Chapter Introduction

CHAPTER 4

4 Thinking About People and Events

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TOPIC OVERVIEW

  • Remembering Things Past

    How Are Memories Formed?

    How Do We Remember?

    Application: Eyewitness Testimony

  • Inferring Cause and Effect in the Social World

    Common Sense Psychology

    Automatic Processes In Causal Attribution

    Dispositional Attribution: A Three-Stage Model

    Elaborate Attributlonal Processes

  • SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY AT THE MOVIES
    Casablanca
  • SOCIAL PSYCH OUT IN THE WORLD
    “Magical” Attributions

  • Forming Impressions of People

    Beginning With the Basics: Perceiving Faces, Physical Attributes, and Group Membership

    Impression Formation

    Changing First impressions

  • What If, If Only: Counterfactual Thinking

    The More Easily We Can Mentally Undo an Event, the Stronger Our Reaction to It

    Upward Counterfactuals

    Downward Counterfactuals

Imagine a scenario in which you are driving in your car, happy that your classes have just ended and listening to your favorite song. As you make a left-hand turn at an intersection, a red sports car in the oncoming lane of traffic comes straight toward you at a fairly high speed and hits the back side of your car. With your mood now substantially ruined, you get out of your car, relieved that no one was hurt but upset and confused by this turn of events. The other driver jumps out of his car and is adamant that you cut him off. You claim that he was speeding and that you would have had plenty of room if he had been going the speed limit. It’s a classic case of one person’s word against the other’s. The police are called to investigate what happened.

Although we hope that car crashes are not a routine part of your day, this situation and the subsequent crime-scene investigation would involve four essential ways people typically make sense of the world and that will be the focus of this chapter:

We rely on our ability to recall events from the past (memory).

We make inferences about what causes other people’s behavior (casual attributions).

We form impressions of other people, often on the basis of limited information (person perception).

We imagine alternatives to the events we experience (counterfactual thinking).

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An investigation of the fender bender would involve retrieving memories for what happened, making determinations of what or who caused the accident, forming an impression of those involved in the accident, and considering how things might have happened differently.

We use these same cognitive processes every day to make sense of the world around us. And, unlike a police detective, our cognitive system often engages these processes automatically and without any taxpayer expense!