Social cognition, like general cognition, uses schemas to help people form judgments and

conclusions about the world.

Social cognition, like general cognition, uses schemas to help people form judgments and
conclusions about the world.
Key Points

 Social cognition is the encoding, storage, retrieval, and processing of information about

other members of the same species.
 A notable theory of social cognition is social- schema theory.
 Through schema activation, judgments are formed that go beyond the information actually
available; in social schemas, the same holds true.
 There are thought to be cultural differences in social cognition; Western social cognition is
thought to be more analytical, while Eastern social cognition is thought to be more holistic.
 The relationship between social behaviour and neural activity is not fully understood.
 schema: A pattern of thought or behaviour that organizes categories of information and the
relationships among them.
 salience: The degree to which a particular object stands out relative to other objects in a
situation.
 priming: A prior experience that causes a schema to be more accessible.
Social cognition is the encoding, storage, retrieval, and processing of information about members of
the same species; from a human perspective, it is simply the ability to think about and understand
others. Social cognition is a specific approach of social psychology (the area of psychology that
studies how people’s thoughts and behaviours are influenced by the presence of others) that uses
the methods of cognitive science. Because of this it has a heavy emphasis on information processing:
How do people process information about the people around them, and how does that affect their
own perceptions of the world?
Schemas
In schema theory, when we see or think of a concept, a mental representation or “schema” is
activated that brings to mind other related information, usually unconsciously. Through schema
activation, judgments are formed based on internal assumptions in addition to information actually
available in the environment.
Similarly, a notable theory of social cognition is social-schema theory. This theory suggests that we
have mental representations for specific social situations. For example, if you meet your new
teacher, your “teacher schema” may be activated, and you may therefore automatically associate
this person with wisdom and authority if that is how you have experienced past teachers.
When a schema is more “accessible,” this means that it can be more quickly activated and used in a
particular situation. Two cognitive processes that increase the accessibility of schemas are salience
and priming. In social cognition, salience is the degree to which a particular social object stands out
relative to other social objects in a situation. The higher the salience of an object, the more likely
that schemas for that object will be made accessible. For example, if there is one female in a group
of seven males, female gender schemas may be more accessible and influence the group’s thinking
and behaviour toward the female group member. “Priming” refers to any experience immediately
prior to a situation that causes a schema to be more accessible. For example, watching a scary movie
late at night might increase the accessibility of frightening schemas, increasing the likelihood that a
person will perceive shadows and background noises as potential threats.

Cultural Differences in Social Cognition

Social psychologists have become increasingly interested in the influence of culture on social
cognition. Although people of all cultures use schemas to understand the world, the content of our
schemas has been found to differ for individuals based on their cultural upbringing. For example,
one study interviewed a Scottish settler and a Bantu herdsman from Swaziland and compared their
schemas about cattle. Because cattle are essential to the lifestyle of the Bantu people, the Bantu
herdsman’s schemas for cattle were far more extensive than the schemas of the Scottish settler. The
Bantu herdsmen was able to distinguish his cattle from dozens of others, while the Scottish settler
was not.
Studies have found that culture influences social cognition in other ways too. In fact, cultural
influences have been found to shape some of the basic ways in which people automatically perceive
and think about their environment. For example, a number of studies have found that people who
grow up in East Asian cultures such as China and Japan tend to develop holistic thinking styles,
whereas people brought up in Western cultures like Australia and the USA tend to develop analytic
thinking styles. The typically Eastern holistic thinking style is a type of thinking in which people focus
on the overall context and the ways in which objects relate to each other. For example, if an
Easterner was asked to judge how a classmate is feeling, she might scan everyone’s face in the class,
and then use that information to judge how the individual is feeling. On the other hand, the typically
Western analytic thinking style is a type of thinking style in which people focus on individual objects
and neglect to consider the surrounding context. For example, if a Westerner was asked to judge
how a classmate is feeling she might focus only on the classmate’s face in order to make the
judgment.