POTENTIAL SOURCES OF ERRORS IN SOCIAL COGNITION

Human beings reason thoughtfully on most of the social occasions, does not guarantee us rationality of thinking. This means that though we try to be correct in our thought process, we are likely to make errors in our social judgments. We shall explore some errors in cognition. 

 Negativity Bias: Take following example: Niranjan is bright, helpful, social, jealous, and friendly person. Which adjective has attracted your attention the most. Perhaps, jealous…right…! This happens because of our tendency called as negativity bias. The tendency of Human beings to pay more attention to negative information than positive information is called as negativity bias. Social psychologists have recognized this tendency of human beings for a long time. Negativity bias refers to the tendency to show greater sensitivity to negative information than positive information. 28 We pay more attention to any negative event, characteristics, etc., of social situation. This is seen in variety of social situations. Such a tendency has a strong evolutionary relevance. Negative information reflects potentially dangerous aspects of the situation which may cause threat to the survival of the individual. Hence, one need to be sensitive to such an information. Human beings detect negative emotions very quickly than positive emotions. This does not mean that we are always negative in our attention. Indeed we also pay attention to positive information, and negativity bias gets eliminated under positive priming conditions.

The Optimistic Bias: We also have an exactly opposite bias called as ‘optimistic bias’. The optimistic bias refers to the tendency to expect the overall outcomes as positive. Generally, most people believe that they are more likely to experience positive events than others. The optimistic bias refers to the tendency to expect the overall outcomes as positive. The effect of optimistic bias is seen on many of our actions and behaviors. Two examples are overconfidence barrier and planning fallacy. Overconfidence barrier refers to tendency to be more confident about the accuracy of our judgments than sensible. We believe that we are more likely to be successful in studies, relations, marriage, jobs, and live longer life than what seems reasonable. This bias is called as overconfidence barrier. Another result of the optimism is planning fallacy. Planning fallacy is a tendency to make optimistic bias regarding the time estimations for a given task. We tend to believe that we will finish a task much earlier than what it would actually take. Think of your time-tables for examination studies. We typically never finish our studies in the planned time. Because we tend to be unrealistically optimistic in our estimations of time. Planning fallacy is a tendency to believe that we can do more work in given period of time than actually or realistically is possible. The planning fallacy occurs because we tend to ignore how much time a particular task has taken in past. We tent to focus on future and make a narrative account. Even when we focus on past 29 we believe that we took more time because of the external factors outside our control which may not affect us now. So if we pay careful attention to potential obstacles, then we can correctly estimate the time required and avoid the planning fallacy.

Counterfactual Thinking : Suppose your friend applies for a specific college and fail to get admission because of less merit. You quickly think that ‘he should have studied more’. If you know that somebody met with an accident and you think ‘what if he wouldn’t have started at that time. This is typically known as counterfactual thinking. Counterfactual thinking is thinking about a past that did not happen. It is tendency to imagine other outcomes in the situation than the once that have occurred. Counterfactual thinking is not just limited to the negative events. It is wide range of automatic thinking that influences our social cognition. Counterfactual thinking is thinking about a past that did not happen. It is tendency to imagine other outcomes in the situation than the one’s that have occurred. Counterfactual literally means ‘contrary to the facts’. The term counterfactual thinking refers to a set of cognitions involving the simulation of alternatives to past or present factual events or circumstances. Suppose, two of your friends failed in unit test because they did not study well. Since the outcome is similar, you should feel similar sympathy for them. Now, imagine that A otherwise studies regularly, and B rarely studies. Now for whom you will have more sympathy..? You think of alternatives for the behavior of A than B and feel more sympathetic for him. Counterfactual thinking is a very strong bias in thinking. In order to get rid of counterfactual thinking one need to suppress counterfactual thoughts or discount them. Counterfactual thinking can be beneficial or costly for the user depending on how it is used. Suppose you have missed a top position in your class by one point. You think that ‘you could have done better’ or ‘least you retained second position in class’, you are engaging in two different types of counterfactual thoughts: upward and downward. This is one useful classification of counterfactuals is based on their direction of comparison (Roese, 1994). Counterfactuals may result in alternative circumstances that are evaluatively better than actual (i.e., upward counterfactuals) or evaluatively worse than actual (i.e., downward counterfactuals). Often, regret can be confused with counterfactual thinking. Regret is an emotion whereas counterfactual thinking is thought. 30 4.3.4 Thought Suppression : Human beings can manage to keep some thought out of their consciousness. This is called as thought suppression. If certain thoughts are disturbing, we can stay mentally healthy by keeping them out of mind. Thought suppression can be achieved in two stages: 

(i) Monitoring Process: this is an automatic monitoring process, which identifies an unwanted interrupting thought. 

ii) Operating Process: this is an effortful, controlled process to find other important thought to distract from the disturbing thought. Individuals engage in thought suppression by influencing their feeling or behaviors.

Magical Thinking: Suppose your friend offers you chocolates that have shape of insect, or cockroach. Will you eat that chocolate...? Most probably no. if you think rationally, the shape of the chocolate does not decide the contents. But still you will not, this is because of magical thinking. Magical thinking involves assumption that does not hold under rational scrutiny, but still individuals believe in them. One of the examples of it is, if two things resemble in external appearance, then they share similar fundamental properties. The plastic or rubber model of snakes or lizard can also create panic among the people. Magical thinking involves assumption that does not hold under rational scrutiny Positive view of Social Cognition: From the earlier discussion it appears that we are making only errors in thinking. Look at various kinds of heuristics that human beings use and various kinds of errors we make in social thinking. This provides a vey grim view of social cognition. As if we are making all judgments and decision irrationally. But in reality, we are processing huge amount of social information. And still, most of the time, in our social interactions, we are making useful and efficient judgments. It is also true that we are cognitive misers, and lazy about using rationality, but these rules of thumb often give us useful judgments. So we need not feel that this is making our life worse. It is certainly bringing some limitation to human thinking, and hence we are not becoming machines that process information, computers. This is what gives humanness to human thinking.