Social cognition is a branch of psychology. How much do you know about this topic? Worry not, let’s dig in and find out more.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
By the end of this topic, you are expected to,
Social cognition refers to a branch of psychology that focuses on how people process, store and make use of information about social situations and other people. It focuses on the role that is played by cognitive processes in social interactions.
More technically, social cognition defines how people deal with members of the same species (conspecifics) or even across species (like a pet) information. Social cognition is made up of four stages:
In social psychology, social cognition defines a specific approach in which these processes are studied according to the methods of information processing theory and cognitive psychology. Based on this view, social cognition is an analysis level aiming to understand the phenomena of social psychology by investigating the cognitive processes that underlie. The main concerns of the approach are the processes that are involved in the judgment, perception, and memory of social stimuli are;
This analysis level can be applied to any content area in social psychology, including research on interpersonal, intrapersonal, intergroup and intragroup processes.
The term social cognition has been applied in multiple areas in cognitive neuroscience and psychology, mostly to refer to various social abilities disrupted in schizophrenia, autism, and other disorders. The biological basis of social cognition is investigated in cognitive neuroscience. Developmental psychologists are responsible for the study of the development of social cognition abilities.
SOCIAL SCHEMAS
Social schema theory builds on and makes use of terminology from schema theory in cognitive psychology, describing how concepts or ideas are represented in the mind and how they are categorized. According to this view, when we think of or see a concept, a schema or mental representation is activated which brings to mind other information linked to the original concept by association.
When a schema is more accessible, it can be activated more quickly and used in a certain situation. Two cognitive processes responsible for increasing the accessibility of schemas are priming and salience. Salience refers to the degree to which a certain social object stands out relative to other social objects in a situation. The higher the salience of an object, the more likely that schemas for that object will be made accessible. For example, in case there is one female in a group of six males, female gender schemas may be more accessible and influence the behavior and the group’s thinking toward the female group member. Priming, on the other hand, refers to any experience immediately prior to a situation that causes a schema to be more accessible. For example, watching a horror movie late at night may increase the accessibility of frightening schemas thus increasing the likelihood that a person will perceive shadows and background noises as potential threats.
