Social Cognition and Interaction

• self-esteem enhancement by the belief that they are the primary contributor

• egocentric bias in the cognitive availability of information → remembering the own inputs easier than others

  • you don’t always see the other person doing work but you always know when you yourself are doing work (even more because of home office)

  • → people use information about themselves more than information about others when making a judgment

• married couples tend to overestimate their contribution also on those activities that reflect negatively on the responsible party 

  • → the magnitude of overestimation is only weakly correlated with the desirability of the activity

• when writing a scientific paper, two people might think they put more work in and their name should be the “first author” → leads to conflict

• in the business world, an employee might not be content with their pay because they believe they did more work than a co-worker but weren’t paid accordingly → leads to conflict

• change the differential availability of people’s personal contributions by targeting the extent to which one remembers one’s own contributions more easily than the contributions of another

  • reframing the question to ask “what is their contribution?” instead of “what is your contribution?”

• people believe the social spotlight shines more brightly on them than is true (people believe people always look at them and judge them, but actually others are less likely to notice or think much about one’s failure than one suspects)

example: people in the experiment were forced to wear an embarrassing shirt and were afterwards asked how many people noticed → it was only 25% instead of the guessed 50%

• social phobia / social anxiety disorder

• paranoia (schizophrenic disorder)

• people are prone to believing their thoughts, feelings, and emotions are more apparent to others than is actually the case (& may fail to correct adequately for this realization)

• example: people in an experiment drank different drinks and one of them tasted bad (they were asked to mask this as good as possible); afterwards they were asked to guess how many people could tell on a video of them drinking which drink was the disgusting one → way less people recognized than they thought → they were far less transparent than they thought

• people think they had been able to convey their emotions with far better clarity than they actually had & because it is so clear to the person themself, they might lose sight of this fact

  • it is easy to confuse the clarity of one’s internal experience with the clarity of one’s expressive behavior

• → the attempt to communicate thoughts, feelings, etc. can fall short without the person noticing it → the other person(s) have little idea of the intended meaning

• → if people overestimate that clarity, they may interpret the partner’s failure to take appropriate action as lack of caring or open hostility