Hello and welcome to the very first lecture in social psyc. So, the first thing to know
is that we are all cognitive misers and that we don’t like having to take a lot of time
to make judgments. We want to do that with as little cognitive effort as is possible.
So a good example of how being a cognitive miser can get in our way is when we have to
pick a paint color. So, let’s say you want to paint a wall blue and you go to the hardware
store and you see all of these different color samples and probably 200 different colors
of blue. And this can be very overwhelming and we stand there in front of all of those
paint chips and we think “Ugh well do I want light blue or kind of light blue or kind
of blue with a little tiny bit of gray in it well I don’t know” and you start worrying
about it and then your brain explodes because its just overwhelming.
And the reason why it’s overwhelming is because we are cognitive misers. We don’t
want to have to take a lot of time making a decision and when the amount of time it
takes exceeds our expectations it becomes really unpleasant.
Automatic and controlled processing explains how we think and behave. So, automatic processing
occurs without thought and a very good example of something I do automatically is typing.
So, I can type and I don’t need to think about it. I just sit down and start writing
words on my keyboard. And a good test to see whether something is automatic is whether
thinking about it screws you up. So if I want to type the word “warehouse” and I sit
down and I think “okay put your left hand, put your finger on the w key which is kind
of straight up and then you need to move your pinky finger out to hit the a” it will take
me a very long time and I will probably mess up. So, if I try and think about this behavior,
typing, if it’s an automatic behavior thinking about it makes it harder and messes me up.
But, when I first learned to type it was a controlled process. So, I did have to think
about where all of my fingers needed to be on the keyboard. So, as you can see you can
move from a controlled to an automatic process with rehearsal. So, now I hope every time
you sit down to your computer to type you are thinking that you know something about
this because of social psychology and you’ve already learned how to apply something from
social psychology to your own life and it’s the very first lecture.
So, a schema is a cognitive representation of essentially every word that we have. So,
a schema can be specific, you can think about a chair and what a chair’s function is,
what a chair typically looks like. Or it can be amorphous. So love is something that is
probably pretty hard for people to define and different people would give different
definitions. But, whether we all have different definitions, we all have schemas for love.
One of the reasons why learning other languages can be difficult is often they have words
that we don’t have. Which means we don’t have schemas for them and so it is hard for
us to understand what those words are.
A prime is a thing (very technical word) that
activates a schema. So, here is a picture of my dog and I think he is the best dog in
the whole dog world and so now I want you now to fill in the blank.
And I imagine that most of you filled in the blank with the letter “D” and spelled the word dog. You could
have filled it in with “F” or “C” but what happened was I primed you with a
picture of my dog and activated the schema of dog in your brain and so when you are presented
with a word you are going to fill it in with the schema which is active in your brain which
is dog.