Explaining social behaviour

The essentials

Social cognition refers to the mental processes involved in collecting, interpreting and using information about the social world. Because we receive vast amounts of information, we use schemas, mental structures that guide social thinking. A prototype is a schema-based category defined by its typical features. Stereotypes are schemas about groups, often containing undesirable characteristics, and can lead to prejudice.

Key points

• Impression formation: forming an impression of a person depends on the perceiver, the target and the situation.
• Primacy effect: information presented first has a stronger effect; recency effect: information presented last has more effect (often when the perceiver is told to pay attention to all information).
• Halo effect: knowing one positive trait leads us to assume other positive traits.
• Solomon Asch showed that "warm" and "cold" act as central traits that change the whole impression of a person.
• Attribution: assigning causes to behaviour. Internal causes relate to the person (traits, effort); external causes relate to the situation (luck, task difficulty).
• Fundamental attribution error: overemphasising internal factors and underestimating external factors when explaining others' behaviour.
• Actor-observer effect: we attribute our own failures to external causes but others' failures to internal causes.
• Social facilitation: performance changes in the presence of others. People tend to perform better on simple or well-learnt tasks when others are present, but worse on complex or new tasks; presence of others increases arousal.

Exam tips

• Look for keywords in case questions: "first impression" (primacy), "because of one good quality" (halo), "blamed his laziness and ignored the situation" (fundamental attribution error).

Common mistakes

• A schema is a general mental structure; a stereotype is a schema specifically about a group.
• Confusing the halo effect with the primacy effect.