more psychologically and emotionally committed to the interaction an individual is, the greater amount and strength of the associative links there will be.

Social Encoding

Social encoding is the process of seeking information from an external social environment and is extremely subjective revolving around the stimulus which captures an individuals attention

There are four stages to social encoding:

1. Pre-attentive analysis (a general scan of an individuals environment)
2. Focal attention (stimuli is consciously noticed, identified and categorised)
3. Comprehension (stimuli is given semantic meaning)
4. Elaborative reasoning (that stimuli is then linked to other knowledge in order for complex inferences to be made)

Key terms related to social encoding include:

• Salient stimuli: a property of a stimulus which captures attention from other stimulus in a particular context
• Vivid stimuli: an intrinsic property of a stimulus itself (e.g. violent crime)
• Priming: the influence of accessible categories or schemas on the way information is processed

Schema use and Development

People tend to use a basic-level of categorisation of neither too inclusive nor too exclusive by accessing subtypes, social stereotypes and role schemas (e.g. doctor). Other influences include:

• Observable features (e.g. physical appearance)
• Contextually distinctive (e.g. a female amongst a group of males)
• Use schemas based on earlier information (primacy effect)
• Accessibile schemas such as those commonly used and;
• Schemas which have a personal importance

These theory-driven schemas are appropriate and accurate enough for a majority of the time, however a data-driven approach is taken on when the costs of being wrong are increased (e.g. responsibility, rewards and punishments). This is when individuals collect more information in order to create a more accurate schema. Individuals are more likely to rely on schemas when:

• Time is scarce
• Highly distracted and;
• Anxious

Subjective importance of schemas and accessibility are major influences of the degree and type of schema used. Other influences include:

• Attributional complexity (individuals vary in the complexity and the number of explanations of other people)
• Uncertainty orientation (individuals vary in the amount of information they want and may prefer to be uninformed)
• Need for cognition (the variance in the amount that individuals think about things)
• Cognitive complexity (the variance in individual complexity of cognitive processes and representations)

The acquisition and development of schemas

• The more encounters experience the more abstract they become
• They become more complex
• As the complexity increases so do the links between schematic elements
• As the schema grows, it becomes well organised and easier to access
• They become more resilient, incorporating a broader variety and understanding its inclusiveness
• They should then become more accurate and assist to better understanding the social world
• Although schemas tend to be slow to change, if a schema has been greatly inaccurate a major subjective experience has the ability to change the schema dramatically

Three process suggested by Rothbart (1981) of schema change are:

1. Bookkeeping (a slow and gradual change brought on by new evidence)
2. Conversion (information in contrast to the schema is slowly acquired that the schema can no longer be sustained, a sudden change to the schema occurs)
3. Subtyping (inconsistent information changes the structure of the schema causing the formation of subcategories, e.g. the change from all apples are red to apples can be both red or green)

Social Schemas and Categories

A schema is a cognitive structure that allows us to understand and perceive a concept or type of stimulus with only a limited amount of information. It uses previous experience and knowledge to 'paint a picture' and is based on concepts and theory; a top-down approach of processing information.

There are many types of schema including person, role, events (generally called scripts), content-free and self-schemas.

• Person schema: individual knowledge about specific people.
• Role schema: the knowledge you have about the way certain people/roles such as doctors act or for example the questions they may ask.
• Scripts/events: the information you have about an event allows you to act accordingly such as to be quiet during a lecture or to be outgoing and social at a party.
• Content-free schema: based around rules or attributing a cause to an individual's behaviour.
• Self-schema: this is the in-depth and complex information individual's have about themselves.

Categorisation is the process of interpreting information to fit into that particular schema

• Family resemblance: the defining property of information which places it into a particular category.
• Prototype: the typical representation and attributes of what is expected for each category
• Fuzzy sets: as information will not be exactly the same as the prototype, categorises are compiled of features and attributes which revolve around the prototype.
• Exemplars: a specific member of a category used when it is new and unfamiliar.
• Associative network: when information stored in our memory are categorised by associative links such as traits, beliefs and behaviours.
• Accentuation principle: when the categorisation accentuates the perception of similarities and differences between groups that they believe (personally, relevant or of value) are correlated with the category. (This plays a major role in the production of discrimination and prejudice involving stereotyping)