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Understanding Social Cognition: An
introduction and overview
This factsheet provides an introduction to and overview of the
topic of social cognition. Pointers are given to how you can apply
social cognition to other parts of the specification and terms in
bold are explained in the glossary. The worksheet also allows you
to test your knowledge in exam style questions.
What the examiner will expect you to be able to do:
1. Define and/or explain ideas or concepts in social cognition
2. Explain how concepts could be applied to predict behaviour in
a given situation
3. Support theories of social cognition with appropriate reference
to research studies
4. Apply concepts of social cognition to a scenario
A. Introduction: What is social cognition?
Cognition is the term used for the mental operations of encoding,
storing, retrieving and using information. Social cognition is
concerned with how the same processes work in relation to social
relationships. It deals with how we acquire, store and use all sorts
of information about other people and ourselves. Perceiving another
person is totally different from perceiving an object because we
understand that other people are similar to ourselves in certain
important ways. For example we know that people act as intentional
causal agents. This means that we form intentions and then act on
those intentions to produce a desired result. People also differ
from inanimate objects because we are able to “perceive back” at
an observer. Anyone we meet is likely to form judgments about us
but they know that we are also forming judgments about them.
Only humans do this. These characteristics mean that we are
processing a great deal of socially relevant information every time
we interact with another person. We continuously interpret and
respond to what we perceive as the beliefs, intentions and
behaviours of the people around us, both consciously and
unconsciously. Social cognition therefore plays a key role in
deciding how we actually behave and feel in our interactions with
other people and has relevance to many real-world issues and
problems for example, in employment, the legal system, and health
care.
Exam Hint: You will be able to use what you learn about
social cognition to answer questions about research
methodology and to illustrate the use of theories and models
in psychology.
What impression do you form when
you look at this man’s picture?
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File%3APeron_tomando_un_café.jpg
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B. The key topics in social cognition
1. The factors affecting impression formation. We only have to
meet another person for a very short while to form ideas about
what sort of person they are, (or might be). Impression formation
research tries to understand how this process works and what
factors are important in creating one impression rather than
another. A key study into impression formation, by Asch (1946),
is described below.
2. The attribution process and its biases. This topic deals with
how we explain other people’s behaviour to ourselves. Usually
the real reasons for another person’s actions are hidden from
us but we nevertheless generate our own explanations, or
attributions, to try to fill the gap. Researchers try to understand
how these explanations are constructed and how attributions
may be subject to bias.
3. The structure and function of attitudes. Attitudes are organized
mental structures composed of feelings, beliefs, and knowledge
about some aspect of the external world. The research into
attitudes aims to understand how they are organized, how and
why they can change and what functions they may perform for
the individual who holds them.
4. Prejudice. Prejudices are negative judgements that some people
hold about others because of personal characteristics such as
sex, skin colour, or beliefs. Research in this area looks at why
some people hold prejudiced views and how those views may
be changed. Research has also looked at the impact that
prejudice has on those against whom it is directed in order to
try to find ways of reducing its negative effects.
Exam Hint: For each of topic you will need to know the relevant
concepts, models and theories, be able to describe and
analyse research, and apply your knowledge to everyday life.
B. How do psychologists investigate social cognition?
Until the 1990s most research into social cognition used
experiments. Experiments are a method of research that investigate
the relationship between two (or more) variables. To achieve this
one variable (called the independent variable or IV), and any
relevant environmental variables are controlled by the experimenter,
who measures changes to a second variable (called the dependent
variable, or DV). Experiments into social cognition typically ask
participants to respond to a socially relevant stimulus (the IV) that
can activate whichever aspect of social cognition that is of interest.
An early psychology experiment
conducted by Wilhelm Wundt
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165. Understanding Social Cognition: An introduction and overview
Exam Hint: Questions that are based on a scenario may
require answers on both research methodology AND theory
and data in social cognition.
In a classic study, Asch, (1946), set out to investigate the factors
that influence the initial impressions we form of other people.
Participants were told they would hear a list of seven adjectives
describing a particular individual. The two versions of the list were
identical except that one list contained the word “warm” while the
other list contained the word “cold”. The independent variable
(IV) in this case is the difference between the two lists. After hearing
the list read twice the participants were given a second list of 18
bipolar traits such as “humorous – humourless” and asked to
select the one from each pair of traits that they thought would also
best describe that person. The dependent variable (DV) was the
group of 18 adjectives that was selected by each of the participants
