PSY220H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Social Cognition, Confirmation Bias, Illusory Correlation
Document Summary
Social cognition: study of how people think about the world and arrive at judgments that help them interpret the past, understand the present, and predict the future. Although our judgments aren"t perfect all the time, they help us in improving, and also give insight to psychologists on people"s perceptions of other individuals and the inferences we make of them. Perceptual psychologists study illusions to illuminate general principles of perception, and psycholinguists study speech errors to learn about speech production: mistakes reveal how systems work by looking at its limitations. Researchers in social cognition explore the limitations of everyday judgment. Even though we may have little information to base a judgment upon, it rarely stops us from doing so; we form impressions of complete strangers based on the briefest glances snap judgment. Evidence is mixed: some investigators report moderately high correlations between judgments on facial appearance and self-reports of approachability, extraverted and powerfulness, but other studies show no connection.
