A completed summary of the course ECP, including illustrations form the book and lecture notes. I added as much info as I could while trying to also keep it simple, since the exam will be open book.
Study guide Social Cognition - UN2640 definitions and notes
Social Cognition and Affect PSB3E-SP04 - Notes lecture 1 till 7
Emotion & Social Cognition - English - Year 3, Period 4 (or honors) - VU Psychology
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ECONOMIC & CONSUMER
PSYCHOLOGY
IBP 2020-2021 Summary
,ECONOMIC & CONSUMER PSYCHOLOGY
,WEEK 1: CH. 1, 2
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
Social Cognition: the study of how people make sense of other people and themselves. It focuses on how
ordinary people think and feel about people, including themselves.
Phenomenology: how ordinary people say they experience their world. Even if people are wrong, researchers
can study people’s common-sense theories in and of themselves to learn how people think. This common-
sense theory is known as naïve psychology.
Apart from the naïve psychology, knowledge about social cognition is also derived by cognitive psychology.
SOCIAL COGNITION APPROACHES
Asch’s Competing Models
Solomon Asch (1946) examined how people make sense of other people, combining their personality
components and coming up with an integrated overall impression. In studies, participants had to form an
impression (single unifying theme) based on a list of personality traits. Switching the traits warm and cold
created completely different descriptions of the target person.
Asch proposed two models to account for these results:
1. Configural Model (holistic): people form a unified overall impression of other people;
the unifying forces shape individual elements to bring them in line with the overall
impression. Perceivers’ mental activity results, according to the configural model, in an
impression made up of traits and their relationships, just as a schema later will
comprise attributes and their relationships.
2. Algebraic Model (elemental): people take each individual trait, evaluates it in
isolation, and combines the evaluations into a summary evaluation. It is as if, upon
meeting someone new, you were simply to combine together all the person’s pros
(intelligence) and cons (coldness) to form your impression.
= people follow each process under different informational and motivational circumstances
that, not surprisingly, mimic the respective research paradigms of the two approaches.
ELEMENYTAL APPROACH IN SOCIAL COGNITION
Elemental approach: breaks scientific problems down into pieces and analyses the pieces in separate detail
before combining them. This began with the British philosophers’ metaphor of elements in chemistry.
In the elemental view, ideas first come from our sensations and perceptions. Then they become associated by
contiguity in space and time. They are likely to be associated simply as a function of repeated pairings.
Frequency of repetition is a major factor that determines the strength of an association among other factors
such as similarity causality and vividness. W. Wundt studied how people committed ideas to memory and on
how they retrieved ideas from memory.
HOLISTIC APPROACH IN SOCIAL COGNITION
Holistic approach: analyses the pieces in the context of other pieces and focuses on the entire configuration of
relationships among them.
, Kant argued that the mind actively constructs a reality that goes beyond the original thing in and of itself. The
mind furnishes that perception; it is not inherent in the stimulus.
Gestalt Psychology describes the phenomenon of interest, the immediate experience of perception, without
analysis. This is also known as phenomenology and it focuses on systematically describing people’s experience
of perceiving and thinking. The perceptual whole has properties not discernible from the isolated parts.
Psychological meaning goes beyond raw sensory parts to include the organization people impose on the
whole.
Lewin’s Person-Situation Field Theory
Lewin emphasized the individual’s phenomenology, the individual’s construction of the situation. He
emphasized the influence of the social environment, as perceived by the individual, which he called the
psychological field. A full understanding of a person’s psychological field cannot result from an “objective”
description by others of what surrounds the person because what matters is the person’s own interpretation.
One must understand all the psychological forces operating on the person in any given situation in order to
predict anything. No one force predicts action, but the dynamic equilibrium among them, the everchanging
balance of forces, does predict action.
Two pairs of factors determine the psychological field:
1. Person in Situation: neither the person or the situation alone can predict behaviour. The person
contributes needs, beliefs, and perceptual abilities. These act on the environment to constitute the
psychological field.
2. Cognition and Motivation: Cognition provides the perceiver’s interpretation of the world; without
clear cognitions, behaviour is not predictable. Motivation provides the motor for behaviour.
Cognitions help determine what a person will do, which direction behaviour will take. Motivation’s
strength predicts whether the behaviour will occur at all and, if it does, how much of it will occur.
COGNITION IN EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
- Introspection: Wundt and others gathered data about mental events and constructed theories to
account for those data. This method did not conform to scientific standards: If my theory accounts
for my introspections and your theory accounts for yours, how do we decide who is right?
- Behaviourism: Due to the problems with introspection, behaviourism was introduced; a field that s
held that only overt, measurable acts were sufficiently valid objects for empirical scrutiny. It was
thought that behaviour has certain rewarding and punishing effects, which cause the organism to
repeat or avoid the behaviour later. Studying cognition was not necessary according to behaviourists
and it was considered irrelevant for predicting behaviour.
- Information processing: refers to the idea that mental operations can be broken down into
sequential stages. This idea was introduced due to the fact that stimulus-response frameworks could
not account for complex phenomena such as language. Information processing theories specify the
steps intervening between stimulus (question) and response (answer). The first important tool was
the widely available computer, a
methodological tool as well as a
theoretical metaphor. Much of
that early cognitive theory built on
the idea that human cognition
resembles computer information
processing.
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