Social Psychology 1 - Social Cognition Flashcards
This lecture series is going to be focused on
traditional models of social psychology.
What is the “naive perciever”?
Ordinary people are like naive scientists
We are all scientists trying to understand the world
Can we see the world objectively?
No,
We everything we see is through our perceptions (not objective)
Our interpretation of events is based on our experiences
What is Social Cognition concerned with?
The study of how people perceieve, interpret and make sense of the world and their place within it.
e.g. people, groups, events
What perspective is most dominant in social psychology?
Social Cognition
What was the Cognitive Revolution in Psychology based on?
Development of ‘information processing theories’ on how people acquire knowledge and interpret sensory input
- It was a switch away from behaviourism as before we didn’t believe we could understand what was happening inside the mind, so we focused on behaviour (e.g. Skinner)*
- Began in the 1960s*
What are information processing models grounded in?
Perceptual Cognitivism
Which type of framework searches internally within the perceptual and cognitive domain of the person (the mind) to understand social phenomena such as: attitudes, stereotypes, attributions, identity, prejudice?
Social Cognition
What are the 4 core principles of social cognition?
- Experimentation
- Information processing metaphor of the person - person as a ‘naive scientist’
- Perceptual-cognitive metatheory.
- Mental representations.
What does mental representations refer to in social cognition?
Mental structures such as schemas, attitudes and stereotypes to organize knowledge, evaluations and expectations about objects in the world.
What is the metaphor of the person as a computer in perceptual cognitivism?
A person is like a computer that receives, recognises and programs incoming information.
There are input-output operations, memory storage and retrieval (like computers do) as central human cognitive processes
What is ‘Perceptual Cognitivism’ (Perceptual-Cognitive Metatheory)?
‘Reality’ is apprehended on the basis of schematic abstractions of the regularities of experiences.
e.g. We know what a terrorist attack looks like, we have a schematic for ‘terrorist attack’
What is a stereotype?
A mental structure that we use to organise knowledge/expectations about social objects, people and events.
Typical attributes associated with a group
Why do we stereotype?
Stereotypes activate and process information quickly and sometimes without much active thinking
Are stereotypes typically conscious or unconscious?
Unconscious
They are activated without us wanting to activate them or being aware of them