from the second list. Asch’s findings were among the first to throw
light on how we process information about other people. His most
important finding was that “warm” and “cold” are what he called
“central traits which influence the interpretation of all other traits.
It also emerged that the interpretation of traits depends on the
context, so that putting the list of traits in a different order also
changed how the person was perceived. Finally, he found that
perceivers vary in how they put together an overall impression of
the person described by the list of traits. Each of these results
revealed something about the process of perceiving others that
had not previously been known.
A major strength of the experimental method in general is that it
allows causal relationships to be identified. However, there are
also weaknesses in Asch’s experiment. One is that the experiment
may lack ecological validity because participants heard a list of
adjectives being read rather than experiencing a real social
encounter. As a result the findings may not generalize to real-life
situations. Secondly the use of a checklist to collect data could be
questioned because although it leads to data that are easily
compared across different participants it also forces them to choose
from a limited response set. In effect this guides the participants to
produce answers decided by the experimenter.
Exam Hint: You can use your knowledge of Asch’s experiment
to demonstrate that you understand how experiments are
designed and also some of the strengths and weaknesses of
experiments as a method of research.
Neuropsychological investigations: studies of brain function in
social cognition
The neuropsychological approach to social cognition (also called
social neuroscience) is based on the idea that evolution has
encouraged the development of areas in the brain that are
specialized for processing social cognitions. To take two examples,
first, there is evidence that thinking about other people’s mental
states and intentions triggers a different pattern of neural activity
than thinking about objects, (Mitchell, Macrae & Banaji, 2005).
Secondly, damage to the brain can affect the ability to interact with
others. Sufferers from certain mental disorders such as autism
appear to process socially-relevant information differently than
non-sufferers. Baron-Cohen, (1995) for example found that autistic
patients have difficulty understanding the intentions behind
people’s behaviour. Similarly, some patients, such as road accident
victims who have sustained severe frontal lobe damage, have
problems functioning in social situations due to the difficulties
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they have with processing the social and emotional cues needed
to interpret other people’s behaviour correctly, (Cicerone, 1997).
Exam Hint: You can use your knowledge of neuropsychology
to answer questions about methods of research, the
localization of functions in the central nervous system and
the strengths and limitations of the biological approach in
general.
Researchers working within the neuropsychological approach use
a range of methods to investigate which brain regions may be
involved in social cognition. Two of the most widely used are
event-related potentials (ERP) and imaging techniques such as
magneto-encephalography. Both these techniques can both be
used either to map the areas of the brain that may be involved in
particular cognitive processes or to test hypotheses about the
relationship between brain activity and a socially relevant stimulus.
For example, using functional neuro-imaging Beer et al. (2006) in a
mapping study found that poor self-monitoring was accompanied
by specific areas of damage to the frontal lobes. These individuals
were found to have more difficulty than non-sufferers in controlling
how much personal information they disclosed in response to
questions. However, interpreting the results from these techniques
is not always straightforward. One problem is that a reliable baseline
measure must be obtained before it is possible to establish whether
any change to brain activity has taken place.
What causes can you attribute to some of
the students’ behaviour in this photo?
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File%3ANus_high_examinations.jpg
C. Theories and models in social cognition
Psychologists use a number of different theories and models in
order to organize and support their thinking as they try to
understand the nature of social cognition. Social cognition has
greatly benefited from its roots in cognitive psychology and has
been both productive and inventive in its use of different theories
and models. There are two general models, the “elemental” and the
“holistic” that have been successfully applied to social perception,
(Fiske & Taylor 2013).
The elemental model begins with the idea that any mental
phenomenon, such as forming an impression of another person,
can be analysed into small units which can then be examined
separately before going on to consider how they may combine
together. An example of this approach in social cognition is found
in Asch’s (1946) study where he suggests that the perceptions of
individual traits are added together to produce an overall evaluation
of the person and some “central traits” such as warmth or coldness
carry more weight than others. The elemental model was also used
by Fishbein & Ajzen (1975) to explain how attitudes develop. They
argued that specific beliefs about a topic are often combined to
form an overall attitude.
The holistic model takes the idea from Gestalt psychology that a
whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In this view, all perception
including the perceiving of another person is received as a complete
experience rather than a collection of units or elements. It is the
total configuration offered by the units as a whole that matters.
The key idea here is that the configuration itself is a construct of
the mind. This means that when we perceive another person we
put together an impression of what that person is like as a way of
organizing the information that we receive. It does not arrive ready

