Department of Management

FT305H- SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

UNIT 2
SOCIAL COGNITION
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Faculty Name - Pooja Nahatkar Subject Code - FT305H Class – M BA 3RD SEM
Department of Management

Faculty Name - Pooja Nahatkar Subject Code - FT305H Class – M BA 3RD SEM
Department of Management

Faculty Name - Pooja Nahatkar Subject Code - FT305H Class – M BA 3RD SEM
Department of Management

SCHEMAS
Schemas are mental structures that represent knowledge about a concept or
type of stimuli, they often include attributes and the relationship among those
attributes

Types of Schemas
• Role Schemas: expectations about people in particular roles and social
categories (e.g., the role of a social psychologist, student, doctor, Blacks)
• Self-Schemas: expectations about the self that organize and guide the
4 processing of self-relevant information
• Person Schemas: expectations based on personality traits. What we
associate with a certain type of person (e.g., introvert, warm person)
• Event Schemas: expectations about sequences of events in social situations.
What we associate with certain situations (e.g., restaurant schemas)
Faculty Name - Pooja Nahatkar Subject Code - FT305H Class – M BA 3RD SEM
Department of Management

Why are schemas important?

• They reduce the amount of information to process
• They reduce ambiguity
• They guide our:
Attention and encoding
1. How quick we notice
2. What we notice
5 3. How we interpret what we notice
• Our memory
• Our judgments

Faculty Name - Pooja Nahatkar Subject Code - FT305H Class – M BA 3RD SEM
Department of Management

Impact of schemas on social cognition

Attention Information inconsistent with existing schema, and thus
unexpected, are more easily noticed and attended
Encoding
•At the initial stage, when schema are being formed, inconsistent information
are more easily encoded
•Once schema are formed information consistent with the schema are more
readily encoded and stored
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Recovery and Retrieval Information consistent with existing schema or
part of them, are more often retrieved, recovered and used in our thought,
decisions and behaviours

Faculty Name - Pooja Nahatkar Subject Code - FT305H Class – M BA 3RD SEM
Department of Management

Faculty Name - Pooja Nahatkar Subject Code - FT305H Class – M BA 3RD SEM
Department of Management

Types of heuristics
Representativeness:
Judging by resemblance Strategy to make social judgments based on the extent to
which current person’s or event’s characteristics resemble with the characteristics
of stored schema of similar event or person
Availability: What comes to mind first
Strategy to make social judgments based on specific kinds of information that can
easily be brought into mind
False consensus effect
8 Tendency to assume that others behave or think as we do to a greater extent than is
actually true
Priming: Medical student syndrome
Some events or stimuli increase the availability of specific types of information in
memory or consciousness
Faculty Name - Pooja Nahatkar Subject Code - FT305H Class – M BA 3RD SEM
Department of Management

What do schemas do?

• Help us organize information
• Help us remember certain things
• Help us to fill in details when our information is incomplete
• Can influence behavior
• Help us to interpret ambiguous behavior
• Influence what information we attend to

Faculty Name - Pooja Nahatkar Subject Code - FT305H Class – M BA 3RD SEM
Department of Management

POTENTIAL SOURCES OF ERRORS IN SOCIAL

COGNITION –
•Negativity bias – tendency to pay more attention and sensitivity to negative
information. View threatening faces faster amongst neutral faces. Negativity
bias not universal – need to pay attention to positive stimuli also. Negative bias
strong but can be reduced or eliminated. We adapt to changing environments.
•Optimistic bias – opposite tendency is a predisposition to expect things to turn
out well. Research indicate that people believe that more positive things are
likely to happen to them than negative events, as compared to others (Sheppard,
10 1996). People believe that they are likely to get a better job, have a happier
marriage, live for a longer time.

Faculty Name - Pooja Nahatkar Subject Code - FT305H Class – M BA 3RD SEM
Department of Management

•Overconfidence barrier – greater confidence in our beliefs and

judgments. Strong leaning towards optimism, belief that our
marriage will be happy, live to a ripe old age, starting a new
business it will do well
• One exception to the optimistic rule – when we expect to get
a negative feedback – we tend to brace ourselves for the worst,
we become pessimistic and show a tendency for negative
outcomes
11 • Planning fallacy – our tendency to believe that we can get
more done than is possible. We often announce optimistic
schedules .. Government today during election time !!!

Faculty Name - Pooja Nahatkar Subject Code - FT305H Class – M BA 3RD SEM
Department of Management

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Faculty Name - Pooja Nahatkar Subject Code - FT305H Class – M BA 3RD SEM