• You are all stranded on a desert island, and may

choose only three of the following objects to survive.

• a bag of fruit and vegetable seeds
• a Swiss army knife
• a fishing net
• sunblock
• a 100 ft rope
• a waterproof bed sheet,
• a large, strong bucket
• 2 litres of kerosene,
• A lighter,
• You can make these objects as obscure and
strategic as possible so that members are
challenged to really think and plan for their
survival.
Social Cognition
• Human beings are social animals.
• They think feel and act by involving themselves, others and
larger collectives
• The enormous yet seemingly natural tasks of social
perception, social memory, and social decision making in
which they engage and the by product of such tasks constitute
the study of social cognition.
• Social cognition is defined as the process by which we
interpret, analyze, remember and use information about the
social world. In the other words, social cognition is the way by
which we process social information.
While studying social cognition, social psychologists attempt
to answer following important questions of social lives of
human being:
• How do we register, encode, classify, store and utilize the
overflow of information in our social world?
• What processes our cognitive system follows when we
receive information about others in order to form an
overall impression of them?
• What do we do in order to understand the reasons behind
and origins of behaviors of people around us?
• Is the processing of social information biased? What biases
and errors generally we commit in the process of social
perception?
Schema
• Our social interactions are largely guided by our
expectations regarding the people involved in the
interactions, roles played by them in the specific situations,
norms guiding behaviors of people involved in the
interactions and the likely events and action in the
situation.
• Such expectations originate from our previous experiences
and knowledge of people, roles, norms and events of
similar kinds.
• Social psychologists refer it as schemas.
• Schemas are defined as cognitive structures containing
broader expectations and knowledge of the social world
that help us systematically organize social information.
• Schemas contain not only some precise and explicit
illustrations, they also include our inferences and
assumptions about the persons, events situations etc.
• Schemas help us to predict the likely behaviors of people
occupying specific roles in a social interaction and
sequence of actions in a particular social events.
• Further schemas influence the process of encoding, storage
and retrieval of social information. They also guide us in
making inferences about the information which is not
available to us in a particular social situation.
• By all its functions, a schema significantly reduces the
efforts we put forth in processing the social information.
• Types of schema
– Person schemas
– Self schemas
– Group schemas
– Role schemas
– Event schemas
Person schema
• Cognitive structure that attempt to illustrate the personalities of
others are called as person schema.
• Person schemas try to explain personalities of either specific
persons (such as Mahatma Gandhi, Mahatma Buddha, J. R. D. Tata,
etc) or explain personalities in terms of some universal types (such
as extravert, introvert, sober, sociable, depressive, submissive, etc).
• Person schema help us in classifying and organizing our
understanding about the personalities of people around us and lead
to make internal predictions about their behaviour.
• It is also referred as person prototypes, generally consist of a
composition of personality traits that we use to classify people and
to predict their behavior in particular situations.
• Generally dominant personality traits are utilized as criteria for
categorizing people in our social world.
• This help us making expectations in our social interactions and
giving us a sense of control and predictability in the situation.
Self schemas
• Similar to the way we receive, encode, store and utilise the
information about other people, we develop schemas that describe
our self concept based on past experiences.
• Self schemas are cognitive representations about us that organize
and process all related information.
• Self schema is developed from the traits that we think as core of
our self concept.
• Self schema describe the components that uniquely characterize
and define our self concept.
• We have different context specific self schemas that are activated in
different social situations
• For example, self schema of A as commanding and dominant when
he is in his office may be opposite from his self schema as
submissive and obedient when he is with his father
Group schema
• Group schema, often referred to as stereotypes, are
the schemas regarding the people representing a
particular social group or category.
• Stereotype specify the traits, qualities, attributes and
behaviors presumably characterizing the members of
the group or category.
• In our social interactions we try to understand our
social world with the help of number of stereotypes
about people of different castes, religious group,
specific geographical regions, speaking different
languages, ethnic groups, etc.
Role schema
• Role schemas characterize traits, qualities, attributes and behaviors
of persons with a particular role in a group. Role schemas help us in
understanding and predicting the behaviors of persons who occupy
specific roles in a social group. Role schemas are categorized in
various ways.
• For example, there are role schemas associated with various
occupational roles such as teachers, scientists, doctors, sales
managers etc.
• Similarly role schemas are also associated other kinds of roles in
social groups such as group leader, caption of sport team etc
• Our initial interactions with a person are broadly guided by the cues
that prominently visible to us.
• However, as our familiarity with the person increases importance of
such physical cues is reduced and trait-based person schemas are
given more importance in guiding our social interactions
Event schemas
• Event schemas, also referred as scripts, are cognitive structures that
describe the expected sequences of actions and behaviors of
people participating in an event in our everyday social activities.
• We explicate scripts by asking people to describe that what actually
happens in a particular social event, what is the sequence of these
actions and what types of behaviors people do during the event.
• For example, if we are asked to explain the appropriate behavioral
sequences of an Indian classroom, we can very vividly describe the
behavioral sequences of teacher and students.
• The phenomenon of event schema or script indicate that we store
the behaviors that are appropriate in particular situation for our
broad understanding and whenever we are encountered to such
situation the script is automatically activated in order to facilitate
out smooth interaction in the situation.
Impact of schema

