Lecture 4 - Social cognition

• Social cognition involves cognitive processes and structures that influence and are influenced by social behavior
• To study and understand human behavior, we need to theorize about the mental processes underlying that behavior
• Social behavior is governed by cognition, emotions, motivations, etc.
• Understanding the underlying cognitive processes can help in understanding decision-making in various contexts
• Heuristics are mental shortcuts that perceivers use to go beyond the information available in any social encounter
• Bottom-up processing is driven by individual features of stimuli, while top-down processing is driven by past knowledge and experience
• Assumptions of social cognition:

  • The objects of social cognition (beliefs, judgments, desires) are malleable and can be changed by being the focus of information processing
  • Nearly all social cognition is evaluative, involving an affective involvement between the perceivers and persons perceived
• Schemas are mental representations of knowledge that involve preconceptions, theories, and expectations
• Schemas help people understand incoming stimuli by categorizing new instances, inferring additional attributes, and guiding interpretation and attention
• Schemas contain attributes (e.g., birds have wings) and relationships among attributes (e.g., birds can fly because they have wings)
• Warm-Cold Study by Asch (1946) aimed to demonstrate how people make inferences from person schemas, showing that traits like warmth or coldness influence inferences
• Schemas enable people to interpret ambiguous events and help in guiding interpretation and attention
• Heuristics provide a quick and simple way of dealing with large amounts of information, but they may not work very well all the time
• Social categorization involves matching a person to an existing social category based on shared characteristics like race, gender, or age
• Consequences of social categorization include ignoring similarities and exaggerating differences between individuals in different category groups
• The Motivated Tactician approach represents the individual as a 'fully engaged thinker' who chooses information processing strategies based on current goals, motives, and needs
• Social Identity Theory (SIT) shows that inter-group categorization can lead to intergroup discrimination as people strive for positive distinctiveness
• Maintaining positive self-esteem can involve creative social comparison, promoting the ingroup, hindering out-groups, and dis-identifying when necessary