PSY 380

January 18, 2000

Today's Topic: Social Cognition

Announcements

Coffee Talk today after class

Grab a coffee cup; when the cups are gone, the coffee talk is full

CP article by Gilovich handed out in section

Paper Assignment 1 handed out in section

Introduction to Social Cognition

Cognition = thought

Cognitive Psychology = scientific study of thought processes

Social Cognition draws on much of the same framework as cognitive psychology

Stages of information processing

encoding

 

storage

 

retrieval

What makes perception of people different from perception of objects?

Potential for interaction

Mutual cognition

Change in the target of perception

Schemas

Schemas: mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social world around themes or subjects

are formed through experience

influence how we see the world

Examples of schemas

Types of schemas

Script: action or event schema

A generalized representation about what we expect to happen and how people will behave during an event.

Examples:

stereotype: a person schema

Examples:

What do schemas do for us?

help us organize, understand and predict the social world

influence how we interpret information

influence what we remember

Example(Pichert & Anderson, 1977)

Participants read a description of a house

One group told to take the perspective of a home-buyer

One group told to take the perspective of a burglar

Results

Home-buyers

Burglars

Schema given to participants influenced what info they paid attention to and could later recall

Schemas help us by facilitating processing

But can also result in biases

Demonstration