Social Cognition
Social cognition is the area of social psychology that examines how people perceive and think about others and their social world.
I didn’t quite know the term for this, but this stuff is really important to understand how humans work.
https://nobaproject.com/textbooks/paul-wehr-new-textbook/modules/social-cognition-and-attitudes
Humans make simplifying assumptions about how the world works. This is what gives rise to prejudice.
There’s a few categorizations:
- A schema is a mental model, or representation, of any of the various things we come across in our daily lives
We can hold schemas about almost anything:
- individual people (person schemas)
- ourselves (self-schemas)
- recurring events (event schemas, or scripts)
Another important way we simplify our social world is by employing
- heuristics: mental shortcuts that reduce complex problem-solving to more simple, rule-based decisions
“Judge a book by its cover”
judging whether things belong to particular categories = representativeness heuristic
people may rely on the representativeness heuristic (A heuristic in which the likelihood of an object belonging to a category is evaluated based on the extent to which the object appears similar to one’s mental representation of the category) to arrive at a quick decision
- female to be an athlete based on the fact that the female is tall, muscular, and wearing sports apparel
availability heuristic = judge the likelihood that things will happen
However, what is really interesting is that we are actually not terrible at making these fast judgements.
There’s a term called “thin-slice judgments”
we seem to be fairly adept at making predictions about others and ourselves.
- our own predictions of our future academic performance are more accurate than peers’ predictions of our performance, and self-expressed interests better predict occupational choice than career inventories
Although we may believe we are always capable of rational and objective thinking (for example, when we methodically weigh the pros and cons of two laundry detergents in an unemotional—i.e., “cold”—manner), our reasoning is often influenced by our motivations and mood
Hot cognition is the mental processes that are influenced by desires and feelings.
Motivated Skepticism - I guess this is the opposite of Confirmation Bias
When we encounter a new object or person, we often form an attitude toward it (him/her).
An attitude is a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favour or disfavour
- An implicit attitude is an attitude that a person does not verbally or overtly express. Like what people think about their jobs, or racism.
To measure implicit attitudes, we do the Implicit Association Test.