Humans depend on social interactions for connectedness, self-esteem, and understanding the world.
Social cognition involves perceiving stimuli, attending to information, categorizing, forming inferences, reasoning, and making judgments about the social world.
Social cognition is influenced by cultural norms, values, expectations, and attitudes.
Allport's Contributions: Emphasized mental representations like stereotypes and heuristics.
Ostrom's View: All cognition is social as it involves action and reactions within social and environmental contexts.
Perceiving People vs. Objects
People and objects are perceived differently; people are more dynamic and have behaviors driven by intentionality.
We develop a "theory of mind" understanding that others have separate psychological states.
Mental Representations
Schemas: Organizational structures guiding how new information is processed.
Self-Schema: Linked to one’s values and beliefs.
Role Schema: Associated with social roles and relationships.
Event Schema: Contains scripts for routine actions and events.
Prototypes vs. Exemplars: Prototypes are abstract, while exemplars are specific instances used to categorize new experiences.
Heuristics
Mental shortcuts used to make judgments efficiently.
Types:
Representativeness Heuristic: Decisions based on similarity to a category.
Simulation Heuristic: Making predictions by simulating scenarios in the mind.
Availability Heuristic: Judgments based on information readily available in memory.
Implicit vs. Explicit Processes
Implicit Cognitive Processes
Automatic processes that occur without awareness, like attention and categorization.
Influenced by motives, values, and cultural norms.
Explicit Cognitive Processes
More effortful and controlled thinking processes used for reasoning.
Involve attributing behaviors to internal or external causes using models like those from Heider, Jones, and Kelley.
Biases in Social Cognition
Fundamental Attribution Error: Overemphasis on internal causes for others' behavior.
Positive Illusions: Unrealistically positive self-views beneficial for mental health.
Misattribution of Fluency: Interpreting ease of processing as a sign of truth or frequency.
Stereotype Activation: Stereotypes can influence judgments subconsciously.
Dual-Process Models
Describe when people engage in deeper, more effortful processing.
Balance between heuristic and systematic information processing based on motivation and capacity.
Conclusion
Social cognition is key to understanding interpersonal interactions and is influenced by cultural and personal factors.
Though often automatic and efficient, social cognition is prone to errors, which may be corrected with awareness.
Important Figures & Theories
Heider (1944, 1958): Introduced the concept of social cognition and attribution theory.
Asch (1946): Studied impression formation and central trait theory.
Festinger (1957): Cognitive dissonance theory.
Tajfel (1981): Social identity theory.
Notable Experiments & Findings
Bruner and Goodman (1947): Value and need influence perception.
Jones and Harris (1967): Fundamental attribution error.
Ross et al. (1977): Role-conferred advantage in knowledge assessments.
References
Key texts for further reading include works by Allport (1954), Fiske (2014), and Moskowitz & Olcaysoy Okten (2017).