Posts Tagged ‘Social Cognition’


April 17th, 2017 5 comments


That feeling when no one understands you…



April 17th, 2017 2 comments




From cocky and conflict ridden to conscious: Causes and implications of the bias blind spot

April 17th, 2017 No comments

“You are extremely average with extremely mediocre talent” my sister tells me every time she thinks I get overly confident and cocky. Why might she say this to me? In order to “plateau” me. “Plateauing,” as my sister would define it, involves dosing out a few insults in order to counteract the effects of excessively high self-esteem.

Or, as a cognitive psychologist might say, dosing out a few insults in order to counteract the self-enhancement bias (i.e. viewing yourself in a very positive way). My sister (as many siblings tend to do) easily recognizes when I act on the self-enhancement bias- and thank goodness she does! Why? Because I don’t.

Before you start feeling bad for me and the fact that I don’t have the ability to recognize my own biases, I’d like to introduce another type of bias, called the bias blind spot. The bias blind spot is the inability for people to recognize a bias in themselves, even if they can see it in others. Studies show that people of all ages and backgrounds are likely to notice biases in others, but do not notice biases in themselves (Pronin, 2007; Pronin & Kugler, 2007; West, Meserve, & Stanovich, 2012). So guess what? Research says that you too are susceptible to be blind to the effects biases play on your thoughts and actions. Not so cocky now, aren’t you? Read more…

Either you’re in or you’re out: The power of in-group bias

April 16th, 2017 1 comment

Have you ever seen someone wearing a shirt with a political candidate you don’t like, and automatically assumed the worst about him or her? Or perhaps you have been at a sporting event, and felt a strong connection towards fans cheering for your team. Why do we make judgments about people we know nothing about based on their group identification? Why do we assume good things about strangers who are more similar to us, or bad things about anyone who differs? What justifies this behavior?

In-group biases 

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Hop on the Bandwagon: Examining the Cognitive Processes Behind Why You Simply MUST Have That

Walking around Colby College campus on a rainy day, one often sees a  dizzying number of Hunter rain boots and Timberland boots. It seems that everyone is wearing the same style of boots. Why are these boots so popular? Who started wearing them? Why are these boots everywhere? In his book, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell examines social epidemics, such as fashion trends and smoking, and the moment they take off. It’s an excellent read that strives to explain how seemingly sudden social epidemics start and are sustained. While Gladwell never explicitly uses the term ‘bandwagon effect’, his case studies in the book concerning fashion trends hint at this phenomenon.

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Once a Cheater, Always a Cheater. Or So You think.

 Ever met someone you just don’t trust? Maybe it’s something about their face. Maybe you heard something about them from a friend that made you wince in disgust. Research shows that this distrust tends to be a stubborn figment in our imaginations—even when we learn that our reasoning for distrusting someone is unfounded, we have a hard time accepting that the person in question is trust-worthy. A group of cognitive psychologists from Japan wondered why this is the case. Their question: why is it that we’re so good at remembering people who are “cheaters?” Given that we’re social animals cooperatively working to make this thing called society work, is it possible that we’re hard-wired to explicitly identify others who take nefarious advantage of our cooperation? Perhaps evolution is at play, and we need this ability to continue to make society viable (Suzuki, Honma, and Suga, 2013). They wondered just that and decided to study this question with a series of experiments testing the durability of stigma participants held in their study.

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