165. Understanding Social Cognition: An introduction and overview
organized for us and what we make of it depends very much on
the context.
Asch (1946) suggested that the holistic model could also be
applied to impression formation. He found that perceivers typically
try to adjust the way that the individual elements are perceived in
line with an overall impression. So an impetuous child might be
seen as willful or headstrong while an impetuous adult, (i.e.
showing the same trait, but being viewed in a different social
context) might be perceived differently as careless or arrogant.
Naïve scientist
The view in the 1950s and 1960s was that the most important
human motivations are the need to form a coherent view of the
world and to gain control over the immediate social environment.
In pursuing these goals people act as “naive scientists” who
rationally and logically test hypotheses about the behavior of
others. Heider (1958) used these ideas to explain how we construct
explanations for other people’s behaviour. He suggested that we
always assume that behaviour must have a specific cause and we
use the information available to us to form a hypothesis about
why a particular behaviour has occurred. For example, we might
try to explain why an argument has broken out between two
friends.
Cognitive miser
By the end of the 1960s a new view had emerged. This recognized
that we may not want, or be able, to perform the detailed reasoning
required to be a naïve scientist. It was argued instead that people
act as ‘cognitive misers”. As Fiske and Taylor (1991) point out,
human cognitive systems have only limited capacity for dealing
with information. In order therefore to avoid the work involved in
processing lots of information we often act to reduce the
processing load. Being a “cognitive miser” essentially involves
us in using heuristics to take cognitive short cuts whenever we
are faced with a task that involves processing a lot of information.
(Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). A key topic in social cognition,
stereotyping, can be seen as heuristic of this kind because it
reduces the amount of information that has to be dealt with when
meeting people.
Motivated tactician
In the early 1990s a third view was proposed by Kruglanski (1996)
who argued that cognition is strongly driven by the need to engage
successfully in social interaction. He suggested that, in order to
maximize the chances of success, people are much more flexible in
their thinking than was recognized by either of the previous two
views. His view is that people can best be characterized as
“motivated tacticians” because they usually choose the strategy
that seems most likely to help them reach their immediate goal(s).
So, if speed or ease of processing is important the cognitive miser
comes to the fore, and if precision or logic is more significant then
the naive scientist emerges. For example, you might act as a naïve
scientist when choosing a new car, but a cognitive miser when
choosing a meal from a restaurant menu.
Exam Hint: Illustrate your explanations of these models with
examples to give richer descriptions and gain more marks.
GLOSSARY:
Autism: a developmental disability identified by difficulty in
communicating and forming relationships with other people.
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Psychology Factsheet
Baseline measure: the point on a scale from which any change is
measured.
Bipolar traits: perceived characteristic with two extremes, e.g.
introversion-extroversion.
Causal relationships: exists when a change to one variable produces
a change to the other.
Central traits: a characteristic that strongly influences the
perception of all other traits.
Cognition: the mental operations that are involved in receiving,
storing and using information.
Cognitive miser: a way of describing human information processing
that uses heuristics rather than thinking through each situation in
detail.
Dependent variable or DV: the variable in an experiment that changes
in response to changes to the IV and on which measurements are
made.
Electro-encephalography (EEG) recording of electrical activity in
the brain by means of sensors attached to the scalp.
Elemental model: suggests that information about other people can
best be understood by analyzing it into its component parts.
Event-related potentials: the electrical activity generated in the brain
in response to a specific stimulus.
Ecological validity: the extent to which findings can be generalised
to explain behaviour in other situations.
Functional neuro-imaging: research technique that uses imaging
technology to measure an aspect of brain function, such as problem-
solving.
Gestalt psychology: school of psychology originating in Germany
that holds the view that we perceive objects or patterns as wholes
rather than as collections of smaller units.
Heuristic: a rule-of-thumb type of strategy for decision-making
that is quick but may not produce the optimum answer.
Holistic model: a model of cognition based on principles derived
from Gestalt psychology.
Independent variable or IV: the variable that is allowed to act on the
dependent variable while under the control of the researcher.
Intentional causal agent: people whose actions follow from their
intentions to cause specific consequences. For example a letter is
posted (consequence) because someone intended that result and
acted to bring it about.
Magneto-encephalography: non-invasive imaging technique that
uses very sensitive equipment to detect and display changes to the
magnetic fields produced by electrical activity in the brain.
Mapping study: branch of neurological research devoted to
identifying the regions of the brain that are active under various
conditions.
Motivated tactician: a way of describing human information
processing that switches between different approaches depending
on the demands of the situation.
Naïve scientist: a way of describing human information processing
that thinks things through carefully and rationally before making a
decision.
Response set: the range of responses available to a participant
Self-monitoring: perceiving and thinking about one’s own
behaviours and mental states.
Social Cognition: the processing applied to any socially relevant
information, such as when we form an impression of another person.
Acknowledgements: This Psychology Factsheet was researched and written by Colin Dyer.
The Curriculum Press, Bank House, 105 King Street, Wellington, Shropshire, TF1 1NU.
Psychology Factsheets may be copied free of charge by teaching staff or students, provided
that their school is a registered subscriber. No part of these Factsheets may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any other form or by any other means, without
the prior permission of the publisher. ISSN 1351-5136
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165. Understanding Social Cognition: An introduction and overview Psychology Factsheet

Worksheet: Understanding Social Cognition

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1. Write your own short definition of Social Cognition and give two examples of how it could be applied to everyday life.

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2. Write a short paragraph to explain the difference between a cognitive miser, a naive scientist and a motivated tactician.

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3. a) Explain why Asch's research into impression formation may lack ecological validity.

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b) Suggest a way that this experiment might be changed to increase validity.

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4. Explain one strength and one limitation of neuro-imaging in social cognition research.

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5. Explain in your own words the three ways that perceiving another person differs from perceiving an object.

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