• Our social environment is flooded with information at any

given time and it is beyond our cognitive capacity to
process all those information instantly.
• We cannot respond to all those social stimuli in equally
efficient manner and therefore, we are required to focus on
some of the most relevant and important information.
• Schemas provide us a practical tool to make precise social
judgments up to an extent by helping us in registering,
encoding, categorizing, organizing, storing,
comprehending and retrieving the social information and
consequently, making decision about the appropriate
behavior in a given situation.
• Schemas are theory driven
– Schema functions as Theory driven structure that
enable us to classify and organize our specific
social interactions and broader social experiences.
– This suggests that the information available in the
social environment is rarely used in social
interactions, instead schematic theories operate
subconsciously in the background and therefore,
we comprehend and act in a novel social situation
based or schema driven assumption.
• Impact of schema on memory
– Human memory is mainly considered as reconstructive in
nature.
– In place of remembering all specific fine points of social
encounters and situations, we generally remember only
prominent details characterizing and defining the
situations which activate the schema when we require and
subsequently schema fills in other minute details
– Such impact of schema on memory suggests that schemas
further determine that what details will be remembered
and which details will be forgotten.
– Details consistent with our schema is more likely to be
remembered than inconsistent.
• Impact of schema on inferences in social interactions
– Most of our social interactions are facilitated by the
schema driven assumptions and inferences we draw about
various people in our social surroundings
– At number of occasions there are large gaps in our
understanding of the social situations which are filled up
by the schema.
– When we are unaware of certain information about
someone, we draw some inferences consistent with our
schema in order to create a coherent and complete
understanding of the person.
– For example if you know your roommate who is fitness
crazy, you can infer that he will love company of another
friend of yours who is sportsperson
• Impact of schemas on social judgments
– Several schemas, particularly person schemas
represent the cognitive structures referring our
evaluations, judgments and affective orientations
about people and events in our social environment.
– Therefore, when a particular schema is activated it
leads us to view the associated social stimulus in the
categories of good-bad, normal-abnormal, positive-
negative, etc. and consequently, it strongly elicits
feelings consistent with our evaluations
• Schemas are integrated and stable in nature
– Schemas are developed and strengthened with our
experiences in particular social situations and further they
are stored in the form of integrated structures of
associated components.
– During our social interactions even a single accessed
component of a schema is capable of activating the whole
schema, as strong associative links exist among the
components of the schema.
– Once schemas are developed and are recurrently activated
during our social encounters they become relatively stable
part of our social thought process and further they resist
change even when we are encountered with the evidences
inconsistent with the existing schemas
Modes of social thought processing
• Continuum model of processing
– We often analyze the social information in a very cautious,
vigilant, systematic and progressive manner
– We process social information along a continuum starting from
category driven schematic processing to data driven systematic
processing
– Category driven schematic processing is employed in the when
information is explicit and less important to the person;
whereas, data driven systematic processing is employed when
the information is confusing and comparatively more significant
for the person.
– Data driven systematic processing is employed also when we
require very high accuracy in our social judgements.
• Automatic vs controlled processing
– An organized, logical and highly purposeful
approach known as controlled processing
– A quick, relatively effortless and intuitive-
spontaneous approach known as automatic
processing
Heuristics: The Mental Shortcuts

