The Understanding of Social Cognition - Essay Example

Schedule: The Contribution of Experimental Approaches in Informing our Understanding of Social Cognition Overview What distinguishes psychologists from other people is their level of skepticism and critical evaluation of things. Psychologists do not assume they have definite answers to an individuals’ behavior or that they ever will. But they do believe that they can learn so much more about cognition, personality and behavior if they persist on asking questions, making observations and studying them systematically. One of the most common approaches in studying social cognition, perception and attribution is experimental research. These are often used to test hypothesis about cause-and-effect relationships of the independent and dependent variables in an experimental group. Experimental researchers deploy methods and strategies in a controlled situation to observe reactions and behaviors in an attempt to explain the diverse and complex human behavior. This essay talks about the research designs, methodologies, and other commonalities that are usually employed in experimental researches. Moreover, this paper will also evaluate the contributions of these experimental researches in our everyday understanding of social cognition, the way people perceive, understand and explain events and situations in the social environment. Experimental approaches to social cognition: Schematic Processing and Attribution One of the most direct ways to learn about behavior is to listen and watch- observing how individuals’ behave in a given situation. According to Heider (1958) in order to understand social behavior we must pay attention to how people perceive and struggle to make sense of their social worlds, usually in terms of cause and effect. People learn about things through observing and interacting with others, they see how their actions affect other people around them. Along with our differences in cognition and knowledge are our differences in social perception. We interpret our observations through schema, a mental structure containing knowledge relating to a particular kind of subject and the social perception of how things usually happen in the social world. An experiment conducted by Rusher et al. (2000) provided an example of schematic processing. In this experiment, a group of students were observed as to the extent of stereotypical impressions versus their motivational relevance. The student participants were presented with a fictional task that involved monetary reward. There were two groups for the experiment, paired and individual participants. The task was simple, they were to make an impression of a person basing on the cards that describe that particular person’s attributes. It was found out that the pairs tend to evaluate the cards more carefully before they make a more accurate impression as compared to those who individually assess the descriptive cards. This was because the monetary reward for those in pairs depends how accurate both their impression will be compared to the participant who have to make an impression alone and still get the reward. The researchers concluded that motivational relevance does indeed play a part in social perception and leads perceivers to form impressions that are not simply based on stereotypical characteristics. Another social cognition experiment, the attribution theory, precedes that internal and external motivators are the main determinant in understanding a person’s behavior. It further postulates that certain behaviors are explained and interpreted through these factors and that internal and external motivators represent an aspect of causality (Heider, 1958). It suggests that the conclusions we draw about people vary according to whether we attribute their actions to their qualities or to the situation in which they find themselves and the more a person attributes internal factors are the causality of behavior, the less likely he is to account other external factors. In an experiment designed by Storms, (1973) he revealed the nature and causes of the actor/observer effect. He concluded that social perspectives will lead to a change in causal explanations of a person in a given situation. In his experiment, he demonstrated the evidence of Fundamental Attribution Error and Actor/Observer Effect among the participants. His experiment was to investigate the nature and causes of the actor/observer effect among the participants. This experiment involved groups of four participants given the role of actors, and observers, each being asked to observe one of the actors while they were conversing and was being videotaped. In the experimental condition the participants were told that the videotape of one of the actors was faulty when their conversation ended while the control conditions were told that both tapes were faulty. The overall findings showed that actors tended to favor situational explanations of their behavior whereas observers tended to favor dispositional explanations of the same behavior. As for the actors, their perception was not internal as it was the situation that brought along the behavior. With these, Storms concluded that because there was a change in the participants’ perceptual perspective, their reactions were no longer internal as these were already attributed to the situation that was presented to them leading to a change in their causal explanations. Commonalities of the studies: Designs, Method, and Results Experimental studies usually employ methods and techniques that are much simpler and much more straightforward than it actually is. The behaviors that are being observed in the everyday life are taken inside the laboratory to be tested for consistency and applicability. The real life complexity of human behaviors is therefore simplified and sometimes do not adequately reflect the nature of judgmental tasks as people actually encounter them in everyday life. This is the case of ecological validity- the presence of an observer or the mere knowledge that subjects are being observed will, on some extent, have effects on the results of the study. Under observation, people are apt to please or impress others, to act as they think they are expected to act. Although the control group helps correct this issue, it does not, however eliminates the problem on ecological validity as findings from laboratory studies can sometimes be different from those in social environment because the experience of the task in the laboratory is, by definition, different from what it would have been in the everyday life. Another aspect to consider in experimental research is the risk perception. Risk includes subjective estimates of the probability of what might happen, and subjective evaluations and feelings about the outcome. In doing experimental research, it is not always expected that results are directional because regardless of the extent of an individuals’ predictability, there still remains the complexity of each human experience. As researches and studies may give calculations on possible outcome of a certain behavior, for example, people will still tend to look at the other way. A good example of this is the risk involved in cigarette smoking. Even when calculations about the risk of dying early for people who smoke is generated, a lot of them still smoke cigarette. An example of risk estimate was prevalent in the study conducted by Taylor et al (1992) over the widespread sense of personal invulnerability particularly towards the people who considers the risk of HIV/AIDS. In this study, they found out that the men in the sample who knew they were HIV positive were significantly more optimistic about not developing AIDS than the men who knew they did not have HIV. Another research however suggested that it was not always the case. In a similar study, researcher Weinstein found out that the more severe an event is felt the less optimistic a bias it evokes and further suggests that people’s personal bias and irrationality play a major role in risk perception (Mapping psychology; pp 90). Conclusions Experimental approaches and studies have major contribution in our understanding of human social cognition. The results of their laboratory experiments and observations provided us with insights on the very diverse and complex human behavior. Although human behavior is generally unpredictable, the results of the experimental studies and researches gave us the main grip on the tendencies of social behavior that are helpful in explaining why people behave, think, and act the way they usually do. It helps us see the bigger picture in terms of the cause-and-effect of a certain experiment that addresses our concerns on social cognition. But then again, given the fact that human experience is entirely complex and constantly changes from over time, these experimental approaches do not have the definite, matter-of-fact answers to our everyday questions about social cognition. As there are strengths in the experimental studies, there are also weaknesses. And for this fact, many psychological researches and studies have been replicated in an attempt to find commonality among the observed behaviors. Even with the primary goal of producing the closest results, experimental approaches are not free from numerous pitfalls that trap the study into mistakes. Psychologists are only human and no matter how objective they seem to be in their research, there is still a chance that they will find what they intended to find, unwittingly overlooking other contrary evidence. And the research-participants, on the other hand, are complex people, with attitudes, feelings, and ideas of their own that are not controlled even with the presence of the experimenter. Human beings have different versions of rationality. One cannot make people to operate in a prescribed way because people do not always operate as scientists, they are not rational the way that was expected. Human as we are, we have own conceptualizations of life and we are rational in terms of how we associate meanings, cultural processes and the functions that our perceptions serve but our actions and behaviors are not always predictable. The theories and models which these experimental studies have set serve as the explanation for the structure of human behavior and enable us to make relatively accurate predictions that can be used for future studies and reference. They gauge and enhance our understanding of how people perceive and behave in the social world, contributing to our understanding of social cognition. References Gormly, Ann V. Understanding Psychology. New York. Random House: 1993. Print. Heider, F. (1958) The psychology of interpersonal relations, New York, Wiley Joffe, H. (1999) Risk and the other, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press The open university. (2007) Mapping psychology, United Kingdom, CP. . Read More