An attitude is a knowledge representation that includes primarily our liking or disliking of a person, thing, or group (“I really like Julie” “I dislike my new apartment”). A schema is a knowledge representation that includes information about a person or group (e.g., our knowledge that Joe is a friendly guy or that Italians are romantic).
Two types of knowledge are particularly important in social psychology: schemas and attitudes. Over time, people develop a set of social knowledge that contains information about the self, other people, social relationships, and social groups. A big part of its job is social cognition-thinking about and understanding other people. Figure 1.6 The cerebral cortex is the part of the brain that is involved in thinking. Social cognition is cognition that relates to social activities and that helps us understand and predict the behavior of ourselves and others. Psychologists refer to cognition as the mental activity of processing information and using that information in judgment.
Humans are highly intelligent, and they use cognition in every part of their social lives. The distinguishing brain feature in mammals, including humans, is the more recently evolved cerebral cortex-the part of the brain that is involved in thinking. The human brain contains about 86 billion neurons, each of which can make contact with tens of thousands of other neurons. Social Cognition: Thinking and Learning about Others Now let’s consider separately the roles of cognition, affect, and behavior. Although we will frequently discuss each of the capacities separately, keep in mind that all three work together to produce human experience. You can see that these three aspects directly reflect the idea in our definition of social psychology-the study of the feelings, behaviors, and thoughts of individuals in the social situation. In order to effectively maintain and enhance our own lives through successful interaction with others, we rely on these three basic and interrelated human capacities:įigure 1.5 Human beings rely on the three capacities of affect, behavior, and cognition, which work together to help them create successful social interactions. Social psychology is based on the ABCs of affect, behavior, and cognition.
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