What is social cognition?
the ways people perceive, interpret, and think about themselves and others in social contexts
- How we make sense of social interactions / contexts
What is the Interpersonal gap in communication?
Interpersonal gap = disconnect between what the sender intends to communicate and the effect of the communication on the perceiver
How does the interpersonal gap work?
- What does the sender do?
- What does the receiver do?
Sender:
- Their private intentions
- Their actions
- Encode both into a message
(The method of encoding and noise influence the message received)
Receiver:
- This causes an effect on the listener
- Have private interpretations of the senders message
Examples of how our social interactions are ambiguous:
(Sorta freebie)
Is my girlfriend laughing at her ex’s jokes because it’s a party and she’s just
being friendly, or is she still hung up on him?
Is the cute stranger I’m chatting up flirting back or are they just being polite?
Is he taking a long time to text back because he’s busy, or because he doesn’t
want to talk to me?
What is attributional conflict often seen with couples?
couple conflict is rooted in disagreements about the meaning of an event rather than disagreement about its occurrence
- Ex. Liking an ex’s pic
- Blip / no thought
- Threat to relationship
(Don’t disagree it happened, but disagree on the meaning behind liking it)
What is Empathic accuracy?
How good we are at mind reading
What is Empathic inference?
the everyday mind reading we do to attempt to figure out others’ thoughts and feeling
- Our attempt to understand other’s thoughts and feelings
Measuring empathic accuracy: What is the Dyadic interaction paradigm
Step 1: Key & Peele have natural, unobtrusively recorded interaction
- Step 2: Key watches video and marks spots where he had a specific, clearly remembered thought or feeling. Peele does the same thing.
- Step 3: Key watches the video again and records his inference about Peele’s
thoughts/feelings. Peele does the same thing for Key. - Step 4: Researchers compare Key’s self-reported thoughts/feelings against
Peele’s inferences (and vice versa). - Useful for making comparisons between different types of dyads
Measuring empathic accuracy: What is the Standard stimulus paradigm
Ppl watch a prerecorded viedo
- Ppl in video reported thoughts and feelings at various points
- Participants make guesses about the people in the video
And their score is calculated
Empathic accuracy is a function of _________?
perceiver ability
Empathic accuracy is NOT predicted by?
- Self reported empathy (sometimes even find opposite correlation)
- Intelligence
Empathic accuracy IS predicted by?
- Age (but not beyond childhood)
- Kids suck at understanding others
- Gender (kind of?)
- Women are sometimes better / sometimes not
- Men are rarely better
What are the two most important predictors of empathic accuracy?
- target characteristics
- Some people are easier to read then others - one’s relationship with the target
- We are more accurate with partners and friends then strangers
- We use subtle cues we pick up through knowing them
Sometimes we are worse at reading those close to us?
Why?
Our Empathic accuracy declines after years of marriage
- the interpersonal gap is sometimes
larger between close others relative to
strangers or casual acquaintance- Due to perspective taking
What is Perspective taking?
need to recognize that others do not see the world exactly as we do—we differ in knowledge, expectations, motivations,
perspectives ,etc.
* Perspective taking is a skill that is developed over time
How do we test perspective taking in young children (director task)?
Young children do not distinguish between what they know & what others
know—exhibit poor performance on standardized tasks like the Director Task
They need to instruct someone to move objects
- They are both looking at diff perspectives of diff things
(they need to understand what others see isn’t the same as you)
Perspective taking in adulthood
- Ego Centric bias examples
What is false consensus effect
Overestimate extent to which others share our attitudes & feeling
Perspective taking in adulthood
- Ego Centric bias examples
What is Curse of knowledge
Use our own knowledge as guide to others’ knowledge
- a cognitive bias where we incorrectly assume that everyone knows as much as we do on a given topic
Perspective taking in adulthood
- Ego Centric bias examples
What is illusion of transparency
Overestimate extent to which our internal states are accessible to others
Do ego centric biases change with age?
Yeah we get better at countering them as we get older
- Become better at effortfully correcting initial egocentric interpretation by
taking into account difference between self and other’s perspective
What does the Dual-process model say about adult effortful correction of ego centric bias?
(2 stages)
Stage 1: automatic, effortless default (leans egocentric)
- Stage 2: effortful correction
= Differences between children & adults on Director Task:
➢ Adults make fewer mistakes (although still make some!)
➢ But do not differ in tendency to look at egocentric object
TO SUM: Adults no less likely than children to consider the egocentric object, just
more likely to make the appropriate correction
What are the implications for the dual process model on ego centric bias?
Egocentric biases are increased under cognitive load—distractions, fatigue,
stress
- Motivation reduces egocentric bias; lack of
motivation amplifies it
why are we sometimes more egocentric when communicating with close
others than with strangers?
We get complacent—motivation wanes, plus we assume that we know our
partner and that they share our perspective and so we let down our guard
So with strangers we assume their perspective is different & pay more attention
➢ E.g., less correction on Director Task when with a friend vs. stranger
Why might women display higher levels of empathic accuracy?
: empathy forms a larger part of women’s desired self-image (e.g., due to socialization)
- Can boost women’s effort and empathic accuracy by presenting them information that threatens their empathic skill as women
(Given women article saying women score low on empathy, then given a mind reading task (they’ll want to disprove the article))
- Better accuracy(men’s accuracy goes up when told women are attracted to empathy)
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