Understanding

and evaluating
the social world
  The combination of social processes like attitude, impression
formation, attribution and pro social behavior is called social
cognition.
 Social cognition refers to the mental activities related to the
gathering and interpretation of information about the social world.
 Social cognition of all’ the individuals is affected by the social
What is social environment (Societal conditions in the society peace, harmony,
cognition? trust or aggression, frustration, disharmony and distrust towards
individuals, groups, peoples, relationship and social issues.)
 because of social influences, people form attitudes or ways of
thinking about specific topics and people. Impression formation is
when we make inferences about personal qualities of people we
meet. Attribution is when we assign causes to the behaviour
shown in specific social situation.
 Social cognition is a sub-topic of social psychology that focuses on how
people process, store, and apply information about other people
and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play
in our social interactions. The way we think about others plays a major
role in how we think, feel, and interact with the world around us.

 Social cognition involves:

• The processes involved in perceiving other people and how we come to
know about the people in the world around us.
• The study of the mental processes that are involved in
perceiving, remembering, thinking about, and attending to the other
people in our social world.
• The reasons we attend to certain information about the social
world, how this information is stored in memory, and how it is then used
to interact with other people.
 Using a social-cognitive perspective, researchers can study a
wide range of topics including attitudes, person-
perception, prejudice, stereotypes, self-
concept, discrimination, persuasion, decision-making, and
other areas.
 Social cognition develops in childhood and adolescence. As
children grow, they become more aware not only of their own
feelings, thoughts, and motives but also of the emotions and
mental states of others. Children become more adept at
understanding how others feel, learning how to respond in
social situations, engaging in prosocial behaviors, and
taking the perspective of others.
 one of the most popular focuses on the work of the
psychologist Jean Piaget. According to Piaget, a child's
cognitive development goes through a series of stages.
 During the earliest stages of development, children are
very egocentric. They see the world from their own
perspective and struggle to think about how other
people may view the world.
 As children grow older, children become increasingly
adept at perspective-taking and have an increased
ability to think about how and why people act the way
they do in social situations.
 Some researchers have found that there are also collective, cultural influences
that can affect how people interpret social situations. The same
social behaviour in one cultural setting may have a very different meaning and
interpretation if it was to take place or be observed in another culture.
 As people interpret behavior, extract meaning from the interaction, and then act
based upon their beliefs about the situation, they are then further reinforcing
and reproducing the cultural norms that influence their social cognitions.
 One criticism of some of the research on social cognition suggests that it is too
focused on individualistic behavior. Because the topic itself is so social, some
suggest that many of the information-processing models that have traditionally
been used to understand the cognitive processes behind social cognition are too
limited. Focusing on the collective and interactive aspects of human thought may
provide a better understanding of how people think about and understand
social behavior.
SOCIAL PERCEPTION

 Social perception (or interpersonal perception) is the

study of how people form impressions of and make
inferences about other people as sovereign
personalities.
 Social perception refers to identifying and utilizing
social cues to make judgments about social roles, rules,
relationships, context, or the characteristics (e.g.,
trustworthiness) of others.
 There are four main components of social
perception: observation, attribution, integration, and
confirmation.

