Social thinking & attribution

1. Social thinking, Attribution &
Social influence
Instructor: Rustam Ali

2. Social thinking & Social perception
Social thinking
• Social thinking is what
individuals do when interacting
with other people: namely, they
think about them.
• Most people take social
thinking for granted, the points
of view, emotions, and
intentions of others.
Social perception
• Social perception is the process
of acquiring, interpreting,
selecting and organizing sensory
information in interpersonal and
social environments

3. Key concepts of Social thinking
• Social Facilitation
• Social cognition
• Impression formation
• Social Roles script
• Stereotype
• Attribution

4. Social Facilitation
• Social facilitation is defined as improvement or decrease in individual
performance when working with other people rather than alone.
• In addition to working together with other people, social facilitation
also occurs in the mere presence of other people.

5. Social cognition
• Cerebral cortex is the part of the brain that is involved in thinking.
• Humans are highly intelligent, and they use cognition in every part of
their social lives.
• Psychologists refer to cognition as the mental activity of processing
information and using that information in judgment.
• “Social cognition is cognition that relates to social activities and that
helps us understand and predict the behavior of ourselves and
others.”

6. Development of Social cognition:
• Social cognition develops in childhood and adolescence.
• As children grow, they become more aware not only of their own feelings,
thoughts, and motives but also of the emotions and mental states of others.
• Children become more adept at understanding how others feel, learning how to
respond in social situations, engaging in pro social behaviors, and taking the
perspective of others.
• Two types of knowledge are particularly important in social psychology:

7. schema
• A schema is a knowledge
representation that includes
information about a person or
group
• (our knowledge that Italians are
romantic).
Attitude
• Attitude is a knowledge
representation that includes primarily
our liking or disliking of a person,
thing, or group
• (“I really like Julie”; “I dislike my new
apartment”).

8. Impression formation
• A social psychological term referring to the way in which strangers
develop perceptions of each other.
• A long tradition of (largely experimental) studies has investigated the
impact of initial impressions. These have identified phenomena such
as primacy effects and halo effects.

9. Social Roles & scripts
Social Roles
• One major social determinant of
human behavior is our social
roles.
• A social role is a pattern of
behavior that is expected of a
person in a given setting or
group (Hare, 2003).
Script
• The concept of a "script" is
presented as a framework for
understanding the cognitive
dynamics underlying many
organizational behaviors and
actions.
• A script is a person’s knowledge
about the sequence of events
expected in a specific setting
(Schank & Abelson, 1977).

10. Stereotype
• Stereotype is an over-generalized belief about a particular category of people.
• It is an expectation that people might have about every person of a particular
group
• The term stereotypes were 1st introduced by Walter Lippmann in 1922.
• Characteristics of stereotypes
• Positive and negative views about someone
• Develops superiority and inferiority in a person or a group
• Ignore the uniqueness of the individual by painting all members of a group in with the
same brush.

11. Attribution
• Attribution theory is concerned with how ordinary people explain the
causes of behavior and events. For example, is someone angry
because they are bad-tempered or because something bad
happened?
• Attribution proposes that the attributions people make about events
and behavior can be classed as either internal or external.
• In an internal, or dispositional, attribution, people infer that an event
or a person's behavior is due to personal factors such as traits,
abilities, or feelings.

12. Types of Attribution
• Internal (inside locates)
• Stable (Permanent)
Natural Ability
• Uncontrollable (luck)
• External (outside locates)
• Unstable (Fluctuating)
Situational
• Controllable (effort)

13. Social influence
• Social influence is the process by which an individual's attitudes,
beliefs or behavior are modified by the presence or action of others.
• Areas of social influence
• Conformity,
• Compliance
• Obedience,

14. Conformity
• The process where by people change their beliefs, attitudes, actions,
or perceptions to more closely match those held by groups to which
they belong or want to belong or by groups whose approval they
desire.
• Conformity has important social implications and continues to be
actively researched.
• One example is when a person drinks and drives because friends do
it

15. Compliance
• Compliance refers to changing one's behavior due to the request or
direction of another person.
• The definition of compliance means following a rule or order.
• An example of compliance is when someone is told to go outside and
they listen to the order.

16. Obedience
• Obedience, in human behavior, is a form of "social influence in which
a person yields to explicit instructions or orders from an authority
figure".
• Obedience is generally distinguished from compliance, which is
behavior influenced by peers, and from conformity, which is behavior
intended to match that of the majority.
• Obedience is a form of social influence that involves performing an
action under the orders of an authority figure.

17. Thanks