Social Cognition Flashcards
What is social cognition?
How social information is acquired,organised and used. Cognitive models of how with think applied to the social world. Goes into other psychological phenomenons : cognitive dissonance, person perception and halo effect
Too much information for our short term memory. How is information processed?
salient features are categorised we can later infer information about stimuli without processing full data
Prototypes
Cognitive representation of a category. Not all members of a category are identical. They differ.
Compare categories and prototypes and give example
A category are instances grouped together as they share family resemblance, for example attractiveness.
A prototype is a cognitive representation of a category for example an image of a model is a prototype for the category attractiveness.
A category is a fuzzy set varying instances centred around on a prototype.
Are prototypes always the average and are categories always hierarchal.
No prototypes can instead be extreme version of a category. Yes categories are hierarchal from very broad to specific
What’s an examplar
A category can be represented as a specific instance the individual has encountered.
What does brewer suggest happens when we become more familiar with categories
We shift from representing with prototypes to examplars.
What does Judd and Park suggest happens when we become familiar with categories
We use both examplars and prototypes to represent ingorups but use examplars to represent out groups
Schemas
Sets of related cognitions that allow us to make sense of a person/ situation /place based on limited information - fills the blanks
Types of schemas
Person, role ,scripts
Person schemas
Knowledge about specific individual
Role schema
Knowledge structures about role occupants and what they do, roles are socially defined.
Scripts
Schemas for situations. Different for different events . If you have no schema for that situation you feel out of place.
What’s a limitation of schemas
Lead us astray : eyewitness testimony.
What is a stereotype
Widely shared, simplified generalisation about members of a social group
How does the process of categorisation lead to stereotypes
When making a judgment on a focal dimension (what our judgment would be with no influence of ourselves) we recruit any peripheral dimension that may be useful ( previous knowledge we have from our scripts) and this is categorised. This can create a perceptual distortion on the focal dimension. This also causes perceptual accentuation of similarities within and differences between social groups.
What type of processing is schemas
Top-down. Uses prior knowledge rather than new information in current context
What is the accentuation principe
Categorisation of stimuli produces a perceptual accentuation of similarities within groups and differences between groups.
Who’s and what study first demonstrated the process of categorisation on stereotypes
Tajfel 1957;59) line study
List some social cognitive models
Consistency seeker, naive scientist, , cognitive miser, motivated tacticians
Consistency seeker (rationalising mind)
We are motivated to reduce discrepancies in our cognition - cognitive dissonance.
Naive scientist
Later research showed we are ok with opposing cognitions. People hold theories about how the world works. Heiders attribution theory
Heiders attribution theory
Our behaviour is motivated and not random so we look for motivatiors in others behaviour. This could be internal or external causes
Cognitive misers
Using heuristics to solve problems ( cognitive short cuts that provide adequately accurate inferences for most of us most the time )
Motivated tacticians
Multiple cognitive strategies available which they chose among the basis of personal goals, motives and needs. Viske and Taylor
What are the criticism of social cognition
reductionist, neglect of developmental approaches, ignores biolology, ununified,
