understanding the world

• Social cognition is the ability to think about and understand others
• Social cognition is a specific approach in social psychology that uses the methods of cognitive science
• Social perception involves forming an understanding of the social world from the data we acquire from our senses
• Social perception refers to the processes through which we use available information to form impressions of other people, and to assess what they are like
• Social perceptions can be flawed - even skilled observers can misperceive, misjudge, and reach the wrong conclusions about people
• Categorization


  The tendency to perceive stimuli as members of groups or classes rather than as isolated, unique entities
• Schemas


  Mental structures that organize our knowledge about the social world and influence the information we notice, think about, and remember
• Types of schemas


  • Person schemas
  • Self-schemas
  • Group schemas
  • Role schemas
  • Event schemas
• Person schemas


  Cognitive structures that describe the personalities of others
• Schemas are useful for helping us organize and make sense of the world and to fill in the gaps of our knowledge
• Schemas guide what we perceive in the environment, how we organize information in memory, and what inferences and judgments we make about people and things
• Schemas


  Cognitive structures that help us organize and make sense of the world and fill in the gaps of our knowledge
• Schemas


  • They contain our basic knowledge and impressions that we use to organize what we know about the social world and interpret new situations
  • They guide what we perceive in the environment, how we organize information in memory, and what inferences and judgments we make about people and things
• Types of schemas


  • Person schemas
  • Self-schemas
  • Group schemas
  • Role schemas
  • Event schemas
• Self-schemas


  Structures that organize our conception of our own characteristics
• Group schemas (stereotypes)


  Schemas regarding the members of a particular social group or social category
• Role schemas


  Expectations of how a person in a specific social role will behave
• Event schemas (scripts)


  Schemas that focus on patterns of behavior that should be followed for certain events
• Stereotypes involve overgeneralization and lead to inaccurate inferences
• Stereotypes can have negative effects, especially when used to limit access to important social roles
• Stereotype threat can negatively affect the performance of members of stereotyped groups
• Why we use schemas

  • They influence our capacity to recall information
  • They help us process more information faster
  • They guide our inferences and judgments
  • They allow us to reduce ambiguity
• Impression formation


  The process of organizing diverse information into a unified impression of another person
• The primacy effect states that information learned first is weighted more heavily than information learned later
• The recency effect states that recent information exerts the strongest influence on our impressions
• Self-fulfilling prophecy


  The process by which a person's expectations about someone can lead to that someone behaving in ways which confirm the expectations
• Self-fulfilling prophecy


  1. People have an expectation about what another person is like

  2. Which influences how they act toward that person

  3. Which causes that person to behave consistently with people's original expectations, making the expectations come true
• The Self-fulfilling Prophecy essentially says that a belief not yet realized, but strongly held and internally affirmed, will in fact become true
• Versions of the Self-fulfilling Prophecy

  • "Fake it til you make it"
  • "You become what you think about"
• Through positive expectations, our thoughts and behaviors become so knitted together as to characterize belief and truth
• Heuristics


  Intuitive mental operations that allow us to make a variety of judgments and impressions quickly and efficiently
• Heuristics


  • They provide a quick way of selecting schemas that, although far from infallible, often help us make an effective choice amid considerable uncertainty
• Availability heuristic


  The process whereby judgments of frequency or probability are based on the ease with which pertinent instances are brought to mind
• The availability heuristic can lead to overestimating the probability and likelihood of events happening in the future, like plane crashes or pandemics, after seeing news reports about them
• Representativeness heuristic


  The process whereby judgments of likelihood are based on assessments of similarity between individuals and group stereotypes or between cause and effect
• The representativeness heuristic can lead to judging someone as more likely to be in a certain profession based on how well they fit the stereotypical image of that profession
• Attribution


  The causal explanations people give for their own and others' behaviors, and for events in general
• Attributions


  • Internal factors such as ability, attitudes, personality, mood, and effort
  • External factors such as the task, other people, or luck
• When students perform poorly, teachers tend to make internal attributions (e.g. the student didn't study) while students make external attributions (e.g. the test was too hard)
• Actor-observer bias


  The tendency to attribute one's own actions to external causes while attributing other people's behaviors to internal causes