Social Thinking

Rehearsal

Spotlights and Illusion：周围的人并没有我们所想象的那么在意我们。我们知道自己的内心活动，我们觉得这些活动很明显，那是因为我们总是习惯把注意力放在自己身上。其他人更关心的是自己，而不是我。
Self-concept: 我们对自我的认知并非总是正确。我们可以分析出 Verbalized explicit attitudes, 但是 implicit attitude 确很难描述

2.1 Spotlights and Illusion

spotlight effect(焦点效应): The belief that others are paying more attention to our appearance and behavior than they really are.
illusion of transparency(透明度错觉): The illusion that our concealed emotions leak out and can be easily read by others.

Concerned with the impression we make on others, we tend to believe that others are paying more attention to us than they are (spotlight effect)
We also tend to believe that our emotions are more obvious than they are (the illusion of transparency).

2.2 Self-concept: Who am I

self-concept(自我概念): What we know and believe about ourselves
self-schema(自我图式): Beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing of self-relevant information.
social comparison(社会比较): Evaluating one’s abilities and opinions by comparing oneself with others.
individualism(个人主义): The concept of giving priority to one’s own goals over group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications.
independent self: Construing one’s identity as an autonomous self.
collectivism(集体主义): Giving priority to the goals of one’s group (often one’s extended family or work group) and defining one’s identity accordingly.
planning fallacy(规划谬误): The tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task.
impact bias: Overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events.
dual attitude system: Differing implicit (automatic) and explicit (consciously controlled) attitudes toward the same object. Verbalized explicit attitudes may change with education and persuasion; implicit attitudes change slowly, with practice that forms new habits.

Our sense of self helps organize our thoughts and actions. When we process information with reference to ourselves, we remember it well (using our self-schemas). Self-concept consists of two elements: the self-schemas that guide our processing of self-relevant information and the possible selves that we dream of or dread.
Cultures shape the self, too. Many people in individualistic Western cultures assume an independent self. Others, often in collectivistic cultures, assume a more interdependent self. These contrasting ideas contribute to cultural differences in social behavior.
Our self-knowledge is curiously flawed. We often do not know why we behave the way we do. When influences upon our behavior are not conspicuous enough for any observer to see, we, too, can miss them. The unconscious, implicit processes that control our behavior may differ from our conscious, explicit explanations of it.

2.3 The Nature and Motivating Power of Self-esteem

self-esteem(自尊): A person’s overall self-evaluation or sense of self-worth.
terror management theory(恐惧管理理论): Proposes that people exhibit self-protective emotional and cognitive responses (including adhering more strongly to their cultural world-views and prejudices) when confronted with reminders of their mortality.
longitudinal study: Research in which the same people are studied over an extended period of time.
self-efficacy(自我效能): A sense that one is competent and effective, distinguished from self-esteem, which is one’s sense of self-worth. A sharpshooter in the military might feel high self-efficacy and low self-esteem.

Self-esteem is the overall sense of self-worth we use to appraise our traits and abilities. Our self-concepts are determined by multiple influences, including the roles we play, the comparisons we make, our social identities, how we perceive others appraising us, and our experiences of success and failure.
Self-esteem motivation influences our cognitive processes: Facing failure, high-self-esteem people sustain their self-worth by perceiving other people as failing, too, and by exaggerating their superiority over others.
Although high self-esteem is generally more beneficial than low, researchers have found that people high in both self-esteem and narcissism are the most aggressive. Someone with a big ego who is threatened or deflated by social rejection is potentially aggressive.
Self-efficacy is the belief that one is effective and competent and can do something. Unlike high self-esteem, high self-efficacy is consistently linked to success.

2.4 Self-serving Bias

self-serving bias: The tendency to perceive oneself favorably.
self-serving attributions(自我服务归因): A form of self-serving bias; the tendency to attribute positive outcomes to oneself and negative outcomes to other factors.
defensive pessimism(防御性悲观主义): The adaptive value of anticipating problems and harnessing one’s anxiety to motivate effective action.
false consensus effect(虚假普遍性效应): The tendency to overestimate the commonality of one’s opinions and one’s undesirable or unsuccessful behaviors.
false uniqueness effect(虚假独特性效应): The tendency to underestimate the commonality of one’s abilities and one’s desirable or successful behaviors.

