Chapter 3 Social Cognitions

• Social Cognition: how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgements and decisions 
• 2 ways to think about the Social World 

  1. Schemas as cognitive building blocks of knowledge  
  2. Motivational factors in cognitions 
• social cognition includes 2 systems of thinking; cognitive (high effort) and experimental (low effort)
• Cognitive system(high effort): a conscious, rational, and controlled system of thinking  
• Experiential system(low effort): an unconscious, intuitive, and automatic system of thinking  
• Often our quick conclusions are correct; ex. interpreting an event such as what is a classroom vs. a party
• Automatic analysis may be based on past experiences
• There are three requirements for controlled thinking to override automatic processes 

  1. Awareness 
  2. Motivation 
  3. Ability  
• According to the Dual Process theory of attitudes; We have an attitude about everything  
• heuristics are mental shortcuts for solving problems in a quick way that delivers a result
• Anchoring and Adjustment/availability: a heuristic where a person starts off with an initial idea and adjusts their beliefs based on this starting point  
• Representativeness heuristic: a mental shortcut where people classify something according to how similar it is to a typical case in their own prototype they hold in their minds
• All the heuristics are an example of automatic thinking processes 
• Social psychology is rich with Dual process theories  
• Implicit attitudes: automatic associations that make up experimental system 
• Explicit Attitudes: Attitudes people are consciously aware of through the controlled processes  
• Both implicit/explicit attitudes can shape attitudes 
• Schemas: mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social world around themes and subjects  
• Common building blocks of knowledge  are known as schemas
• Schemas are organized in associative networks  

  • Synaptic connections 
  • Video in class, activates similar words for our neurons that are connected  
• Carli (1999) : study about person perception  
• Where do schemas come from? 

  Through cultural associations  

  • Built universally 
  • Content of schemas and how they are organized is shaped by culture  
• Schemas work by: accessibility, salience, and priming
• Priming can influence how we perceive other people & process social information  
• Confirmation biases are most likely to occur when people are distracted 
• When a situation is ambiguous, we are more likely to use schemas