Lecture notes Economic and Consumer Psychology

ECP lecture notes

Week 1: Introduction/Automaticity

Social cognition:
= how people make sense of people (including themselves)
 Social perception: social categorisation of individuals into groups (e.g. elderly)
 Attribution: what causes people to behave in a certain way? -> circumstances,
chance, individuals?
 Decisions: conscious decision-making, peer pressure, intuition?
 Attitudes: what creates positive/negative attitudes? Long and short term

Behaviourism vs. social cognition:
 Classic (behaviourist) perspective
Stimulus -> response
 Socio-cognitive perspective
Stimulus -> information processing, mental representations -> response

Characteristics:
1. Mentalism (cognitive representations)
2. Information processing process
3. Cross-fertilisation (cognitive psychology, neuroscience)
4. Relevant ‘real world’ phenomena (prejudice, attitudes)

Models of the Social Thinker
1. Consistency seeker
- Consistency in behaviour, attitudes, self-image
- This provides meaning, certainty
- Cognitive dissonance theory
2. Cognitive miser
- Avoid cognitive effort
- Uses heuristics to facilitate judgements
- Relies on schematic information processing (e.g. stereotyping)
3. Naïve scientist
- Wants to figure out causes
- Systematic information processing
- Aimed at informed, accurate judgements
- Attribution (why does someone act like that? Character or situational pressure?)
- Out-of-role behaviour (= when a certain behaviour is not attributable to a
situation, so must be personality)
4. Motivated tactician
- When a schema/heuristics (intuition)?
- When accurate picture/informed decision?
- Two factors 1) motivation (do you want to create an accurate picture?, 2)
cognitive capacity (can you create an accurate picture?)
- Not motivated/incapable -> cognitive miser

, - Motivated + capable -> naïve scientist
- Two modes of info processing: fast & slow
5. Activated actor
- Social environment primes automatic behaviour, without people being aware of
it

Automaticity
Criteria for Automaticity:
1. Unconscious
- Stimulus
- Consequences of stimulus
2. Efficient
- Requires little or no attention
3. Unintentional
- Happens without you wanting it
4. Uncontrollable
- You cannot stop it
- Reflex

Types of Automaticity
 Subliminal priming (pre-conscious automaticity):
- Unconscious primes (stereotypes)
 Supraliminal priming (post-conscious automaticity):
- People act according to a prime (people have to think of something consciously)
 Chronic accessibility:
= constructs that a person frequently uses when judging social stimuli
- Mental constructs (stereotype, personality trait, attitude, knowledge)
- Accessible (activated, ready and waiting to interpret new info)
- When accessible? -> recently activated (priming) and frequently activated
(chronically accessible)
- Depends on one’s role/culture
- Becomes stronger when consciously used: proceduralisation + between pre- and
post-conscious automaticity
 Goal-dependent automaticity:
- Process proceeds automatically as a function of the goal
- E.g. following a route ‘automatically’ while cycling

Has an influence on:
- Goals
- Norms/scripts
- Behaviour
- Evaluation
- Emotions

, Week 2: Goals & Self-regulation
Conceptual issues
 Motives
- Set behaviour (and cognition) in motion
 Goals
- Cognitive representation of a desired end-state
 Self-regulation
- Cognitive processes guiding goal-pursuit

Five Core Motives
1. Belonging to something
= the most fundamental human social need (family, friends, groups)
- If this is threatened -> other motives automatically threatened
- Contributes to physical/psychological pain
- Loneliness/ostracism is aversive
- Social exclusion causes stress (Kip experiment)
2. Understanding (environment, world)
- Naïve scientists/consistency seekers
- People need (socially shared) sense of meaning
- Meaning threats -> absurdist humour, art, literature + reversed coloured playing
cards
- Consequences: punishing world-view threatening others + search for meaning
3. Control (in their life)
- People need to feel some control over the (social) world around them
- Lacking control is aversive and leads to attempts to regain control
- Control manipulation
4. Positive self-image (see lecture 4)
5. Trust in ingroup (see lecture 4 + 7)

Why is motivation so important or social cognition?
 Dual process models
- Automatic (quick, heuristics, default)
- Systematic (slow, informed decisions, when motivated/interested)
 In which mode you process info (partly) depends on motivation

Impression-Formation Continuum
 Stereotyping = default
 Individuation dependent on
- Cognitive capacity
- Motivation for accurate impression