Social Cognition

CHAPTER 3 - SOCİAL COGNİTİON

Central topic of SP.

It is important how do we what we know.

Social cognition: how people think about themselves and social world or more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember and use social information to make judgments and decisions.

Why making judgments and taking decisions are important? Because it shapes our behaviors, lives. In order to survive we make decisions, judgments. It is a matter of life of death.

In this chapter we study about issues actually we think about it. How we think?

In order to understand how people think about social word and how accurate their impressions are likely to be we need to distinguish two types of cognitions.

1) Automatic thinking(low effort, quick thinking)

Is thinking that unconscious, unintentional, involuntary and effortless.

We think in consciously,..,..., it is coming from biology. We have a capacity of unconscious thinking. Most of the time we use this type of thinking in order to survive. When we are taking a decision we are not aware that we are taking a decision.

It helps us to understand new situations by relating them to our old experiences. When we counter a new situation we unconsciously related to our old past experience and then we have a probe decision and it affects our behavior.

For example, when we meet new person we categorize him/her easily like thinking about that this person is engineering student, like my uncle. And this helps us to have some thoughts about that particular individual. We unconsciously do this.

The same is valid for places, objects, and situation. For example, you go fast food restaurant in foreign country. You know what you should do. You should ask menu, go to counter, take a table. You have all necessary information in your mind.

How this possible? How we can relate unintentionally relate new situation to our old experiences?

We use schemas.

Schemas: mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social world around themes or subjects and that influence the information people notice, think about and remember.

So all we have some mental structures in our mind and these structures help us to categorize knowledge.

For example, if we think that this person is architect. How she might be? She will be creative, artistic .Do all architects like that? no but it is a schema.

For example, define me a bird. Flying (there are many birds which cannot fly)

For example, drawing house by children (we don't have houses like that)

For example, heart-love

They are general knowledge about everything. We have some schemas about ourselves too. Social roles, specific events...For example, religion bayrams are important days to visit older people.

So it helps to categorize everything around us. They are very useful because most of the time we are in situation that we need to interpret the situation immediately so schemas are very useful in this manner.

But, sometimes they are dangerous. Especially if schemas are related with gender ,race, ethnicity can be harmful because they are called as stereotypes.

Stereotypes are the cause of prejudice. They are dark side of social cognition.

Religion is ethnicity it is not cultural, not in native. It is not the most important thing.

Stereotypes: a generalization about a group of people in which identical characteristics are assigned to virtually all members of the group regardless of actual variation among members.

Why it is dangerous? It creates prejudices. They are generalization regardless of actual variation among members. You overgeneralize some characteristic of that group to all members. And this creates..nörtsy

For example, all black people are criminals.

For example, college students in ABD-gun, tool experiment

Knowledge of cultural stereotypes can be influenced on people instrues way.(kurnazca,sinsi)

You may not have any prejudice but when you meet with a gay person you feel uncomfortable this is because of the cultural stereotypes about gay people.

So if they have some dangerous side effects so why do we need schemas?

2) Controlled thinking (high effort)

We make controlled thinking in order to understand automatic thinking.

They are typically very useful for us to organize and make sense of a word and feel the gaps of our knowledge.

Categorization, filing the blanks in our knowledge.

Neurological disorder that people loose ability to create new memories. And they approach every situation as they have actually experienced.

Yes, schemas have side effects but if we use our second thinking we can handle them.

They are particularly important when we encounter information that can be in interpretive in a number of ways because they help us to reduce ambiguity.

How we can interpret an ambiguous situation? In automatic it is not matter that our decision is wrong or right. What is important is we can take decision immediately. We can make mistakes in automatic thinking.

For example, classical experiment the researcher says that in the college want to measure the student's reaction to a new instructor. They divided the classes into two groups. In one class people were given information about age, personality about new instructor. In other group, it is added that she is a very cold, distant person and also the information given to the first group also given to second group. And they ask that evaluate the teacher. And she visits each class for 20 minutes. It is an ambiguous situation. Of course we perceive the clear situation in an accurate way. For example, if the teacher behaves clearly then the students perceived it accurately.

The more ambiguous our information is the more we use schemas to fill in the blanks .If they are accurate, they are useful but if they are not then they might be very harmful and we should aware of it.

For example, "gelen gideni arattırır"  ambiguous situation of new coming person