SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
LECTURE | SECOND SEMESTER
SOCIAL COGNITION
Introduction _
Social cognition focuses on how people process, store, and
apply information about other people and social situations. It
focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in our social
interactions. The way we think about others plays a major role in
how we think, feel, and interact with the world around us.
The processes involved in perceiving other people and how we
come to know about the people in the world around us.
The study of the mental processes that are involved in
perceiving, remembering, thinking about, and attending to the
other people in our social world.
The reasons we attend to certain information about the social
world, how this information is stored in memory, and how it is then
used to interact with other people.
Example: Imagine that you are getting ready to go on a blind
date. Not only do you worry about the impression and signals that
you are sending to the other person, but you are also concerned
with interpreting the signals given by your date. How do you form
an impression of this person? What meaning do you read into the
other person's behavior?
This is just one example of how social cognition influences a
single social interaction, but you can probably think of many more
examples from your daily life. We spend a considerable portion of
every day interacting with others, which is why an entire branch of
psychology is formed to help understand how we feel, think and
behave in social situations.
Social cognition is not simply a topic within social psychology—
it is an approach to studying any subject with social psychology.
Using a social-cognitive perspective, researchers can study a wide
range of topics including attitudes, person perception, prejudice,
stereotypes, self-concept, discrimination, persuasion, decision-
making, and other areas.
Social Cognition _ understand symbolic concepts, and use language in more
Social cognition develops in childhood and adolescence. As
children grow, they become more aware not only of their own
feelings, thoughts, and motives but also of the emotions and
mental states of others.
Children become more adept at understanding how others feel,
learning how to respond in social situations engaging in prosocial
behaviors and taking the perspective.
Piaget’s Theory _ stage, children are so engrossed in egocentric thoughts that they
There are many different theories that look at how social
cognition develops, one of the most popular focuses is on the work
of the psychologist Jean Piaget. According to Piaget, a child's
cognitive development goes through a series of stages.
During the earliest stages of development, children are very
egocentric. They see the world from their own perspective and
struggle to think about how other people may view the world.
As children grow older, children become increasingly adept at
perspective-taking and have an increased ability to think about
how and why people act the way they do in social situations.
One of the most important developments in the early emergence
of social cognition is the growth of a theory of mind. A theory of
mind refers to a person's ability to understand and think about the
mental states of other people.
It is the emergence of a theory of mind that is critical to being
able to consider the thoughts, motives, desires, needs, feelings,
and experiences that other people may have. Being able to think
about how these mental states can influence how people act is
critical to forming social impressions and explaining how and why
people do the things that they do.
Sensorimotor stage
According to Piaget’s theory, children like to explore at the
sensorimotor stage. They want to watch, hear, taste, and touch
things around them. They learn about their environment by
sensation: watching, grasping, sucking, and manipulating objects
they can get their eyes and hands-on. They generally don’t appear
to be thinking about what they do.
As infants become toddlers, children enjoy their rapidly
improving abilities to move around and take in new experiences.
They focus on making sense of the world by linking their
experiences to their actions.
During the late sensorimotor stage, children begin to learn the
concept of object permanence. In other words, they know that an
object will continue to exist even if they can no longer see it.
Preoperational Stage
Around age two, children enter what Piaget called the
preoperational stage where they learn how to think abstractly,
sophisticated ways. They learn to use words to describe people,
their feelings, and their environments.
Now that children can express themselves better, they become
insatiably curious and begin to ask questions about everything they
see. They can imagine people or objects that don’t exist (such as a
lizard with wings) more readily than younger children, and they like
to make up their own games.
Piaget’s theory of cognitive development suggests that at this
believe their view of the world is shared by everyone else. They
can’t understand that there are other ways of looking at the world
and interpreting information. For example, a child in a game of
hide and seek may simply close his eyes and believe that others
can’t see him (since he can’t see others).
At the preoperational stage, children understand object
permanence very well. However, they still don’t get the concept of
conservation. They don’t understand that changing an object’s
appearance doesn’t change its properties or quantity. To illustrate
this, Piaget performed an experiment on children who were at the
preoperational stage:
In the experiment, Piaget poured the same amount of water into two
identical glasses and asked the children whether the glasses
contained the same amount of water. The children said that both
glasses contained the same amount of water. Piaget then poured the
water in one glass into a tall, narrow beaker and repeated the
question. This time, the children said there was more water in the
cylinder because it was taller.
1 | BPSY 110
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
LECTURE | SECOND SEMESTER
Concrete Operational Stage
By the time they reach the concrete operational stage, children
can understand much more complex abstract concepts, such as
time, space, and quantity. They can apply these concepts to
concrete situations, but they still have trouble thinking about them
independently of those situations.
Piaget pointed out that at this stage, children’s ideas about
time and space are sometimes inconsistent. They can learn rules
fairly easily, but they may have trouble understanding the logical
implications of those rules in unusual situations.
In addition, at the concrete operational stage, children are able
to use inductive logic – the type of reasoning that starts from a
specific idea and leads to a generalization. They can also
distinguish facts from fantasies, as well as formulate judgments
about cause and effect.
Another important child development milestone at this stage is
the idea of reversibility – children understand that some objects
can be altered and then shaped back to their original shape. For
example, a deflated balloon can be filled with air again to become
an inflated balloon.
Formal Operational Stages
At the final stage of the Jean Piaget stages of cognitive
development, children are capable of more abstract, hypothetical,
and theoretical reasoning. They are no longer bound to observable
and physical events. They can approach and resolve problems
systematically by formulating hypotheses and methodically testing
them out.
Children can now apply their reasoning to a variety of situations
including counterfactual “if-then” situations, meaning in situations
where the “if” is known to be untrue. For example “if dogs were
reptiles, they would have cold blood.” They can accept this as valid
reasoning, even though the premise is obviously false
Theory of the Mind _ Self-schemas.
Theory of mind is an important social-cognitive skill that
involves the ability to think about mental states, both your own and
those of others. It encompasses the ability to attribute mental
states, including emotions, desires, beliefs, and knowledge.
Not only does the theory of mind involve thinking about thinking,
but it also refers to the ability to understand that other people's
thoughts and beliefs may be different from your own and to
consider the factors that have led to those mental states.
If you’ve ever talked to a young child on the phone, you may
have encountered the following situation:
Denzel hasn’t yet figured out that he needs to give his dad extra
information about what he is doing, because his dad can’t see what he
is holding. Denzel thinks his dad sees and thinks the same thing he
does. The understanding that people don’t share the same thoughts
and feelings as you do develops during childhood, and is called “theory
of mind”. Another way to think about it is a child’s ability to “tune in” to
other peoples’ perspectives. This ability doesn’t emerge overnight, and
it develops in a predictable order.
Cultural Differences _
Social psychologists have also found that there are often
important cultural differences in social cognition. When looking at
a social situation, any two people may have wildly different
interpretations. Each person brings a unique background of
experiences, knowledge, social influences, feelings, and cultural
variations.
Some researchers have found that there are also collective,
cultural influences that can affect how people interpret social
situations. The same social behavior in one cultural setting may
have a very different meaning and interpretation if it was to take
place or be observed in another culture.
As people interpret behavior, extract meaning from the
interaction, and then act based upon their beliefs about the
situation, they are then further reinforcing and reproducing the
cultural norms that influence their social cognitions.
Example of cultural differences are: living with extended
families, and child marriage.
Factors affecting one’s social cognition _
I. Schemas.
A cognitive framework or concept that helps organize and
interpret information. Schemas can be useful because they allow
us to take shortcuts in interpreting the vast amount of information
that is available in our environment.
Person schemas
These are focused on specific individuals. For example, your
schema for your friend might include information about her
appearance, her behaviors, her personality, and her preferences.
Social schemas.
It includes general knowledge about how people behave in
certain social situations.
For example, when you have a date, you should be respectful,
pay for movie tickets, and don’t eat garlic.
These are focused on your knowledge about yourself. This can
include both what you know about your current self as well as
ideas about your idealized or future self.
For example, future doctor, hates broccoli, smart.
Event schemas.
These are focused on patterns of behavior that should be
followed for certain events. This acts much like a script informing
you of what you should do, how you should act, and what you
should say in a particular situation.
For example, professionalism, portfolio, handshake, business
suit.
II. Heuristics.
It is a mental shortcut that allows people to solve problems and
make judgments quickly and efficiently. These rule-of-thumb
strategies shorten decision-making time and allow people to
function without constantly stopping to think about their next
course of action.
III. Social beliefs.
How we perceive, judge, and explain our social worlds, and how
– and to what extent our expectations matter/to be important.
It covers a wide range of things such as war, religion,
government, etc.
Belief Perseverance.
It is the tendency to cling to one’s initial belief even after
receiving new information that contradicts or disconfirms the
basis of that belief.
2 | BPSY 110
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
LECTURE | SECOND SEMESTER

