social cognition Flashcards
what is social cognition?
a focus on how people process, store and apply information about other people and social situations
what does social cognition focus on?
the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions
social cognition is the reason we know how to act in social situations? how?
- processing short cuts are needed
- attend to sailent features of stimulus
- then categories that information
why do we put information in categories (prototypes)?
to be able to later infer more information about stimuli without processing full data
what is a stimuli?
anything that can trigger a physical or behavioral change
what is a prototype?
the cognitive representation of a category - but not all members of a category are identical (they differ)
give an example of a prototype
- you have an idea of what your average lecturer will look like - while, old man (this could be a prototype)
- but a prototype does not have to be the average, it can be an extreme version of the category - for example, you could picture your lecturers in a cap and gown
what is an examplars
a representation of a category with a specific instance they encounter
give an example of an examplar
when thinking of the category american you may think of donald trump
do we use prototypes or examplars as our representations?
- brewer 1988 suggests as we become more familiar with categories, we shift from representing with prototypes to exemplars
- judd and park 1988 suggests we use both to represent ingroups, but just exemplars to represent outgroups
explain schemas
- sets of related cognitions that allow us to make sense of a person/situation/place based on limited information - schema fills in the blanks
- schemas incorporate generalisations made about the characteristics of stimuli
give an example of a schema
we know that there is a shop with places to sit, where you can chat with friends/work on your laptop and can have food and drink there that you order at the till. from this you can figure out that it’s a coffee shop - you know this because of a schema
what are the schema types?
- person schemas
- role schemas
- scripts (schemas situations)
explain person schemas
knowledge about specific individuals - friends, family, politicians
explain role schemas
shared notions about what people can do in certain situations - e.g. you would take pills from the doctors, but if a random person did it would be more questionable
explain script (schema situations)
- scripts are schemas for events - shortcuts for how to behave in certain situations
- different for different events - attending lectures, cinema, parties etc
- if you have no schema (e.g never been in that specific social situation before, don’t know how to act/no script for that situation ) things can seem alien and very difficult
give an example of an experiment on script
there is smoke coming from under a door in a waiting room, everyone but one woman knows to ignore it and is a part of the experiment. after 20 minutes she still didn’t say/do anything about the smoke as our reliance on schemas in social situations is powerful
what is the negative side of schema?
often it gets called stereotypes which is a negative thing
name a theory on steryotypes
perceptual accentuation - taifel 1957;1959
explain the study perceptual accentuation - taifel
- participants were asked to look at a set of lines.
- firstly they were shown lines under ‘A’ and line under ‘B’ which were clearly different sizes
- then they were shows again ‘A’ and ‘B’ lines however it was harder to differentiate size wise
- then they got shown different A and B lines and asked to guess the length of them
- the study showed that people would exaggerate the lengths of A and B to much shorter and much longer
name the social cognitive models of information processing
- consistency seeker
- naive scientist
- attribution theory
- cognitive misers
- motivated tacticians - fiske and taylor 1991
