PSYC12H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Motivated Reasoning, Enmeshment, Contact Hypothesis
Document Summary
Cognitive psychologists found that the human brain seems to almost automatically classify or categorize similar object sin the environment. Most researchers have taken allport"s lead and now regard stereotypes as a natural consequence of cognition. Humans have a limited-capacity cognitive system that cannot simultaneously process all the available information in our social environment: we have developed ways around our limited cognitive system; one of the best ways is categorization. We tend to classify people along a few broad categories: race, gender, and age. One of the most basic ways we partition people in our social environment is into ingroups and outgroups. Ingroup: group to which we belong: outgroup: group to which we do not belong. How we partition people in groups depends on current, salient motives, fears, goals, and expectations. Individuals who are part of an outgroup are perceived to share similar characteristics, motives, and other features.
