Question

Discuss the view that social cognition is prone to errors and biases. Answer in less than 1000 words.

Answer 1

Social cognition involves how we think about the social world. It involves the use of schemas. Schemas are often helpful because they permit us to make sense out of a vast array of social information. However, they have an important “downside,” too. By influencing what we notice, enter into memory, and later remember, schemas can produce distortions in our understanding of the social world. Unfortunately, schemas are often resistant to change. They show a strong perseverance effect, remaining unchanged even in the face of contradictory information. Perhaps even worse, schemas can sometimes be self-fulfilling: They influence our responses to the social world in ways that make our expectations come true, consistent with the schemas.

Social cognition also involves certain errors and biases. f we were completely rational in the ways we think about the social world, we would simply gather information, process it, and then use it to make judgments and decisions. Instead, in many respects, most people tend to “see the world through rose-colored glasses.” This tendency is known as the optimistic bias—a powerful predisposition to overlook risks and expect things to turn out well. In fact, research findings indicate that most people believe they are more likely than others to experience positive events, and less likely to experience negative events. imilarly, we often have greater confidence in our beliefs or judgments than is justified—an effect known as the overconfidence bias. Ironically enough, people who are least competent in a domain are often the most likely to be overconfident of their judgments in that domain! Like many other types of judgments, we frequently have to assess our competence under conditions of uncertainty—where all the relevant information is not known. Another illustration of optimism at work is the planning fallacy—our tendency to believe that we can get more done in a given period of time than we actually can, or that a given job will take less time than it really will. We can see this aspect of the optimistic bias in announced schedules for public works (e.g., new roads, airports, bridges, stadiums) that have no chance of being met. Individuals, too, adopt unrealistically optimistic schedules.