Social Cognitive Processes Influence On People's Reponses Towards Their Selves

The idea that humans internalize their cultures’ social norms to a degree at which these norms affect their self-image is a long debated argument among many social sciences. From psychology to history, the idea of socialization has sprung a diverse variety of theories, all proclaiming that their theory is the answer. All of these social theories provoke questions about social reality. Social reality is a complex evaluation of what is considered biological reality and what is considered individual cognitive reality. These realities are created by social interaction thus influencing individual motives and actions, so how can one theory answer it all. Dennis H. Wrong (1961), an American sociologist and professor of sociology at New York University, suggests that much like the question of social reality the answer is complex thus no single theory can correctly affiliate with all the problems surrounding social reality.

Schemas are mental structures people use to organize their knowledge about the social world (Akert, Aronson, & Wilson, 2010). The accessibility of schemas makes them easier to retrieve in social situations. Priming is also relevant in how people apply schemas. Researchers in Germany pursued the idea that stereotypes organize as multiple, context-specific schemas that activate only by a combination of category and context information

I survey the body language, facial expressions and the possible words or phrases that can be interpreted more than one way. Because of this course I am more tolerant to people who are prejudiced. The most personally influential chapter to me was chapter two in the assigned textbook. The chapter introduced me to how stereotypes are formed and the consequences of categorizing people. Studies show that in order to simplify the workload of the brain, we place people into social categories based on previous experience and peer learning. “Social categorization involves thinking about people primarily as members of social groups rather than as individuals” (Blaine, 22).I found that I engage in this practice, but the automatic groups do not usually have negative stereotypes attached; When I meet a negative exception, they are then sorted into a subgroup.The second most influential chapter …..Chapter four of the textbook details the components of prejudices. the stereotypes and instances of prejudice enabled me

The findings by Mayr et al. (2003) sparked a debate due to conflicts with the results found by Gratton et al. (1992). Gratton et al. (1992) had previously looked at the possibility of a repetition priming effect and found that there

It is explained that “almost any stereotype is true in some way” (73). They can be another form of a mindbug, which can lead one to judge or treat others in a way that they might not have if there was no stereotype associated with them in the first place. When people assume that all stereotypes are true, they begin to judge others based off of those stereotypes. For example, the stereotypes “Old people are forgetful” or “Women are nurturing” or “Asians are good at math” lead people to associate those thoughts with all elderly, all Asians, and all women which can drive our judgement of one another. The human mind tends to group traits together into categories which then affects our behavior. For example, when an individual is sick they go to a clinic, and they can place the doctors and nurses into a category as someone to trust and someone who is going to help them based on their clothing and behavior. This behavior then affects how the patient acts in that

An example would be a student who believes all teachers are intimidating and bossy from past experiences, but after having a shy and timid teacher, their view may change their internal schema and stereotype of all teachers being individual. Scientists may want to study the reactions of the student and how he or she will integrate the new schema. Social cognition researchers are also interested to study the regulation of activated schemas. It is widely perceived that the situational activation of schemata is automatic, outside of conscious control. However, the regulation and activation of social schemas is self-regulatory and independently motivated.

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.

Therefore, reporting an illusory correlation. Study one and two consisted of 16 sentences. The first study asked the participants to press a button once they understood the sentence (Risen & Gilovich, 2007). The second study asked them to rate on how much they wondered about the connection between the group and the behaviour. The results from these two studies concluded that the longer it took to understand a sentence, or the more you wondered about the sentence, were associated with rare-rare matchings (Risen & Gilovich, 2007). Study three examined whether rare-rare matchings are more likely to be stored in memory. The participants were asked to match behaviour with the appropriate targets that were previously told to them. It was discovered that it is not necessarily negative behaviours, but rare behaviours that are paired with rare groups (Risen & Gilovich, 2007). The fourth study analyzed if people generalized their experience to the population. They hypothesized that an association between a minority group and an anomalous behaviour would lead participants to search for evidence of the anomalous behaviour when interviewing another member of the minority group (Risen & Gilovich,

Television is a source of entertainment for millions of people. It has a wide range of applications including commercials, advertisement, news, and entertainment. Large amounts of people watch television makes it a good outlet to reach a broad audience. It can also serve an educational purpose. Modern family, winner of a Golden Globe, appeals to a wide audience by showcases the Pritchett, Dunphy and Tucker families.

Stereotyping is the “selective attribution of specific trait of characteristic to particular social groups and their members” (Wyer 1). As human beings, our brains have developed a way to store information about other people’s behavior, through similarities. This

Kahneman’s theory of two systems develops the understanding of how the human brain functions in our daily lives. Priming–exposure to a stimulus influences your responses to a later stimulus–is a major factor in how the way people think differs. Events that have occurred in the past can change the way people perceive a word or a situation given. A Very familiar example of priming, and is also mentioned in this book is the fill-in-the-blank experiment. The scientist provides the word, “S _ _ P” to the subjects. If the subject is naturally or influenced to image a restaurant, they would say, “Soup.” However, if the subject is thinking of cleaning or bath, then they would answer,

I thought it was interesting that there is so much information and thought that can go into determining if we know ourselves better than anyone else, or if others can tell us more about ourselves than we are able to. Prior to reading the article by Vazier and Carlson (2010, p 605-616), I was under the impression that only you can truly determine what you are like, and therefore what others say is only a reflection of what you are willing to show them. While I still believe that my interpretation of the self-knowledge isn’t necessary wrong, the readings providing an excellent view from the other side. In reading the article, I found myself thinking that there are most likely acts and other functions that we perform, but are not necessarily

Dual process theory is an interesting concept that ties into many common aspects of not just social psychology, but to biology and the psychology field as a whole. Dual process theory has ties to sensation and perception, priming, and Need for Cognition, and multiple psychologists are discussed in this chapter about how they tie all these ideas together in order to make sense of dual processing.

Our knowledge of the world is influenced by mental processes such as the semantic relatedness effect to connect different ideas to help form what we remember in our memory. This stems from learned prototypes to understand different targets. Prototypes are typical representations of a category that a majority of people would agree to. For example, when asked to think of a dog, people would think of a golden retriever instead of a Chihuahua (Ashcraft & Klein, 2016, p. 280). Semantic relatedness is when concepts that are related to each other are processed much faster than concepts that are not and involves both category statements and property statements. For example, people would connect the word "chicken" to "animal" faster than "chicken"

Stereotypes are known to be a form of person schemas, which ultimately leads to bias and prejudicial behaviors. Also, like schemas, stereotypes can cause a person to misrecall or misinterpret events. The information is misled so that it is consistent with assumptions of the stereotype. Schemas help us develop an understanding of people and situations with the organization of the knowledge we have or will acquire. Most schemas are related to one another and are organized hierarchically; including scripts, which tells us what behavior to expect of ourselves and of others in a given situation. Both help to fill in the gaps as we classify something observed, thus enabling us to interpret what it is, how it will behave, and how we will behave or act towards it.