 Observations serve as the raw data of social perception—an

interplay of three sources: persons, situations, and behaviour.
These sources are used as evidence in supporting a person's
impression or inference about others. Another important factor
to understand when talking about social perception is
attribution.
 Persons – physical influence
 Although society tries to train people not to judge others based
on their physical traits, as social perceivers, we cannot help but
be influenced by others' hair, skin colour, height, weight, style of
clothes, pitch in voice, etc., when making a first impression.
People have the tendency to judge others by associating certain
facial features with specific personality types. For example,
studies indicate that people are perceived as stronger, more
assertive, and competent if they have small eyes, low eyebrows,
an angular chin, wrinkled skin, and a small forehead. People tend
to associate baby-faced people with impotence and
harmlessness.
 Behaviors – nonverbal communicationEdit
 Nonverbal communication helps people express their emotions,
attitudes, and personalities. The most dominant form of
nonverbal communication is the use of facial expressions to
channel different emotions. Greatly influenced by Charles
Darwin's research on facial expressions and book The Expression
of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), it is believed that all
humans, regardless of culture or race, encode and decode the six
"primary" emotions, (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise,
and disgust), universally in the same way. To encode means to
communicate nonverbal behavior, while to decode means to
interpret the meaning or intention of the nonverbal behavior.
 Situations – context of experiences
 People are able to easily predict the sequences or
outcomes of an event based on the scope and depth of
their past experiences with a similar event. The ability
to anticipate the outcomes of a situation is also highly
influenced by an individual’s cultural background, as
this inevitably shapes the types of experiences.
 Situational observations lead humans to have pre-
established notions about certain events or to explain
the causes of human behaviors.
 Attribution is expressing an individual's personality as the source or cause of their behavior
during an event or situation.[3] To fully understand the impact of personal or situational
attributions, social perceivers must integrate all available information into a unified
impression. To finally confirm these impressions, people try to understand, find, and create
information in the form of various biases. Most importantly, social perception is shaped by an
individual's current motivations, emotions, and cognitive load capacity.
 A large component of social perception is attribution. Attribution is the use of
information gathered through observation to help individuals understand and rationalize the
causes of one's own and others' behaviours. Psychological research on attribution began with
the work of Fritz Heider in 1958, and was subsequently developed by others such
as Harold Kelley and Bernard Weiner. People make attributions to understand the world
around them in order to seek reasons for an individual's particular behaviour. Attribution
theory is the study of what systems and models people implement to make attributions about
the behaviour of others
 Integration
 Unless instant judgment is made by observing people, situations, or behaviors, people
integrate dispositions to form impressions.
 Information integration theory
 Norman H. Anderson, an American social psychologist, developed the theory of information
integration in 1981, which states that impressions are made from the personal dispositions of
the perceiver and a weighted average of the characteristics of the target individual.
 the differences between the perceivers are due to the fact that people use themselves as a
standard or frame of reference when judging or evaluating others, they tend to see that their
own abilities and traits are favorable for others to have them as well, these Impressions
formed on others can be influenced by the current and temporary mood of the perceiver.
 A concept called, priming also affects a perceiver’s impressions of others, priming is the tendency
for newly perceived or implemented concepts or words to become easy and influence the
understanding of new information.
Accuracy of social perception

 The precision of social perception has been called sensitivity and empathy, if this
perception becomes imprecise, working and living together would be difficult, to
be successful in society, one’s social perception must be accurate.
 Studies show that groups that make an accurate perception of social behavior are
more efficient than groups made up of members with a less precise perception.
  Social perception sometimes becomes biased and wrong due to
social prestige, high status in society, increased responsibility and
wealth, it is also influenced by physical characteristics,
attractiveness, power and recognition, education, etc.
 In general, attractive high-status people doing important jobs are
Factors held more accountable for their actions than ineffective low-status
people, studies support this view.
influencing  Similarly, people who consider themselves powerful in controlling
social their own destiny and their own actions perceive others as
controllers of their own destiny. On the other hand, people who
perception feel they have less power or impotence perceive others as
controlled by external events.
 Trust, personal relationship and close association with the person
also influence social perception, a stranger is perceived in a
different way than an already known person. While trust and good
personal relationships help attribute positive factors that lead to
positive social perceptions, lack of trust, bias, and prejudice,
unpleasant attitudes lead to negative social perception.
 The state of the person also influences the perception and
judgment of older children. Generally, a high status person is
perceived and credited with having good intentions in everything
they do, rather than a low status person.
 Justifiability is another factor that affects social perception, it
depends on the degree to which this action is on an appropriate
ground, if the action violates ethical norms or deviates from social
norms, customs and traditions, it does not stand on ground.
appropriate and is therefore forced to perform a negative act due
to certain compulsions beyond his control.
 A gender stereotype that has been observed in all cultures is that of women
who are more patient, sensitive, affectionate, affectionate or helpful.

Examples of –Associating a particular race with certain behavioral traits or categorizing

people based on their nationalities: Americans so smart, Italians so
social creative, Germans so punctual, or Japanese so educated, and so on.

perception Anxious or shy people often think that others are talking about them, or
criticizing them, when in reality that may not be the truth.

We also have many personal memories that can fit well as examples of
social perception, we might have misjudged our favorite school teacher
initially for being a ‘bad person’, just because she insisted on discipline.
 The thought component is referred to
as the cognitive aspect, the emotional
Attitude is a state of the mind, a set of
component is known as the effective
views or thoughts, regarding some
aspect, and the tendency to act is
topic (called the ‘attitude object’),
called the behavioural (or conative)
which have an evaluative feature
aspect. A-B-C components (Affective-
(positive, negative or neutral quality).
Behavioural-Cognitive components)
of attitude.

Attitude
Beliefs refer to the cognitive component of attitudes
and form the ground on which attitudes stand, such
as belief in God, or belief in democracy as a political
ideology.

