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• Thought is internal language and symbols used, often conscious
• Cognition refers to mental processing that can be largely automatic
• Social cognition involves cognitive processes and structures that influence and are influenced by social behavior, teaching us how we process and store information about people and how it affects how we perceive and interact with others
• In social psychology, there are 4 guises identified by Jones (1998) and Taylor (1998): cognitive consistency, naïve scientist, cognitive miser, and motivated tactician
• Cognitive consistency is a model where people try to reduce inconsistency among their cognitions because they find inconsistency unpleasant
• Naïve scientist is a model that categorizes people as having rational, scientific-like, cause-effect analyses to understand their world
• Attribution is the process of assigning a cause to our own behavior and that of others
• Cognitive miser is a model characterizing people as using the least complex and demanding cognitions that generally produce adaptive behaviors
• Motivated tactician is a model of social psychology characterizing people as having multiple cognitive strategies available, which they choose from based on personal goals, motives, and needs
• Social neuroscience explores brain activity associated with social cognition and social psychological processes and phenomena
• A schema is a structure that represents knowledge about a concept or stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among those attributes
• A script is a schema about an event, for example, the steps involved in going to a restaurant
• Schemas facilitate top-down processing, where prior knowledge and preconceptions are used to fill in gaps
• Person schemas are knowledge structures about specific individuals, while role schemas are about role occupants
• Content-free schemas contain a limited number of rules for processing information
• Self-schemas are schemas about oneself, represented and stored in a more complex and varied way than information about others, forming part of people’s concept of who they are
• Categories are represented by prototypes, which are cognitive representations of the typical or ideal defining features of a category
• People rely on basic-level categories, known as 'optimally distinctive', as they are neither too broad nor too narrow
• As people become more familiar with a category, they shift from prototypical to exemplar representation
• Associative networks consist of nodes or ideas connected by associative links along which cognitive activation can spread
• Stereotypes are widely shared generalizations about members of a social group, often derogatory
• Stereotypes are central aspects of prejudice and discrimination
• Perceptual accentuation is a process where categorization accentuates perceived similarities within and differences between groups on dimensions believed to be correlated with the categorization
• Social identity theory is based on self-categorization, social comparison, and the construction of a shared self-definition in terms of ingroup-defining properties
• Self-categorization theory explains how categorizing oneself as a group member produces social identity and group and intergroup behaviors
• Stereotypes are not static and respond to social context and people's motives
• Stereotypes persist if they are readily accessible in memory and can clarify social roles, intergroup conflict, and justify the status quo