Contrary to the presumption that most people suffer from lower self-esteem or feelings of inferiority, researchers consistently find that most people exhibit a self-serving bias. In experiments and everyday life, we often take credit for our success while blaming failures on the situation.
Most people rate themselves as better than average on subjective, desirable traits and abilities.
We exhibit unrealistic optimism about our futures.
We overestimate the commonality of our opinions and foibles (false consensus) while underestimating the commonality of our ability and virtues (false uniqueness)
Such perceptions arise partly from a motive to maintain and enhance self-esteem — a motive that protects people from depression but contributes to misjudgment and group conflict.
Self-serving bias can be adaptive in that it allows us to savor the good things that happen in our lives. When bad things happen, however, self-serving bias can have maladaptive effect of causing us to blame others or feel cheated out of something we “deserved”.

2.5 Self-presentation

self-handicapping(自我妨碍): Protecting one’s self-image with behaviors that create a handy excuse for later failure.
self-presentation(自我表露): The act of expressing oneself and behaving in ways designed to create a favorable impression or an impression that corresponds to one’s ideals.
self-monitoring(自我监控): Being attuned to the way one presents oneself in social situations and adjusting one’s performance to create the desired impression.

As social animals, we adjust our words and actions to suit out audiences. To varying degrees, we note our performance and adjust it to create the impressions we desire.
Sometimes people self-handicap with self-defeating behaviors that protect self-esteem by providing excuses for failure.
Self-presentation refers to our wanting to present a favorable image both to an external audience (other people) and to an internal audience (ourselves). With regard to an external audience, those who score high on a scale of self-monitoring adjust their behavior to each situation, whereas those low in self-monitoring may do so little social adjusting that they seem insensitive.

2.6 Self-control

Self-control is like a muscle: It can get tired when you use it too much. Willpower requires energy.
But self-control can get stronger if it’s used more. Improving self-control in one area leads to improvements in others.

2.7 Post-script: Twin Truths—The Perils of Pride, the Powers of Positive Thinking

This chapter offered two memorable truths: the truths of self-efficacy and the truth of self-serving bias. The truth concerning self-efficacy encourage us not to resign ourselves to bad situations. We need to persist despite initial failures and to exert effort without being overly distracted by self-doubts. Likewise, secure self-esteem can be adaptive. When we believe in our positive possibilities, we are less vulnerable to depression and we feel less insecure.

Thus, it’s important to think positively and try hard, but not to be so self-confident that our goals are illusory or we alienate others with our narcissism. Taking self-efficacy too far leads to blaming the victim: If positive thinking can accomplish anything, then we have only ourselves to blaming if we are unhappily married, poor, or depressed. For shame! If only we had tried harder, been more disciplined, less stupid. This viewpoint fails to acknowledge that bad things can happen to good people. Life’s greatest achievements, but also its greatest disappointments, are born of the highest expectations.

These twin truths — self-efficacy and self-serving bias — remind us of what Pascal taught 300 years ago: No single truth is ever sufficient, because the world is complex. Any truth, separated from its complementary truth, is a half-truth.

We have an enormous capacity for automatic, efficient, intuitive thinking (System 1). Our cognitive efficiency, although generally adaptive, comes at the price of occasional error. Because we are generally unaware of those errors entering our thinking, it is useful to identify ways in which we form and sustain false beliefs.
Our preconceptions strongly influence how we interpret and remember events. In a phenomenon called priming, people’s prejudgments have striking effects on how they perceive and interpret information.
We often overestimate our judgments. This overconfidence phenomenon stems partly from the much greater ease with which we can image why we might be right than why we might be wrong. Moreover, people are much more likely to search for information that can confirm their beliefs than for information that can disconfirm them.
When given compelling anecdotes or even useless information, we often ignore useful base-rate information. This is partly due to the later ease of recall of vivid information(the availability heuristic).
We are often swayed by illusions of correlation and personal control. It is tempting to perceive correlations where none exist (illusory correlation) and to think we can predict or control chance events (the illusion of control).
Moods infuse judgments. Good and bad moods trigger memories of experiences associated with those moods. Moods color our interpretations of current experiences. And by distracting us, moods can also influence how deeply or superficially we think when making judgments.

System 1: The intuitive, automatic, unconscious, and fast way of thinking.
System 2: The deliberate, controlled, conscious, and slower way of thinking.
priming(启动): Activating particular associations in memory.
embodied cognition(具身认知): The mutual influence of bodily sensations on cognitive preferences and social judgments.
automatic processing: “Implicit” thinking that is effortless, habitual, and without awareness; roughly corresponds to “intuition.” Also known as System 1.
controlled processing: “Explicit” thinking that is deliberate, reflective, and conscious. Also known as System 2.
overconfidence phenomenon: The tendency to be more confident than correct——to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs.
confirmation bias(验证性偏差): A tendency to search for information that confirms one’s preconceptions.
heuristic(启发式判断): A thinking strategy that enables quick, efficient judgments.
representativeness heuristic(代表性启发式判断): The tendency to presume, sometimes despite contrary odds, that someone or something belongs to a particular group if resembling (representing) a typical member.
availability heuristic(易得性启发式判断): A cognitive rule that judges the likelihood of things in term of their availability in memory. If instances of something come readily to mind, we presume it to be commonplace
counterfactual thinking(反事实思维): Imagining alternative scenarios and outcomes that might have happened, but didn’t.
illusory correlation(错觉相关): Perception of a relationship where none exists, or perception of a stronger relationship than actually exists.
regression toward the average(趋均数回归): The statistical tendency for extreme scores or extreme behavior to return toward one’s average.

