Explains the process by which we receive, interpret, analyze, remember and use information about the social world. Also attempts to explain the process of attribution and common errors we often commit in social perception.

1. Social cognition: Perceiving self
and others
Ari Sudan
Tiwari, Ph. D.

2. Social cognition: Perceiving the social world
The manner in which we
receive, interpret, analyze, remember and use
information about the social world.

3. Inquisitive area of social cognition
 Why we are overoptimistic while planning various tasks?
 Do our images of ‘certain kinds of persons’ influence our behaviour?
 Do our expectations about various events shape our reactions to
them when they actually occur?
 Does thinking too much get us confused and interfere with our ability
to make accurate judgments?
 What types of errors we commit over and over again while
perceiving people around us?

4. Schemas
Schemas are mental frameworks containing
information relevant to specific situations or
events, which, once formed, help us interpret these
situations and what is happening in them.

5. Types of schemas
 Person schemas are mental frameworks suggesting that certain traits
and behaviours go together and individuals having them represent a
certain type.
 Role schemas contain information about how persons playing specific
roles generally act.
 Event schemas (Scripts) are mental frameworks of and expectations
in specific situations and events.

6. Impact of schemas on social cognition
Attention
Information
inconsistent
with
existing
schema,
unexpected, are more easily noticed and attended
and
thus

7. Impact of schemas on social cognition
Encoding
 At the initial stage, when schema are being formed, inconsistent
information are more easily encoded
 Once schema are formed information consistent with the
schema are more readily encoded and stored

8. Impact of schemas on social cognition
Recovery and Retrieval
Information consistent with existing schema or part of them, are more
often retrieved, recovered and used in our thought, decisions and
behaviours

9. Heuristics: Mental shortcuts in social cognition
Heuristics are rules or principles that allow us to make social
judgments more quickly and with reduced efforts.
Bombardment of social information
Limited capacity cognitive system
Heuristics
Social interaction needs:
 Rapid judgment
 Reduced effort
 Reasonable accuracy

10. Types of heuristics
Representativeness: Judging by resemblance
Strategy to make social judgments based on the extent to which current
person’s or event’s characteristics resemble with the characteristics of
stored schema of similar event or person
Availability: What comes to mind first
Strategy to make social judgments based on specific kinds of information
that can easily be brought into mind

11. Types of heuristics
False consensus effect
Tendency to assume that others behave or think as we do to a greater
extent than is actually true
Priming: Medical student syndrome
Some events or stimuli increase the availability of specific types of
information in memory or consciousness

12. Errors in social cognition
Rational vs. intuitive processing
Red and White Jelly Beans Experiment
 Rational Thinking in situations involving analytical thought
(Solving mathematical problems)
 Intuitive Thinking in situation involving social judgments
Dealing with inconsistent information
Tendency to pay greater attention to information that is unexpected
or somehow inconsistent with our expectations

13. Errors in social cognition
Optimistic bias for task completion: Planning Fallacy
Tendency to make optimistic prediction concerning how long a task will
take
Automatic vigilance: Noticing the negative
We never notice a person’s twenty smiles but readily notice once
he frowns.
Strong tendency to pay attention to undesirable or negative information

14. Errors in social cognition
Counterfactual thinking: Experience of regret
Tendency to evaluate events by thinking about alternatives to them“what might have been or should have been”

15. Errors in social cognition
Magical thinking
Belief that things that resemble one another share fundamental
properties; Assumptions that does not hold up to rational inquiry
 Law of Contagion: When two objects touch, they pass properties
to one another,
 Law of Similarity: Things that resemble one another share
fundamental properties

16. Person perception: Attribution
Attribution is the process of identifying the causes of others’
behaviour and their stable traits and dispositions

17. Correspondent Inference Theory: Jones and Davis
Behaviour that is
Freely chosen
Somehow forced
Non common in its effects
Common in its effects
Low in social desirability
High in social desirability
Originates from the
person’s stable traits
Originates from the
situational effects

18. Theory of Causal Attribution: Kelley
Causes Behind Others’ Behaviours:
Internal Causes: Persons’ traits, motives and intentions
External Causes: Some aspects of social or physical world

19. Theory of Causal Attribution: Kelley
Consensus
The extent to which an individual’s
response is similar to one shown by others
Low
High
Consistency
The extent to which an individual responds
to a given situation in the same way as on
different occasions
High
High
Distinctiveness
The extent to which an individual responds
in the same way as to different situations
Low
High
Internal
Causes
External
Causes

20. How do we handle multiple causes?
Discounting Principle
Tendency to attach less importance to one potential cause of a
behaviour when other potential causes are also present
Augmenting Principle
Tendency to attach greater importance to one potential cause of a
behaviour if it occurs despite the presence of other inhibitory factors

21. Attribution: Basic sources of errors
Fundamental attribution error
Tendency to overestimate the impact of dispositional causes on others’
behaviour
Actor-observer effect
Tendency to attribute our own behaviour mainly to situational causes but
others’ behaviour to internal (dispositional) causes
Self-serving bias
Tendency to attribute our own positive outcomes to internal causes (own
traits or characteristics) but negative outcomes to external causes
(chance, task difficulty)

22. Rules of justice in social relationship
The Contribution Rule and Equity
A relationship is considered fair when all individuals involved receive
outcomes proportional to their respective contributions
The Need Rule and Norm of Social Responsibility
Outcome should be distributed in accordance with the relative amount
of individual need
The Equality Rule
Outcomes should be distributed equally among the participants in a
relationship, irrespective of individual contributions or needs

23. Thank You