Exploring social cognition and attitudes in everyday life

 Exploring Social Cognition and Attitudes in Everyday Life

Social Cognition

Social cognition is like our mental toolbox for understanding the social world around us. We should think of it as how our brains process information when we interact with people. When our preconceived notions or beliefs influence how we perceive and interpret information is top down processing . For example, if we believe someone is generally friendly, we might interpret their neutral facial expression as a smile. When we rely on raw sensory data without preconceived ideas. Imagine meeting someone new, and we form your impression based solely on their behaviour during that encounter, without any prior knowledge is bottom up processing. The setting or situation or the context of a place can significantly affect our social cognition. In a job interview, for instance, we might interpret a person's confident demeanour differently than we would at a casual party.

Schemas

Schemas are mental shortcuts or templates we use to organise information about people and situations. Perseverance Effect happens when once we have a schema in mind, it tends to stick, even when we're presented with contradictory evidence. Suppose you think someone is unfriendly because they were distant once. You might still see them that way, even if they're friendly later. Self-Fulfilling Prophecy is when our beliefs about someone lead us to treat them in a way that causes them to behave as we expected. For instance, if we believe a classmate is uncooperative, we might not collaborate well with them, and they might indeed become uncooperative. Cognitive Capacity and Information overload happens when there's too much information to process, our social cognition might suffer. For example, during a group discussion, if trying to pay attention to multiple conversations at once, one may not fully grasp any of them.

Heuristics

Heuristics are mental shortcuts or rules of thumb we use to make quick judgments. Representativeness Heuristic is when we judge something based on how well it matches a prototype in our minds. If someone acts like a typical "nerd" in your view, we might assume they're really smart. We tend to overestimate the importance of information that's easily accessible. If it is recently heard about a shark attack, one might think they're more common than they actually are. We often anchor our judgments to an initial piece of information and then adjust from there. Imagine buying a used phone, and the seller asks for a high price. We might start negotiating from there, even if it's too high.

Attributions

Attributions are how we explain the causes of people's behaviour. Personal Attributions is when we attribute someone's behaviour to their personality or character. For example, if a friend is always late, one might think that they might have organisation issues. Situational Attributions is when we attribute someone's behaviour to external factors or the situation. If a friend is late because of traffic, we'd consider it a situational factor.

Attitudes

Attitudes are our evaluations of people, objects, or ideas. We have different attitudes towards various occasions. For instance, we might have a positive attitude toward studying because it helps us achieve good grades. We often use surveys to measure attitudes. If we want to know how much our friends enjoy a particular class, we can ask them to rate it on a scale from 1 to 5. It can also be dependent upon various factors.