“People don’t just receive external
information; they also process it and become architects of their own social
environment” – Markus
and Zajonc (1985)
Imagine
yourself in a new environment full of people you’ve never met. For most, this
is a stressful situation. Interacting with people without knowing how they see
and interpret the world carries a fair degree of uncertainty, and therefore,
vigilance.
Most of
this happens unconsciously and automatically, and is the foundation of social
cognition. When thinking about the world around us, we are highly influenced by
our heuristics and the way in which we are socialised.
The looking-glass self, popular in psychology since the
early 1900s, is the most basic way of looking at this process. The theory is
that each of us derives our identities from how we perceive others to see us.
This occurs due to theory of mind, a cognitive
process unique to humans.
Simply
speaking: we change how we behave based on the people and environment around
us.
Yeung and Martin present the
theory in three stages: thinking about how we appear to others, reacting to
their judgment of our appearance, and modifying our behaviour in response to
those judgments. The second stage is the most interesting, as we can never be
certain of how others are actually judging us (if at all).
We just make
best guesses based on the context.
However,
these guesses are often less than accurate. Humans are notorious cognitive
misers, and are biased towards choosing the path of least resistance when it
comes to forming judgments and theories.
In
classical psychology, the model of the naïve scientist was one way of examining
these cognitive shortcomings. The naïve scientist, in thinking about the world,
seeks to create balance and control the environment around them.
Any new
situation is interpreted by an individual through the lens of a scientist (albeit a naïve one) based
on observations and common sense.
But ‘common
sense’ is actually pretty subjective. If a situation does not fit our internal
model of the world, it creates dissonance, and as recent research has shown, we engage in all manner of cognitive
leapfrogging in order to reduce it.
Research
into the naïve scientist theory has revealed a wealth of biases and heuristics that we employ daily, and often unconsciously, to
circumvent unfamiliar situations.
The
argument over how many of these biases are evolutionary is ongoing, but there
is solid evidence to support that many developed in order to reduce cognitive
load and generally make our lives easier. While these may have been very
effective in our hunter-gatherer days, some are less than beneficial in the
modern world.
Think of
pattern-seeking (or categorisation heuristics).
We have evolved over millennia to seek out patterns, as recognising them has
proved far more beneficial than not over our evolutionary lifespan.
Even today,
it does less harm to see a threat when there is none, than to not see a threat
when it is lurking just around the corner.
For
instance, if you hear a loud sound go off behind you, you will turn quickly to
see what it is. The more it goes off, however, the more you will habituate to it, as you have categorised it as
non-threatening. If we didn’t have this heuristic, we would constantly be on-edge
even when the environment free of threats.
But
categorisation heuristics also mean we see patterns that are not there, or
group things into narrow categories even when broad categories are more
logical. We do this for the sake of easy remembrance, as the more categories we
attach something to, the easier it becomes to recall. This is the nodal network model of memory; a popular theory to this
day.
The
conjunction fallacy is a great example of a categorisation heuristic. Consider
the following put forth by Tversky and Kahneman:
Because of
our need to categorise, option 2 seems to make sense. Linda is interested in
social justice, so why wouldn’t she be a feminist?
Option 1 is
the correct answer simply because there are more bank tellers in the world than
there are bank tellers who are also feminists. Here, our preconceptions of how
‘representative’ Linda is to the options given influences our ability to
categorise in a rational manner.
All of
these ways of thinking – the looking-glass self, the naïve scientist,
categorisation heuristics – boil down to motivated reasoning.
Every
interpretation we make is done so to achieve the same goal: to interpret the
world in a way that makes sense to us, reaffirming what we already believe.
With motivated reasoning, we actively reduce the dissonance that occurs when
things don’t make sense.
And as
previously stated, what ‘makes sense’ to one person does not necessarily make
sense to the next. For some, even objective truths don’t make much sense, which
is why clinging to false beliefs is such an effective comfort strategy for
those whose beliefs don't match the reality.
Next time:
Intergroup relations and latitudes of judgment.
a.ce
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