Week 4: Cognition & Emotions: Social Cognition Flashcards
Essentially how we think about and understand the social world around us.
It includes things like:
- How we perceive others
- Understanding others
- Interacting with others
Social Cognition
An area of psychology that is located on the intersection of social psychology and cognitive psychology.
Social Cognition
The study of psychological processes in the presence of others
Social Psychology
The study of mental processes, such as attention, perception, and memory
Cognitive Psychology
An inconsistency between one’s beliefs and one’s actions.
Cognitive Dissonance
People who were performing behaviour that is inconsistent with their beliefs simply changed their beliefs to accommodate their inconsistency.
Festinger’s Findings on Cognitive Dissonance
3 Psychological Assumptions (Social Cognition)
1) People are consistency seekers (cognitive dissonance)
2) People are accuracy seekers or naive scientists
3) People are cognitive misers (heuristics)
We draw conclusions about others based on limited information, often relying on past experiences, stereotypes, and personal biases.
Social Inferences
When we interact with people, we go beyond physical attributes and make judgments about their personality, trustworthiness, and likability.
Subjective Attributions about Social Targets
People’s ability to understand what goes on in another person’s mind.
It is an essential process to understanding empathic behaviour, such as perspective taking and
understanding another person’s emotions.
Theory of Mind
What attributions we make when we see another person
Person Perception
The ease with which information comes to mind.
For example, something you recently experienced is more accessible than something from the distant past.
Accessibility
The degree to which something stands out in the environment.
Ex. A brightly colored object is more salient than a plain one.
Salience
Explanations we give for people’s behavior (e.g., internal vs. external factors).
The process of assigning causes to behavior.
Attributions
The tendency to attribute our successes to internal factors and failures to external factors.
Self-Serving Bias
In order for people to make social judgments of others– for example, judging how trustworthy, likable, competent, or friendly they are - they need to, first of all, understand that these other people are independent from themselves and have their own wishes, motives, desires, beliefs, etc.
Theory of Mind
Is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person.
It involves putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and experiencing the world from their perspective.
Empathy
Is a feeling of pity or sorrow for someone else’s misfortune.
It is more about acknowledging someone’s suffering than actually sharing their feeling.
Sympathy
Was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development.
He observed and studied children to understand how they think and learn.
His theory suggests that children go through different stages of cognitive development, from infancy to adolescence.
Jean Piaget (1896 - 1980)
These are specialized brain cells that activate both when performing an action and when observing someone else perform the same action.
Primarily found in the premotor cortex of the brain.
They seem to help us understand and imitate the actions of others.
Mirror Neurons
Are fascinating brain cells because they provide a potential neural basis for empathy and social understanding.
By firing both when we act and when we observe, they create a bridge between our own experiences and the experiences of others.
Mirror Neurons
Causal Evidence in 2 Areas (Mirror Neurons)
1) Action Perception: process other people’s actions
2) Imitation: copying observed actions
The act of copying someone else’s behavior.
Imitation
The ability to understand and interpret the actions of others.
Action Perception
Challenges in Mirror Neurons
1) Mirroring Actions VS Mirroring Emotions
2) Mirroring may be learned through experience
3) Self-other Distinction
