View Notes - Impact of Schemas on Social Cognition from PSYCH 2501 at University of Iowa. Social cognition: Perceiving self and others 1. A schema is a mental concept that informs a person about what to expect from a variety of experiences and situations. As the cognitive revolution took hold throughout psychology in the middle to latter part of the 20th century, researchers in social psychology began to import methodologies from cognitive psychology to the study of social phenomena, giving birth to what is now known as social cognition. Imagine the alien Todf in a classroom with children ages 5 or 6 years old. Social cognition is how we view, analyze and interpret information about the social world (Baron and Byrne, 1997). Social cognition is a sub-field within the larger discipline of social psychology and has been defined as “the study of mental processes involved in perceiving, attending to, remembering, thinking about, and making sense of the people in our social world” (Moscowitz, 2005, p.3). Social cognition is a sub-topic of social psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. Representativeness Heuristic Estimating the probability of an event by comparing it to existing may be subordinate in relation to you, superior in relation to some- Social cognition allows people to read the faces of other people and enables them to decode the contents of their minds. A social representation of a political philosophy or program may develop in part through objectification such as by personification in which the philosophy is linked to the leader. persisting. Schemas can be seen as mental templates that guide our perceptions and interpretations of… Schemas. Our memory of past events is often influenced by schemas of what should have happened. THE IMPACT OF SCHEMAS ON SOCIAL COGNITION: ATTENTION, ENCODING, RETRIEVAL Schemas influence attention (the information we notice, for which schemas act as filters), encoding (the process by which information gets stored in memory), and retrieval. The very characteristics of social cognition reflect the nature of social constructivism – interpersonal and intersubjective. The way we think about others plays a major role in how we think, feel, and interact with the world around us. Social Cognition- Schemas (2) STUDY. A notable theory of social cognition is social- schema theory. Through schema activation, judgments are formed that go beyond the information actually available; in social schemas, the same holds true. in the presence of disconfirming info. Social Cognition Is Thinking About Relationships Alan P. Fiske and Nick Haslaml Departments of Psychology and Anthropology, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania (A.P.F. Observers develop schemas for individual social roles (e.g., librarians) and social groups (e.g., ethnic and cultural outgroups). Cognitive dissonance theory, schemas and heuristics, and social influence, specifically conformity, can all help to explain why Donald Trump is America’s new president-elect. PLAY. Social Cognition- Schemas (2) STUDY. PLAY. General Overviews. Social Cognition 1 - An approach in social psychology that focuses on the way in which cognition is affected by wider and more immediate social context. This active and social practice (pretend play) consisting of conversation and interaction, developed children's "mindreading" (social skill) capabilities, further developing social cognition (Goswami, p234). Schemas for social groups fall under the rubric of stereotypes, and the basic principles discussed later apply to them as well as to other types of schemas.