Social Cognition : The Way People Process, Storage And Apply Information

Social psychology is an empirical science that studies how people think about, influence, and relate to one another. This field focuses on how individuals view and affect one another. Social psychology also produces the idea of construals which represent how a person perceives, comprehends or interprets the environment. Construals introduce the idea that people want to make themselves look good to others and they want to be seen as right. It is also said that the social setting in which people interact impacts behavior, which brings up the idea of behaviorism. Behaviorism is the idea that behavior is a function of the person and the environment.

“Social psychologists investigate how we view ourselves and others, how we interact with others, how we influence others, and how we act when we are part of a group. Given the amount of time each of us spends thinking about and interacting with the people we encounter every day, much of our lives are spent with the subject matter of social psychology.”(p.22)

According to our text, social psychology is a science that studies the impact of our

-A person’s behavior can be influenced by observing others within the context of social interactions, experiences, and outside media influence.

There were three questions asked at the start of this paper. What is Social Psychology all about? Why is the study of it so important? Is there truly a purpose or benefit from the findings of the studies? Social Psychology is the study of attitude, behavior, and interactions of individuals within a group setting. You may have heard the saying "for every action, there is a reaction," Social Psychologists observe and interpret behaviors in effort to provide further explanation of cause and effect. It is thru the studies of Social Psychology we can learn how to get into the cause and begin to foresee patterns of reactions. A simple yet sophisticated theory.

Social cognition is the encoding, storage, retrieval, and processing, of information in the brain. It is a process that is generalized within a species, and relates to members of the same species. At one time social cognition referred specifically to an approach to social psychology in which these processes were studied according to the methods of cognitive

Social cognition is our ability to understand other people, and it enables us to predict their behaviour and share experiences.

Therefore social cognition can be defined as the study of the mental process involved in perceiving, attending to, remembering, thinking about and making sense of the people of all ages in the social world that we live in (Moskowitz, 2005). The development of various forms of social-cognitive understanding is one of the most essential accomplishments of childhood cognitive development.

In life people will come in contact with others, who are from a different background, culture, lifestyle or ethnicity as them, yet still every individual is equal, they’re all humans. As humans, people have the tendency to have their own unique perspectives on the world around them and everything it encounters. Psychologist Gordon Allport (1985), one of the founding fathers of personality psychology, defined social psychology as a discipline in which scientific methods are used in order “to understand and explain how the thought, feeling, and behavior of individuals are influenced by actual, imagined, or implied presence of other human beings” (Cherry).Social psychology involves

The book defined availability heuristic as the mental shortcut people take to quickly come up with a solution to a situation based on how easily it comes to mind. The example was about if there were more words that began with the letter “k” or words that had “k” in the third position. Most of the participants said that there were more words that began with the letter “k” because we have organized our minds into a linear fashion and it is difficult to look up words with the third letter being “k” and think of words that start with “k.” Even though the book says there are three times more words with “k” in the third position This is important because it allowed me insight on the own shortcuts I take in my thinking, and how I might not be seeing the entire picture.

Huffman (2012) explains that social psychology is a subject which, “studies how other people influence our individual thoughts, feelings and actions” (p. 567). Understanding the way people act around others can be important when society is faced with challenges, and can even help others learn how to reduce conflict with each other.

Everyday people use social cognition as a tool to help them thrive in social world. There are many important aspects of social cognition that are helpful to us in making decisions and help us to interpret the world around us. An important aspect that is linked to social cognition is that of thought suppression. Thought suppression is when a person tries to force particular thoughts, memories or feelings out of their minds that may be unpleasant or may cause a great deal of stress for the individual. Many people are unaware how often we use thought suppression in our daily lives, but the truth is we use it in almost every aspect of our day.

Social psychology is the understanding of an individual’s behavior in a social context. It is the scientific field that focuses on the nature and causes of that individual’s behavior in social situations. It looks at the human behavior that has been influenced by others and in the social context with which it occurred. Social psychology pays attention to how feelings, thoughts, beliefs, intentions, and goals are constructed and how these factors influence our behavior and interactions with others. This paper will examine the principles of social psychology and help us to

Availability heuristic can be defined as making a choice based on immediate and easy examples that comes to the mind more easily when evaluating a decision. Even though availability heuristic has many pros such as saving time when making a choice, it does come with cons. This is because the availability heuristic distorts our understanding of real threats and risks. For example, Tom is a 10-year-old boy that adores puppies and loves playing with them. One day he saw a puppy bite its owner. Due to this small incident, Tom avoids playing with puppies even though the likelihood of it happening is slim. Since this heuristic draws from immediate and easy examples, it uses system 1 to evaluate our decisions. As we already know system 1 can lead to a lot of incorrect assessments in comparison to system 2.

Social psychology is a subfield of Psychology and Sociology that is interested in how the thoughts, feelings and behaviour of individuals and social groups are influenced by the presence of others such as families, work groups, and organisations. Indeed, Robbins (2003) states that many theories originally developed within Social Psychology have directly influenced the concepts and theories found in organisational behaviour concerning communication processes, decision-making, conflict management and politics and in turn have led to the development of many techniques used in these areas.