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.
- 2.1: Prelude to Social Cognition
- This page discusses social cognition's importance in predicting social behavior and making decisions. It covers how learning and unconscious influences shape judgment and highlights the reliance on schemas and shortcuts that can lead to errors in social interactions. The chapter also draws parallels to the 2008 financial crisis, showing how flawed judgments impacted educated individuals and contributed to market failure.
- 2.2: Sources of Social Knowledge
- This page discusses the foundations of social knowledge acquisition, focusing on operant, associational, and observational learning, and their effects on behaviors and attitudes. It highlights the role of schemas in processing information, leading to confirmation bias and the persistence of stereotypes. Research shows that children learn behaviors by observation, especially when reinforced, and how schemas influence memory and decision-making.
- 2.3: How We Use Our Expectations
- This textbook explores cognitive biases and social judgment, emphasizing how schemas, salience, and accessibility shape our evaluations. It covers automatic vs. controlled cognition, various heuristics like the representativeness and availability heuristics, and the planning fallacy. Key concepts include counterfactual thinking, overconfidence, and the potential for bias in eyewitness testimony.
- 2.5: Thinking Like a Social Psychologist about Social Cognition
- This page explores the role of social cognition, schemas, and attitudes in shaping perceptions and judgments of others. It discusses biases stemming from operant learning and modeling, which can lead to misinterpretations. Key concepts like salience, accessibility, and counterfactual thinking are presented, illustrating how cognitive processes can distort judgments.
- 2.6: Chapter Summary
- This page examines social cognition, focusing on how we perceive and evaluate others. It underscores the need for accurate social judgments in interactions and notes that while our cognitive processes are efficient, they are prone to errors from schemas and heuristics. It discusses the impact of learning on social knowledge and contrasts automatic versus controlled cognition.
- 2.7: Additional Learning Opportunities
- This page provides application activities for reinforcing social learning concepts, schemas, heuristics, and cognitive biases for students and instructors. It includes assignments for observational learning, schema analysis, and decision-making strategies to reduce cognitive biases. Khan Academy videos explain Piaget’s theories, emphasizing schemas and heuristics in judgments and biases. Critical thinking questions are also included to promote deeper engagement with the material.
- 2.8: References
- This page presents a comprehensive list of references in psychology, covering key topics like cognitive biases, social behavior, decision-making, and emotional processing. It highlights significant studies on happiness, trauma, self-regulation, and social perceptions by notable psychologists. The works emphasize the interplay of emotions and cognition, detailing how biases affect judgments and behaviors in social contexts.
- 2.9: Alternate Text Descriptions
- This page explores the connections between mood, weather, and well-being, indicating that weather impacts mood and influences self-assessments of well-being. It details how asking about mood can yield neutral evaluations and discusses the facial feedback hypothesis via an experiment involving pen positions and facial muscle activity affecting emotions.
Thumbnail: Mental Representations and Social Cognition. (CC BY 2.0; via Wikimedia Commons).