PSY220H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Social Cognition, Availability Heuristic, Learned Helplessness
Document Summary
The human mind has a limited capacity to process social information. 56-4632: our short term memory tends to remember plus or minus 7 words. As a result, people are cognitive misers . We take shortcuts to understand our world. A mental structure that helps people organize knowledge about a stimulus. Makes the world more predictable (we know what to expect) Guide our attention: there is a lot of info out there for us to take in, and schemas help us determine what is important to keep a note of. Provide us with scripts so that we know what to expect. Participants watched a video of a husband and wife having dinner together. Of the participants told that women was librarian. Told that woman was a waitress. Later, took a quiz assessing their memories. A schema that describes that expected sequence of events in a well-known situation, such as going to a restaurant.