• In our everyday social interactions, we are flooded by

information which generally exceeds the capacity of
our cognitive system.
• In such situations, we devise and employ various
strategies which help us to maximum utilization of our
cognitive resources in minimum cognitive efforts;
consequently leading to an automatic, rapid,
spontaneous and effortless social thought process.
• Using heuristics a type of mental shortcuts, is one of
the most prominent such strategies in which we make
complex decisions in an automatic, rapid, spontaneous
and effortless manner by using simple rules.
• At a certain time many schemas are available
to us which may guide our social interactions.
• We employ heuristics in order to select a
particular schema to guide our social
interactions.
Types of heuristics
• Availability heuristics
– Some schemas are more frequently ued inour
social interactions than others.
– A schema which is most recelty used is more
readily available to us to huide our social
interactions.
• Representativeness heuristics
– Representativeness heuristics is often used when we faced
with situations with high level of uncertainty.
– In such situations we generally focus on very essential
properties of the social entities and match them with
various schemas held in our cognitive system
– The schema which most closely resembles with the
characteristics of the particular social entity is selected
– In certain situations, representativeness heuristic becomes
so strong that it is employed even in the presence of
contradictory evidences and statistical information
• Anchoring and adjustment heuristics
– In a situation where we are required to take a
social decision or to express our opinion on some
social issue about which we do not haveexpertise,
we usually try to make a guess based on a
somewhat workable cue
– This cues functions as a starting point or as an
anchor and further we make modifications and
adjustments in the starting point in order to arrive
at our final decision or opinio
Cognitive Biases

• As a human being, we consciously desire to think logically in

order to make somewhat error-free decisions, evaluations
and judgments about people and events in social
surroundings.
• However, at various occasions our social thought process
ignores certain logical standards and we put in less cognitive
effort to comprehend our social world which subsequently
leads to errors in our social cognition.
Biases in social cognition

• Cognitive –experiential self theory

• Paying attention to inconsistent information
• Negativity bias
• Planning fallacy
• Potential costs of thinking too much
• Counter factual thinking
• Magical thinking
Cognitive –experiential self theory
– This theory argues that many times we prefer our
intuitive thoughts based on past experiences over
logical thinking in order to evaluate a social situation.
– For example when a cricket player scores a century
with a pair of shoes he continues to wear the same
pair of shoes in coming matches as well despite the
probable dangerous consequences of wearing an old
pair of shoes.
– Such intuitive thoughts originate from the past
experience that old shoes were lucky for him.
Paying attention to inconsistent information
– When we encounter a person with a social situation,
information inconsistent with his/her role draws our
attention even at cost of some consistent and even more
relevant information.
– Social psychologists have provided evidence that
inconsistent information is better remembered than the
consistent information about gender roles.
– Bardack and park (1996) reported that the participants
remembered the qualities inconsistent with a gender
better than those that are usually consistent with a gender.
– The findings indicate that the inconsistent information may
be preferred over important consistent information
leading to potential errors in social cognition.
Negativity bias
– The negativity bias referes to the notion that, even
when of equal intensity, human being has
tendency to give greater weight to negative social
information and entities (events, objects, personal
traits etc.) as compared to positive ones.
– When trait differ in terms of the positivity and
negativity traits are disproportionately impact the
final impression.
Planning fallacy
– While deciding about the time we will take to complete a task,
we often underestimate the time needed and at the time of
execution we generally overshoot the time period that we had
assigned to ourselves. This is known as planning fallacy.
– The reason for this is that while initially taking the decision
about the time required, we generally focus on events or
actions to occur in future rather than focusing on the time we
had taken to accomplish a task in the past.
– This tendency disallows us to do a realistic estimate of time
needed.
– Furthermore, at the time of initial decision making, even if one
is reminded of the excessive time incurred in the past, the delay
is usually attributed to some external factors rather than one’s
own capabilities to finish the work in time.
Potential costs of thinking too much
– At number of occasions, we excessively do careful thinking
resulting into confusion, frustration and wrong judgment.
– Wilson and Schooler (1991) asked half of their research
participants to simply rate the several strawberry jams and
the other half of them to deeply analyze the reasons for
the ratings they themselves gave to each jam.
– The researcher also took he opinion of experts about the
correctness of the judgment made of the two groups of
the participants.
– They found that, according to the experts, the judgment of
the second half of the participants were not as accurate as
that of the first half.
Counterfactual thinking
• Counter factual thinking is the tendency in which
people think contrary to what actually occurred.
• People think about the already occurred events by
framing some possible alternatives in terms of “what
is” and the “ if I had only”.
• For example, a cricketer thinks that “ what could
have happened if played in that match!”
Magical thinking
– Magical thinking is the kind of thinking that involves irrational
assumptions often associated with law of similarity or law of
contagion.
– Law of similarity states our assumption that people similar to
each other in appearance may be having similar fundamental
characteristics.
– For example, some children might not like to eat biscuit in the
shape of a lizard.
– Law of contagion is the belief that when two people or object
come in contact with each other, they pass on their properties
to one another and such an impact last long even after the
contact is over.
– For example, one might not like to wear the coat used by an HIV
patient even after it is dry-cleaned.