Social Cognition

Social cognition is the way we perceive, interpret and judge the behaviours of others in social situations. (Leyens and Dardenne, 1996) Our understanding of social cognition was developed by Helder and Kelly in 1955.

Helder believed that people want to understand and control their social environment, and they do this by acting as “naive psychologists” and trying to work out people's behaviour.

Kelly believed that people acted like scientists by trying to predict social situations and he proposed that we use ways of classifying people and objects.

To understand social cognition, we need to understand how we get information about people, and how we apply it. This can be done using Schema Theory, Heuristics, and Social Categorisation.

Schema Theory

A schema is defined as a cognitive structure containing knowledge about a  concept (Fiske and Taylor,1992), in other words it is a sort of mental plan for a social situation, that decides what we pay attention to and what we ignore. There are four different types of schemata: self, person, role and script.

An example of a self schemata is what you expect you would do in a social situation.

An example of a person schemata is what you expect your best friend to do during a day out

An example of a role schemata would be what you expect a teacher to do during a lesson.

An example of a script schemata would be what you expect to happen if you go to a restaurant.

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Schemas and scripts help us socially as they simplify social situations and new information. They help us to function in society as they help us understand and predict how people will behave.

Fiske and Taylor proposed that because we have so much stored knowledge about social situations, when we have to remember and use that knowledge, we act as “cognitive misers”- we take short-cuts so we can process the information better.

Heuristics

Heuristics are defined as short-cuts and strategies used to modify and reduce complex information (Traversky and Kahneman,1974) , or a way ...

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3* The essay identifies certain key features of social cognition with some description, however it needs to refer to one or two relevant theories and to evaluate one or two studies including reference to applications.