summary of social cognition essays

summary of social cognition essays CHAPTER 17: SOCIAL COGNITION AND EFFECT Social psychology is the study of how people think and feel about their social world and how they interact and influence one another. - Social psychologists begin with the basic observation that human behaviour is a function of both the person and the situation. - Research has repeatedly shown that situations are more powerful determinants of behaviour than our intuitions lead us to believe. - Individuals, however, do not react simply to the objective features of situations but to their subjective interpretations of them. Intuitive Theories of Social Behaviour - In attempting to understand people, we act like informal scientists and construct our own intuitive theories of human behaviour. In doing so we face the same basic tasks as the formal scientist: 2. We attempt to detact covariation or correlation, to discern what goes with what. 3. We try to infer cause and effect, to evaluate what causes what. - We go through this same process in trying to understand ourselves: 1. We observe our own thoughts, feelings or actions. 2. We attempt to detect covariation. 3. We try to infer cause and effect. - Our intuitive attempts to apply scientific reasoning to everyday life work surprisingly well. However, our theories can actually shape our perceptions of data, distort our estimates of covariation, and bias our evaluations of cause and effect. - The first difficulty we face as informal scientists is that of collecting data in a systematic and unbiased way. - When, as informal survey researchers, we try to make the estimate of a representative sample intuitively, our major source of data is likely to be the people we know personally. Obviously, this is not a represantative sample of the population. - Another major source of data is the mass media, which also provide nonrandom and nonrepresentative sample: the data mass media gives us ...