Social Chap 4

Social Perception
BY
ADAN BINT E MUSTAFA
SOCIAL COGNITION
COGNITION
The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and
understanding through thought, experience, and senses.
All the sensations, ideas, perceptions, and intuition results from a process
known as cognition.
SOCIAL COGNITION
SOCIAL COGNITION is encoding, storing, retrieving and
processing information about other people and social situations.
It is the relationship between how people store, process, apply information
about the other people and their society.
How we think about others plays an important role in our interaction with
society.
• Social cognitions guide our behaviors.
• It helps us make judgments about the people and the society.
• Social cognition requires our attention and concentration.
• Social cognition forms social behaviors.
• They help us adapt to the environment.
Social cognitions can be in two ways.
Automatic thinking
quick and automatic. Thinking at this stage is involuntary and at a
unconscious level.
Controlled thinking
is deliberate, effortful and carefully selecting the right course of
action.
Schemas
• Schemas are mental structures that organize our knowledge about the
social world.
• We can say the structures involved in social cognition are schemas.
• They are very helpful in organizing and making sense of the world.
• Schemas help in interpretation in different ways thus reducing the
ambiguities.
Types of schemas
There are four types of schemas.
1- person schemas
2- social schemas
3- self schemas
4- event schemas
Person schemas
They focused on specific individuals.

It is the mental structure that helps in thinking specifically about a person.
Our schemas for our friend might include information about their
appearance, behaviors, personality, and preferences.
Social schemas
• As the name indicates, the mental structure controls knowledge about the
society.
• It includes how people think, behave, and act in various social situations.
Self schemas
• These are the structures that focus on the knowledge of our self.
• It includes both the knowledge about our real self as well as the ideal self.
• The real self is what the individual is in real.
• The ideal self is what the individual wants to be.
• For example what an individual thinks about himself.
Event schemas
• They focus on the patterns that how we react in various events.

• The mental structures that help in in controlling various events.
• This is regarded as a script that how we should react in a situation.
• This also controls our behaviors in various situations.
How schemas changes?
• Two processes helps in changing the existing schemas.
1- assimilation
New information is incorporated by modification in the existing schemas.
2- accommodation
Existing schemas might be altered or new schemas are formed as a person
learns new information or has new experiences. The whole schema gets
changed.
Impression formation
Impression is regarded as the opinion about something or someone.
Impression formation is a social psychology term, that refers to how strangers
develop perceptions about other individuals.
It can also be regarded as the process by which we integrate various sources of
information about others.
Every time we meet a new person we make an impression about him.
It happens without even realizing it. However, it also might change after being
in an interaction with them.
Factors influencing impression formation
• Appearance
• Class
• Age
• Gender
• Profession
• Skin colour
• Looks
• Personality traits
• Company
Soloman Asch
• We conducted studies and concluded that some information about others

is considered more important than the other.
• The important information was referred as CENTRAL TRAITS.
• The less important information was referred as PERIPHERAL TRAITS.
ATTRIBUTION
• ATTRIBUTION refers to how people try to understand the behavior of

others or interpret the events around them
• Attribution theory is the theory that explains how people explain various
things.
• It also tries to see the causes of why people make these casual attributions.
Types of attribution
• We have three categories.

1- internal, external
2- stable, unstable
3- controllable, uncontrollable
Controllable vs uncontrollable
• In controllable we can alter if we wish so. Eg I failed because I played

more instead of studying. Next time ill study more
• In uncontrollable, the causes are not controlled. Eg the test was poorly
designed now its not in the control of student to design a test.
Internal vs external
• In internal factors, people try to attribute or explain behaviors or events on

the base of personal factors like feelings, emotions, abilities or traits.
• In external factors, people infer o the base of the external events
situations.
Stable vs unstable
• The stable attributions are the attributes that remain the same over time. it
means that people think that the event is occurring due to unchanging
stable factors.
• Eg pessimist thinks life is negative and cant be positive
• The unstable attribution is due to temporary or changeable factors. E.g.
optimist thinks that negativity is due to temporary factors.

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Social Perception

They focused on specific individuals.

• They focus on the patterns that how we react in various events.

• We conducted studies and concluded that some information about others

• ATTRIBUTION refers to how people try to understand the behavior of

• We have three categories.

• In controllable we can alter if we wish so. Eg I failed because I played

• In internal factors, people try to attribute or explain behaviors or events on

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