Its tendency is strengthened if an explanation for our belief

has been created. One way to reduce this is to get a person to
argue the opposite position.
Perseverance Effect is the finding that people’s beliefs about
themselves and the social world persist even after the evidence
supporting it is discredited.
Example of Belief Perseverance:

Hostile Media Phenomenon.

It refers to the theory that ideological partisans often think that
media coverage is biased against their opinions on an issue. This
phenomenon has been identified experimentally (Vallone, Ross, &
Lepper, 1985).
Individuals with strong preexisting attitudes about an issue tend
to perceive media coverage as biased against their point of view,
and this “hostile media effect” is believed to be driven in part by
social identity.
Biased Sampling
It is generalizing based on information from others that are
known to be biased. To simply put, we are generalizing certain
information even if we know that it is biased, meaning to say, it
does not reflect the general population.
For example, there is this researcher who wanted to know the
percentage of the population who wants seafood. Findings
revealed that out of 100 people, 90% said that they love seafood.
With that, the researcher will report that 90% of the population
loves seafood, where in fact, the researcher itself is biased
because he/she only asked 100 people who eat at a Seafood
Restaurant.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
It occurs when a person has expectations about what another
person is like, which influences how they act towards the person,
which causes the person to act and behave according to the
person’s original expectation.
An example of the self-fulfilling prophecy is known as the
placebo effect. In this example, patients are randomly split into
two groups: one receiving the new treatment and one receiving a
placebo treatment or “fake treatment.”
(cont.) Those who are given the placebo drug have been shown
to display improvements in the respective issue despite there
being no active agent causing the recovery.
(cont.) The beliefs that one held, in contrast to actual treatment,
led to that prophecy being fulfilled.
Another example is when a gas station warns the public that
there will be a gas shortage. People have a tendency to stockpile
gas supplies in their homes, but there is no shortage of gas in
reality. However, because most people are unaware of this, they
stockpile gas until there is a shortage of it.
IV. Attitudes.
V. Behaviors.

3 | BPSY 110