Social

Psychology
Numera Younus
OBJECTIVES
• Explain social cognition.

• How attitudes are formed.

• Discuss the prejudice & discrimination and how it can be reduced.

• Discuss social influence and group behavior.

3
 ✗ Social Psychology is the study of how
individuals influence and are influenced by the
thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of others.
Social Cognition
What is Social Cognition?
• Social cognition refers to how we process, store, and use information
about other people.
• In other words, it focuses on understanding how we think about others and
how that in turn influences our behavior, feelings, and social interactions.
• 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.
Example
• Imagine that you are getting ready to go on an interview. Not only do you
worry about the impression and signals that you are sending to the other
person, you are also concerned with interpreting the signals given by the
other individual. 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
Assessing the World
• We assess the world using non-verbal communication
• Facial Expressions
• Body Language
• Eye Contact
 Social Cognition

• Research on social cognition suggests that our thinking about

other persons and social situations is subject to many sources
of error.
• One source of such effect is schemas
• mental frameworks centering around a specific theme that help us
to organize social information.
 Schemas
• Schemas can relate to persons, events, or situations. Once formed,
schemas exert powerfully effects on what we notice (attention), enter into
memory (encoding), and later remember (retrieval).

• While schemas help us to process information, they often persists in the

face of disconfirming information. As a result, they can distort our
understanding of social world.
Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts in Social
Cognition
• We are “cognitive misers” who are willing to take shortcuts to
understand the social world.
• Our capacity to process information is limited, we often experience
information overload. To avoid this, we use heuristics
• A heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows people to solve problems
and make judgments quickly and efficiently.
• rules for making decisions in a quick and relatively effortless
manner.
Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts in Social
Cognition
• One such heuristic is representativeness
• A cognitive bias in which an individual categorizes a situation based on a pattern of
previous experiences or beliefs about the scenario. It can be useful when trying to
make a quick decision but it can also be limiting because it leads to close-
mindedness such as in stereotypes.
• Which suggests that the more similar an individual is to typical members of given
group, the likely he or she is to belong to that group .
Heuristics: Mental Shortcuts in Social
Cognition
• Another heuristic is availability,
• Which suggests that the easier it is to bring information to mind, the greater its
importance or relevance to our decisions or judgments. In some cases, availability
may also involve the amount of information we bring to mind.
• This phenomenon is what makes the marketing process of "branding" work. A
company makes a slogan or logo and shows it to you over and over again, until that
company comes to your mind easily. You may not have any particular preference for
the brand, but the marketing people count on your familiarity with the name alone to
sell the product.
 Attitude

✗ Social psychologists define an attitude as

an enduring evaluation, positive or
negative, of people, objects, or ideas
Basic Components of Attitudes
• Cognitive Component of Attitude
• Refers to opinion, thoughts and belief part of attitude. When
you form your opinion or judgment on the basis of available
information and decide whether you have a favorable or
unfavorable opinion on that, it is the cognitive part of attitude
we are talking about.
Basic Components of Attitudes
• Affect Component of Attitude
• Refers to the emotional aspect of attitude. This is perhaps the
most often referred part of attitude and decides mostly the
desirable or undesirable (like or dislike) aspect attitude.
Basic Components of Attitudes
• Behavioral Component of Attitude
• Refers to the behavioral part of attitude. If we have a positive
attitude for a particular object, it is likely to be translated into
a particular type of behavior, such as buying or procuring that
object.