Other experiments have planted judgments or false ideas in people’s minds after they have been given information. These experiments reveal that as before-the-fact judgments bias our perceptions and interpretations, so after-the-fact judgments bias our recall.
Belief perseverance is the phenomenon in which people cling to their initial beliefs and the reasons why a belief might be true, even when the basis for belief is discredited.
Far from being a repository for facts about the past, our memories are actually formed when we retrieve them, and they are subject to strong influence by the attitudes and feelings we hold at the time of retrieval.

belief perseverance(信念固着): Persistence of one’s initial conceptions, such as when the basis for one’s belief is discredited but an explanation of why the belief might be true survives.
misinformation effect(误导信息效应): Incorporating “misinformation” into one’s memory of the event, after witnessing an event and receiving misleading information about it.

misattribution(错误归因): Mistakenly attributing a behavior to the wrong source.
attribution theory(归因理论): The theory of how people explain others’ behavior——for example, by attributing it either to internal dispositions (enduring traits, motives, and attitudes) or to external situations.
dispositional attribution(性格归因): Attributing behavior to the person’s disposition and traits.
situational attribution(情境性归因): Attributing behavior to the environment.
spontaneous trait inference(自发性特质归因): An effortless, automatic inference of a trait after exposure to someone’s behavior.
fundamental attribution error(基本归因错误): The tendency for observers to underestimate situational influences and overestimate dispositional influences upon other’s behavior.

Attribution theory involves how we explain people’s behavior. Misattribution——attributing a behavior to the wrong source——is a major factor in sexual harassment, as a person in power (typically male) interprets friendliness as a sexual come-on.
Although we usually make reasonable attributions, we often commit the fundamental attribution error when explaining other people’s behavior. We attribute their behavior so much to their inner traits and attitudes that we discount situational constraints, even when those are obvious. We make this attribution error partly because when we watch someone act, that person is the focus of our attention and the situation is relatively invisible. When we act, our attention is usually on what we are reacting to——the situation is more visible.

self-fulfilling prophecy(自我实现预言): A belief that leads to its own fulfillment.
behavioral confirmation(行为确证): A type of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby people’s social expectations lead them to behave in ways that cause others to confirm their expectations.

Our beliefs sometimes take on lives of their own. Usually, our beliefs about others have a basis in reality. But studies of experimenter bias and teacher expectations show that an erroneous belief that certain people are unusually capable (or incapable) can lead teachers and researchers to give those people special treatment. This may elicit superior (or inferior) performance and, therefore, seem to confirm an assumption that is actually false.
Similarly, in everyday life we often get behavioral confirmation of what we expect. Told that someone we are about to meet is intelligent and attractive, we may come away impressed with just how intelligent and attractive he or she is.

View human nature through cognitive social psychology

Research on social beliefs and judgments reveals how we form and sustain beliefs that usually serve us well but sometimes lead us astray. A balanced social psychology will therefore appreciate both the powers and the perils of social thinking.

4. Behavior and Attitudes

4.1 How well do our attitudes predict our behavior

attitude: Beliefs and feelings related to a person or an event (often rooted in one’s beliefs, and exhibited in one’s feelings and intended behavior).

How do our inner attitudes (evaluative reaction toward some object or person, often rooted in beliefs) relate to our external behavior? Although popular wisdom stresses the impact of attitudes on behavior, in fact, attitudes are often poor predictors of behaviors. Moreover, changing people’s attitudes typically fails to produce much change in their behavior. These findings inspired social psychologists to find out why we so often fail to play the game we talk.
The answer: Our expressions of attitudes and our behaviors are each subject to many influences. Our attitudes will predict our behavior (1) if these “other influences” are minimized, (2) if the attitude corresponds very closely to the predicted behavior (as in voting studies), and (3) if the attitude is potent (because something reminds us of it, or because we acquired it by direct experience). Under these conditions, what we think and feel predicts what we do.

4.2 When does our behavior affect our attitudes.

role: A set of norms that defines how people in a given social position ought to behave.

Social Thinking

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