social cognition

Question 1

what is social cognition?

Answer 1

a focus on how people process, store and apply information about other people and social situations

Question 2

what does social cognition focus on?

Answer 2

the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions

Question 3

social cognition is the reason we know how to act in social situations? how?

Answer 3

• processing short cuts are needed
• attend to sailent features of stimulus
• then categories that information

Question 4

why do we put information in categories (prototypes)?

Answer 4

to be able to later infer more information about stimuli without processing full data

Question 5

what is a stimuli?

Answer 5

anything that can trigger a physical or behavioral change

Question 6

what is a prototype?

Answer 6

the cognitive representation of a category - but not all members of a category are identical (they differ)

Question 7

give an example of a prototype

Answer 7

• 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

Question 8

what is an examplars

Answer 8

a representation of a category with a specific instance they encounter

Question 9

give an example of an examplar

Answer 9

when thinking of the category american you may think of donald trump

Question 10

do we use prototypes or examplars as our representations?

Answer 10

• 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

Question 11

explain schemas

Answer 11

• 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

Question 12

give an example of a schema

Answer 12

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

Question 13

what are the schema types?

Answer 13

• person schemas
• role schemas
• scripts (schemas situations)

Question 14

explain person schemas

Answer 14

knowledge about specific individuals - friends, family, politicians

Question 15

explain role schemas

Answer 15

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

Question 16

explain script (schema situations)

Answer 16

• 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

Question 17

give an example of an experiment on script

Answer 17

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

Question 18

what is the negative side of schema?

Answer 18

often it gets called stereotypes which is a negative thing

Question 19

name a theory on steryotypes

Answer 19

perceptual accentuation - taifel 1957;1959

Question 20

explain the study perceptual accentuation - taifel

Answer 20

• 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

Question 21

name the social cognitive models of information processing

Answer 21

• consistency seeker
• naive scientist
• attribution theory
• cognitive misers
• motivated tacticians - fiske and taylor 1991