Social Cognition & Affect Flashcards
What is the human mind unlike?
A tape recorder
In what way is it impossible for humans to record events?
Exactly as they see them
In what way is it impossible for humans to recall events?
Like a tape that has been rewound.
To what does cognition refer?
To the many different processes we use to understand and make sense of the world.
How does cognition apply to the social world?
As it refers to the way in which we analyse, interpret, remember, and use information about our social world.
What kind of theories from cognitive psychology can be applied to social psychology?
Those related to attention, memory, inference, and concept formation in helping people understand others.
What is social cognition?
The mental activity that relates to social activities and helps us meet the goal of understanding and predicting the behaviour of ourselves and others.
With what are we bombarded from our social environment?
Information and stimuli
How do we absorb our environment?
Via our attention
What do we devise to simplify incoming information?
Short-cut strategies
What offers us a way of simplifying incoming information?
Categorisation
What is social categorisation?
The process of understanding what something is by knowing what other things it is equivalent to, and what other things it is different from.
What is a way of classifying some collection of objects, events, opinions, attitudes, concepts, or people?
Social categorisation
What does social categorisation save us?
Time and cognitive processing.
What are schemas in the context of social psychology?
Mental frameworks that centre around a specific theme that help us to organise social information.
