Social Cognition by Martha Augoustinos

Author:Martha Augoustinos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sage Publications
Published: 2018-02-05T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Summary

In this chapter, we have reviewed how the major, classical attribution theorists proposed that people function in their day-to-day lives as though they were intuitive scientists. Research on attributional biases shows just how bad we are as intuitive scientists, especially when it comes to discerning our own behaviour and its causes. We apparently bend and shape, distort and construe information from our ambient social environments so that, in the end, we look good both to ourselves and to others. For the most part, classic attribution models attribute these biases to internal cognitive and perceptual mechanisms, though social motivations such as the need to understand everyday life, enhancing our sense of control and feeling good about ourselves are also important (Fiske, 2004).

Social identity theory extends a social motivational account of attributions by considering how group memberships, social identifications and intergroup relations affect what sorts of attributions people make. Social groups based on class, ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality perceive things differently and have different versions of the world that reflect their particular group’s history, power and interests (see also Chapter 7). Social representations theory elaborates upon this social perspective by locating causal attributions, not in the perceptual and cognitive workings of individual minds, but in the cultural meaning systems that are shared by collectivities and groups. Importantly, cross-cultural research has demonstrated how the fundamental attribution error or correspondence bias is not a universal cognitive phenomenon, but is specific to cultures and societies that are dominated by the ideology of individualism. Moscovici reminds us that explanations are also shaped increasingly by scientific and expert knowledge which proliferates within society. Some of these explanations will eventually become accepted as common sense as people draw upon this knowledge to understand and explain aspects of their everyday life.

Finally, we discussed discursive social psychology’s take on attributions and explanations. Discursive social psychology is not interested in cognition – in underlying cognitive processes and entities – but rather, in people’s situated discursive practices. Attributions are seen as things that people do in their talk to accomplish social actions such as blaming, accusing, etc. Attributions are embedded in reports and accounts of events that occur in everyday talk, in descriptions of ‘what happened’, which in turn are situated in extended activity sequences in social interaction. Reports and descriptions of objects, events and behaviour are never neutral, but are discursively constructed in various ways that orient to participants’ interests, stake and accountability. Discursive psychology thus emphasizes the need to study naturally occurring attributions in everyday discourse and social interaction.

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