Social Cognition Lecture Note

Social cognition is a sub-topic of social psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in our social interactions. The way we think about others plays a major role in how we think, feel, and interact with the world around us.

Social cognition involves:

• The processes involved in perceiving other people and how we come to know about the people in the world around us.
• The study of the mental processes that are involved in perceiving, remembering, thinking about, and attending to the other people in our social world.
• The reasons we attend to certain information about the social world, how this information is stored in memory, and how it is then used to interact with other people.

Social cognition is not simply a topic within social psychology—it is an approach to studying any subject with social psychology. Using a social-cognitive perspective, researchers can study a wide range of topics including attitudes, person-perception, prejudice, stereotypes, self-concept, discrimination, persuasion, decision-making, and other areas.