CHAPTER 3

SOCIAL COGNITION

LEARNING OUTCOMES

At the end of the chapter the learners should be able to;

 explain what social cognitions and its importance;

 identify the sources of social knowledge;
 compare and contrast how to use our expectation in different scenarios.

INTRODUCTION

The chapter discusses how our brain works and gives meaning to what we sensed, and how our
mental structures organize our knowledge about the social world.

ABSTRACTION

Social Cognition

 a broad term used to describe cognitive processes related to the perception, understanding, and
implementation of linguistic, auditory, visual, and physical cues that communicate emotional and
interpersonal information.
 how people think about themselves and the social world, or more especially how people select,
interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgements and decisions.
 The unique processes that enable human beings to interpret social information and behave
appropriately in a social environment.
A. Sources of Social Knowledge
1. Our Knowledge Accumulates as a Result of LearninConditioning—the ability to connect stimuli
(the changes that occur in the environment) with responses (behaviors or other actions).
2. Operant Learning - the principle that we learn new information as a result of the consequences of
our behavior.
3. Associational learning occurs when an object or event comes to be associated with a natural
response, such as an automatic behavior or a positive or negative emotion.

Forms of Impressions:
 a. Automatic Thinking – quick and automatic “without thinking”. Thinking that is nonconscious,
unintentional, involuntary, and effortless.
b. Controlled Thinking – is effortful and deliberate, pausing to think about self and environment,
carefully selecting the right course of action.

4. Observational Learning- in addition to operant and associational learning, people learn by

observing the behavior of others.

Schemas as Social Knowledge

 The outcome of learning is knowledge, and this knowledge is stored in schemas.

 In the brain, our schemas reside primarily in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that lies in
front of the motor areas of the cortex and that helps us remember the characteristics and actions
of other people, plan complex social behaviors, and coordinate our behaviors with those of
others (Mitchell, Mason, Macrae, & Banaji, 2006).

 The prefrontal cortex is the “social” part of the brain. It is also the newest part of the brain,
evolutionarily speaking, and has enlarged as the social relationships among humans have become
more frequent, important, and complex.

 Demonstrating its importance in social behaviors, people with damage to the prefrontal cortex are
likely to experience changes in social behaviors, including memory, personality, planning, and
morality

Schemas

> Mental structures that organize our knowledge about the social world.

> Are typically very useful for helping us organize and make sense of the world and to fill in the gaps of
our knowledge.

Nature of Schemas

a. Self- Confirming nature of Schemas

2. Self- fulfilling prophecies – predictions that, in a sense, make themselves come true.

b. Behavioral confirmation

> a type of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby people’s social expectations lead them to act in ways
that cause others to confirm their expectations.

What do Schemas do?

1. Help us organize information

 2. help us remember certain things
3. help us to fill in details when our information is incomplete
4. can influence behavior
5. help us to interpret ambiguous behavior
6. influence what information we attend to

B. How We Use Our Expectations

a. Salience and Accessibility Determine Which Expectations We Use

Salience

 One determinant of which schemas are likely to be used in social judgment is the extent to which
we attend to particular features of the person or situation that we are responding to.

 We are more likely to judge people on the basis of characteristics that are salient, meaning
that they attract our attention when we see something or someone with them. Things that are
unusual, negative, colorful, bright, and moving are more salient and thus more likely to be
attended to than are things that do not have these characteristics (McArthur & Post, 1977; Taylor
& Fiske, 1978).

Cognitive Accessibility

 refers to the extent to which a schema is activated in memory and thus likely to be used in
information processing.

Heuristics

> simple rules for making complex decisions or drawing inferences in a seemingly effortless manner.

When do we use these shortcuts?

2. lack of time for full processing

3. information overload
4. when issues are not important
5. when we have little solid information to use for decision making

Availability Heuristic

> “If I think of it, it must be important

> it suggests that the easier it is to bring information to mind, the greater it’s importance or relevance to
our judgments or decisions.

Priming
 increased availability of information in memory or consciousness resulting from exposure to
specific stimuli or events.
Automatic Priming
  Effect that occurs when stimuli of which individuals not consciously aware alter the availability of
various trails or concepts in memory.
False Consensus Effect
 The tendency to assume that other behavior or think as people do to a greater than is actually
true.
Potential Sources of Error in Social Cognition
 Rational versus intuitive processing
- going with our guts
 Dealing with inconsistent information
 the planning fallacy
- the tendency to make optimistic predictions concerning how long a given task will take for
completion
- known as “optimistic bias”

 the potential costs of thinking too much

- why sometimes, our tendency to do as little cognitive work as possible may be justified.
 counterfactual thinking
- how it related to regret.
- upward counterfactual thinking
- downward counterfactual thinking
 magical thinking
- thinking involving assumptions that don’t hold up to rational scrutiny- for example, the notion
that things that resemble one another share fundamental properties.
 thought suppression
- efforts to prevent certain thoughts from entering consciousness

C. Social Cognition and Affect

Affect and Cognition
 how feelings shape thought and thought shapes feelings.
- Affect: our current feeling and moods.
- Cognition: The ways in which we process, store and remember, and use social information.
- a reciprocal relationship.

The Influence of Affect on Cognition

 Affect and style of information processing we adopt.
 Affect and memory
 Affect and plans and intentions
 Mental contamination

APPLICATIONN
1. In your own words explain what social cognitions and its importance?

2. What are the sources of social knowledge? Base from your experience as a teacher, give a
realistic example.

3. Cite some of your expectations in your family, school/workplace and community/ church. How
will you use your expectation in the different scenarios?