Social SC

What is social cognition?

• social psychology concerned with how our thoughts, feelings and behaviours influence and are influenced by others
• 'thinking' can occur rapidly, automatically and without awareness
• cognition allows us to aquire, organise and use info, social cognition is how social info is aquired, organised and used

Categories

• by categorising stimuli on salient features, we an later infer infom about stimuli without processing full data
• categories are instances grouped together as they share a family resemblance
• but no specific set of attributes that all stimuli must be categorised
• categories hierarchical, from broad to specific

Prototypes

• cognitive representation of a category, but members of a category differ
• more accurate definition of category is a fuzzy set, varying instances of examples/stimuli that are centred on a prototype

Exemplars

• people may represent categories with a specific instance they encounter
• Brewer (1988) as we beome more familiar wth categories we shift from representing with prototypes to exemplars
• Judd…