Social Cognition & Behaviour Cheat Sheet

Social cognition explores how individuals perceive, interpret, and remember information about others and social situations, often relying on mental shortcuts that lead to efficient but biased thinking.

Core Principles

• Social cognition is how we process information about others and social situations.
• Thinking can be automatic (fast, unconscious) or controlled (slow, deliberate).
• Schemas are mental frameworks organizing social knowledge.
• Heuristics are mental shortcuts for simplifying judgments.
• Attribution theory explains how we assign causes to behavior.
• Attribution biases (like FAE) show we are not perfectly rational.
• Much social thinking is automatic and unconscious.
• Motivation and emotion significantly influence our thoughts.
• We are often accurate but predictably biased in social thinking.

Key Terms

• Social Cognition: How people process, store, and use information about others and social situations.
• Automatic Thinking: Fast, unconscious, and effortless thinking based on experience and intuition.
• Controlled Thinking: Slow, deliberate, and effortful thinking used in important or unexpected situations.
• Schemas: Cognitive structures that organize knowledge about the social world.
• Heuristics: Mental shortcuts used to simplify complex judgments.
• Availability Heuristic: Judging based on what comes to mind easily.
• Representativeness Heuristic: Judging based on similarity to a prototype.
• Anchoring & Adjustment: Starting with an initial value and adjusting insufficiently.
• Attribution Theory: The process of explaining why behavior occurs.
• Dispositional Attribution: Explaining behavior by internal factors (personality, traits).
• Situational Attribution: Explaining behavior by external factors (environment, context).
• Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE): Overestimating personality and underestimating situational factors when explaining others' behavior.
• Actor-Observer Bias: Attributing one's own behavior to situational factors and others' behavior to dispositional factors.
• Self-Serving Bias: Attributing successes to internal factors and failures to external factors.

Real World Examples

• Seeing someone trip and immediately thinking they are clumsy.: Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) - overestimating dispositional factors.
• A student performs well on an exam and attributes it to their intelligence.: Self-Serving Bias - attributing success to internal factors.
• A student fails an exam and blames the difficulty of the questions.: Self-Serving Bias - attributing failure to external factors.
• Deciding what to wear based on what you've seen others wear recently.: Availability Heuristic - judging based on easily recalled information.
• Assuming a person in a doctor's coat is a doctor.: Role Schema - using expectations of roles to interpret situations.