Social Cognition

Course: Social Psychology (BS VII)

Instructor: Ms. Mona Khurshid
 Social Cognition
• How people think about themselves and the social world;
more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember,
and use social information to make judgments and decisions.
• People are generally trying to form accurate impressions of
the world.
• People sometimes make wrong impressions.
 Two Types of Social Cognition
1. Automatic Thinking
• Quick, Involuntary, effortlessly
• No Conscious deliberation of thoughts, perceptions, assumptions
2. Controlled Thinking
• Effortful, Deliberate
• Thinking about self and environment
• Carefully selection the right course of action
• What comes to your mind when you
see this picture?
• Is this man alcoholic or bad in his
luck? Our judgments about other
people can be influenced by schemas
that are accessible in our memory. If
you had just been talking to a friend
about alcoholism or reading a
newspaper about poverty then your
recent memory can affect your
impression about this image.
 People as Everyday Theorists: Automatic
Thinking with schemas
• Schemas
• Mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the
social world around themes or subjects.
• Schemas can influence the information people notice, think about,
and remember.
 People as Everyday Theorists: Automatic
Thinking with schemas
• The term schema is general; it encompasses our knowledge about many
things—
• other people,
• ourselves,
• social roles (e.g., what a librarian or an engineer is like),
• and specific events (e.g., what usually happens when people eat a meal in a restaurant).
• In each case, our schemas contain our basic knowledge and impressions that we
use to organize what we know about the social world and interpret new
situations.
 Schemas and stereotypes
• When applied to members of social groups such as fraternity, gender, race,
schemas are commonly referred to as Stereotypes
• can be applied rapidly and automatically when we encounter other people.
 Functions of Schemas
• Schemas are useful for helping us organize and make sense of the
world and to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. Think for a
moment what It would be like to have no schemas at all.
• Korsakov’s syndrome
• Neurological disorder
• Can’t form new memories
• Each situation is new
• Schemas are particularly useful in helping us figure out what is
going on in confusing or ambiguous situations.
• A classic study by Harold Kelley (1950) in which students in different
sections of a college economics class were told that a guest lecturer
would be filling in that day. Kelly was interested in how different classes
reacted to different instructions.
• The more ambiguous our information is, the more we use schemas to fill
in the blanks.
 Schemas as memory guides
• Every single time you remember something you reconstruct it. for
example, remembering about an event, you put it back together.
• Every time you do it you lose a bit of information or fill a gap in it. For
example, I ask you to tell me about your first day at NIP.
• Over time schemas become stronger and more resistant to change.
 Which Schemas do we use?
Accessibility and Priming
• Accessibility
• The extent to which schemas and concepts are at the forefront of
people’s minds and are therefore likely to be used when making
judgments about the social world.

• Priming
• The process by which recent experiences increase the accessibility of a
schema, trait, or concept
 Which Schemas are applied?
Accessibility
• Something can become accessible for three reasons:
1. Chronically accessible due to past experiences
2. Accessible because it is related to recent goals
3. Temporarily accessible because of our recent experiences
How We Interpret an Ambiguous Situation
The role of accessibility and priming.
 Class Activity
• Look at the list of the words and you have 30 seconds to memorize it.
• Now read the full description of Donald
• Now write down what kind of person Donald is.
 Which schemas are applied?
Priming
• People who previously memorized words like adventurous
• Form positive impressions
• People primed with words reckless and stubborn
• Form negative impressions
Priming is a good example of automatic thinking because it occurs unconsciously ,
quickly and unintentionally.
 Making our schemas come true: The Self-
Fulfilling Prophecy
• The case wherein people have an
• expectation about what another person is like,
• which influences how they act toward that person,
• which causes that person to behave consistently with people’s original
expectations, making the expectations come true
• Teachers can unintentionally make their expectations about their
students come true by treating some students differently from others.
• A study found that if first-grade teachers had overly low expectations of
their students, those students did worse on standardized tests of math,
reading, and vocabulary 10 years later—especially if those children came
from poor families (Sorhagen, 2013).
• Some limits of self-fulfilling prophecies
• People’s true nature can win out in social interactions
• It is most likely to occur when you are distracted
 Activity
• Try this exercise to counteract self-fulfilling prophecy
• Find someone who is a member of a group you dislike and do not feel connected
and strike up a conversation with the person
• Try to imagine that the individual is friendliest, kindest, sweetest, person you have
ever met-act as if you expect the person to be extremely pleasant
• Observe the person’s reactions
 Reference
• Aronson, E., Wilson, T. D., & Sommers, S. R. (2021). Social
psychology. Pearson Education. 10th edition