PSY100H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 31-36: Representativeness Heuristic, Implicit Attitude, Social Cognition

• School: UTSG
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY100H1
• Professor: Ashley Waggoner Denton

Document Summary

People know intuitively that we can better understand others" behaviour if we know the thoughts contributing to the behaviour. Social cognition - area of social psychology focuses on how people think about others and about the social world. Researchers show how people make sense of themselves and others to make judgments, form attitudes and make predictions about the future. Much of the research has demonstrated that humans are adept at distilling large amounts of information into smaller, more usable chunks and that we possess many cognitive tools that allow us to efficiently navigate our environments. Many of our decisions and behaviours are driven by our unconscious processes and implicit attitudes we are unaware of having. Form schemas of the various people, objects, situations, and events we encounter. A schema is a mental model or representation of the various things we come across in our daily lives. A mental blueprint for how we expect something to be or behave.