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2: Social Cognition

  • Page ID
    257067
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    Chapter Overview 

    This chapter explores how people acquire, organize, and use social knowledge to understand themselves and others. You will examine how learning, schemas, attitudes, expectations, and cognitive heuristics shape social judgments and behavior. The chapter also considers the relationship between cognition and affect, including how emotions influence thinking and how our thoughts can influence emotional experiences. Finally, you will explore strategies for regulating affect and consider how accurately people predict their future emotional responses.

    Chapter Learning Objectives

    1. Sources of Social Knowledge

    • Review the principles of operant, associational, and observational learning, and explain the similarities and differences between them.
    • Explain how and when schemas and attitudes do and do not change as a result of the operation of accommodation and assimilation.
    • Outline the ways that schemas are likely to be maintained through processes that create assimilation.

    2. How We Use Our Expectations

    • Provide examples of how salience and accessibility influence information processing.
    • Review, differentiate, and give examples of some important cognitive heuristics that influence social judgment.
    • Summarize and give examples of the importance of social cognition in everyday life.

    3. Social Cognition and Affect

    • Describe important ways in which our affective states can influence our social cognition, both directly and indirectly, for example, through the operation of the affect heuristic.
    • Outline mechanisms through which our social cognition can alter our affective states, for instance, through the mechanism of misattribution of arousal.
    • Review the role that strategies, including cognitive reappraisal, can play in successful self-regulation.
    • Explore the relationship between positive cognition, affect, and behaviors.
    • Outline important findings in relation to our affective forecasting abilities.


    2: Social Cognition is shared under a not declared license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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