User:MandaG/Tutorial and lecture 3

Social Thinking...where to begin. I guess I'll start where James started with social perception.

Social Perception Perception, in the dictionary of Manda, does not mean what is actually happening but moreover what we believe is happening and thus makes perception very unique to the individual. This perception can relate to anything but to keep my rambling to a minimum I will talk in the scope of the lecture and limit it a little. First up communication.

Communication What is important to note when looking at communication is that cues can be both verbal and non verbal. Ignorance in picking up on less obvious cues often leads to conflict. Though I am writing this quite a while after the actual lecture I had my own experience of ignorance in this area on Tuesday night which I'll share but feel free to just skip over. So I was umpiring a game of very high division and competitive softball. One of the calls I made though of course right was disputed and while I picked up on the verbal of what was being said to me loud and clear, I totally ignored the body language.

This led to a very ugly situation where I thought the player was talking in jest when his body language was clearly aggressive and very serious and because I missed that cue my perception of the conflict was entirely wrong, and I'll admit it quite embarrassing. I think as a student of psychology, and just to get a little philosophical, a student of life, it is important to avoid misunderstandings in communications as much as possible to try and limit conflict and thus be aware of all aspects of communication.

Impression Formation and Management (Social impressions, stereotypes, schema's and scripts)

• The duplex mind: To me the duplex mind is a very simplistic yet necessary idea to know about. Basically its common sense. The automatic side is things that are unconscious, fast and effortless to do and typically require very low cognitive attention. On the flip side the conscious mind takes a little more effort, is slow and deliberate and typically is a higher cognitive load. An automatic act may be the simple act of walking (for most), we don't tend to think about it or put much effort in to it. A more conscious task may be writing an essay. Unless you belong to MENSA (and perhaps even then), a lot of time and effort goes into writing the material.

• Cognitive Miser: The cognitive miser is basically in my opinion what allows us to function as human beings. The amount of stimulation we are presented every minute of everyday is outrageously huge. If we were to pay attention to every single aspect I'm fairly certain we would all go crazy! The miser allows us to filter out things that are not immediately important and use our energy wisely focusing on things that are most salient or important. There is also evidence of the nature of laziness, when our mind is preoccupied we take more short cuts than usual, which lets be honest is quite a few, to reduce need for too much thought.

  

• Schema's

- Part of the automatic mind which stores information about a concept, it's attributes and relationship to the world. For example, my schema for a table is: Geometricly shaped, legs, used to sit around or eat (and occasionally with enough vodka to dance on). The good thing about schema's is that they allow us to understand the world and save us from too much in depth, effortful thought to process stimuli that are very similar. I can use my schema to identify a table in the refec as it matches my preconcieved idea and its not too hard. The bad thing about schemas is that they may interfere with new information that doesn't fit the previous schema. So say I had a schema that all apples were roundish, I would probably find it very hard to apply that schema if ever a square apple were found.

• Priming

Activating a concept in the mind: –Influences subsequent thinking –May trigger automatic processes In the lecture notes James used the example of the medical student whos thinks they and family members are suffering from serious illness. However, I don't think we have to look past our own backyard...but it might just be me though I hope not. Every lecture where we talk about some form of psychopathology, or sleep disorders, eating disorders anything I ALWAYS apply that to someone, anyone I know or have met at some point in my life. Mind you I don't think thats always a bad thing. While typing this I was watching Scrubs, for those not familiar the funniest show (next to I Love Lucy) ever written! Anyway the point is the protaganist JD had just watched a program on a rare disease and due to that priming was able to identify it in a patient the following week when everyone else was stumped.

• Attribution Theories

When it comes to attributions we tend to make them either internally or externally. We tend to attribute our own errors to external circumstances and others short comings or errors to internal circumstances. If I'm late clearly the world is against me! All the lights were red, there was an accident that held traffic up, there were random sheep running the streets etc etc. If somebody else is late well heck they are just that kind of person who is unorganised, scatter brained and unable to plan for extenuating circumstances. This is what we call the fundamental attribution error. There are also other attribution theories outlined in the lecture but that one was the one I most identified with.

Attitudes and beliefs

• JennyO has possibly the coolest link on her page (so you guys should check it out!) and its a test that measures implicit attitudes. I would try to improve on her explanations and have a cool link but I can't it beat so I suggest you check it out on Jenny's page.

• I've always hated that saying "You are nothing if not consistent", but when it comes to attitudes and beliefs that's just how it is. We all like to think that we are a constant in what we believe and how we act, and when that is not the case we suffer from cognitive disonance.

  

  When cognitive disonance occurs it means your attitude does not match your behaviour and to fix the situation, we need to either change the attitude or behaviour. A majority of the time what happens is we rationalise our actions to fit with the behaviour, for all intents and purposes I believe speeding kills. However, if I said I never speed I would toally be lying. To ease my cognitive disonance when I speed I tend to rationalise it by saying I am what I have christened "safe speeding". What safe speeding means is that while yes I am going over the legal limit I am still driving within my capacity and thus am not endangering myself or other motorists. Bad yes and I do try not to do it too often but it is an example of an everyday situation in which I'm sure its not just me rationalises an attitude that does not match the behaviour.

Social Influence and Persuasion Social Influence Questions (as per lecture notes) and my answers: How can you get others to do what you want them to do? If I knew that there would be no telling of the luxuries I would be enjoying right now! I wouldn't even be writing this as James would just give me a HD straight up, feel free to do it James. Would you obey an order that you disagreed with? I like to think not. I use to work at a popular restaraunt where the head chef ordered me to take a meat meal to a vegetarian and not tell them it wasn't vegetarian because he stuffed up an order. I disagreed with this order and refused to obey it. This led to a huge conflict and resulted in me quitting the job. However, the loss of a job I decided I no longer wanted is a relatively small consequence and I wonder if my actions would have been different if the consequence was larger, I hope not but who knows. Why do we often go along with the majority/group? FEAR OF REJECTION!

• There are many concepts related to influence and persuasion and my favourite is conformity. I just don't get it. In some circumstances conformity just doesn't make sense! check out this you tube video: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=a71h6LZKXTc. You can see where each door goes yet the people still conform. It's just weird! The concept that scares me is the idea of depersonalisation. How in Sam Heck can you depersonalise yourself??? Yet people do it and when that happens atrocities such as the Nazi party can occur.

My favourite technique of social influence is the "Thats not all" technique. Ever watched late night television because you couldn't sleep? I swear nearly every infommercial has some sort of statement like this" AAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNND that's not all ladies and gentlemen, but this product and get a set of steak knives free! Thats right FREE! And for some bizzare reason it works. My aunt bought some useless ornament I don't think she ever took out of the box just for the steak knives. I think the other techniques (see textbook and lecture notes) may however be more effective. My reason for this is because people don't always want something more if that something more is entirely useless to them.

I think the most useful one and most talked about is the door in face technique. I had a discussion just the other day with a non psych friend of mine who thinking she was being very wise and original said: "Ask for a horse and you get a pony" I responded with why wouldn't you just ask for the pony straight up.

Apparently if you do that you only get a dog. The point is ask bigger than what you want and you'll be more likely to get a "concession". While psych people have a name for that technique non psych people use it all the time.