Values are attitudes or beliefs that contain a ‘should’

or ‘ought’ aspect, such as moral or ethical values. One
example of a value is hard work or honesty. Values are
formed when a particular belief or attitude becomes
an inseparable part of the person’s outlook on life.
  (i) Valence (positivity or negativity).
 (ii) Extremeness indicates how positive or negative an
attitude is.
 (iii) Simplicity or Complexity (multiplexity) refers to
how many attitudes there are within a broader
Features of attitude. An attitude system is said to be ‘simple’ if it
Attitude: contains only one or a few attitudes and ‘complex’ if it
is made up of many attitudes.
 (iv) Centrality: This refers to the role of a particular
attitude in the system much more than non-central (or
peripheral) attitudes would.
  Association, e.g., a positive attitude towards a subject is learned
through the positive association between a teacher and a student
 Reward or punishment increases/decreases the further
Attitude development of that attitude.
 Modelling observing others being rewarded or punished for
Formation expressing thoughts, or showing behaviour of a particular kind
and Process of towards the attitude object.
 Group or Cultural norms through the norms of our group or culture
Attitude which may become part of our social cognition, in the form of
Formation attitude
 Exposure to information, e.g., positive and negative attitudes are
formed through the media.
  (i) Family and School Environment particularly in
the early years of life.
Factors that  (ii) Reference Groups indicate the norms regarding
acceptable behaviour/ways of thinking, reflect
Influence learning of attitudes through cultural norms,
Attitude noticeable during beginning of adolescence.
Formation:  (iii) Personal Experiences (direct).
 (iv) Media-related Influences. Technological
advances have made audio-visual media, school
level textbook and the Internet very powerful
sources of information
 Attitudes that are still
in the formative stage,
and are more like
opinions, are much
more likely to change
compared to attitude
that have become
firmly established and
have become a part of
the individual’s values.
 1. Balance or P-O-X triangle (Fritz Heider) represents the
relationships between three aspects or components of
attitude.
• P is the person whose attitude is being studied,
• O is another person
Different • X is the topic towards which the attitude is being
studied (attitude object).
models
 It is also possible that all three are persons. The basic
idea is that an attitude changes if there is a state of
imbalance between the P-O attitude, O-X attitude, and
P-X attitude. This is because imbalance is logically
uncomfortable.
 Imbalance is found
when all three sides
are negative, or two
sides are positive,
and one side is
negative. Balance is
found when all three
sides are positive or
two sides are
negative, and one
side is positive.
2. Cognitive Dissonance (Leon Festinger) emphasises
on the cognitive component. Cognitive components of
an attitude must be ‘constant’ (opposite of
‘dissonant’), i.e., they should be logically in line with
each other. If an individual finds, that two cognitions
in an attitude dissonant, then one of them will be
changed in the direction of consonance.
 Both balance and cognitive dissonance are examples
of cognitive consistency which means that two
components or elements of the attitude, or attitude
system, must be in the same direction. If this does
not happen, then the person experiences a kind of
mental discomfort, i.e. the sense that ‘something is
not quite right’ in the attitude system.
3. The Two-Step Concept (S.M. Mohsin): According to
him, attitude change takes place in the form of two
steps:
 (i) The target of change (person whose attitude is to
be changed) identifies with the source (person
through whose influence the attitude is to be
changed). Identification means that the target and
the source have a mutual regard and attraction.
 (ii) The source himself/herself shows an attitude
change, by actually changing him/her behaviour
towards the attitude object. Observing the source’s
changed attitude and behaviour, the target also
shows an attitude change through behaviour. This is
a kind of imitation or observational learning.
  Characteristics of the Existing Attitude: All four properties of
attitudes mentioned earlier, namely, valence (positively or
negatively), extremeness, simplicity or complexity (multiplexity),
and centrality or significance of the attitude, determine attitude,
determine attitude change. Positive, less extreme, peripheral (less
Factors that significant) and simpler attitudes are easier to change.

Influence  In addition, one must also consider the direction and extent of
attitude change. Congruent (same direction of the existing
Attitude attitude) or incongruent (direction opposite). Moreover, an
attitude may change in the direction of the information that is
Change: presented, or in a direction opposite to that of the information
presented.
 Source Characteristics: Source credibility and attractiveness.
Attitudes are more likely to change when the message comes from
a highly credible source rather than from a low- credible source.
 Message Characteristics: Attitudes will change when the amount
of information that is given about the topic is just enough, neither
too much nor too little. Whether the message contains a rational
or an emotional appeal, also makes a difference. The motives
activated by the message and the mode of spreading the message
(face-to-face transmission is more effective than indirect
transmission).
 Target Characteristics: Qualities of the target, such as
persuasibility (open and flexible personality), strong prejudices,
self-esteem, more willing because they base their attitude on
more information and thinking.
  Psychologists have found that there would
be consistency between attitudes and
behaviour when—
• Attitude-  (i) the attitude is strong and occupies a
Behaviour central place in the attitude system.
Relationship:  (ii) the person is aware of his/her attitude.
 (iii) there is very little or no external pressure
for the person to behave in a particular way.