Evaluate the contribution of experimental approaches in informing our understanding of social cognition - Essay Example

Evaluate the contribution of experimental approaches in informing our understanding of social cognition Social cognition refers to the study of how human interactions relate to the encoding, storage and retrieval of information by the brain and its subsequent applicability. It is a broad topic, and attempts to study in detail how perceptions, thoughts, emotions and behavior are affected by the social contact with others. This social contact is not necessarily restricted to the physical presence of people; social cognition explores the thought process and behavior of humans even in the implied presence of individuals. Social cognition deals with the processing of perceptions in the daily life. It aims to explain how people tend to perceive other people and events, and the process of decision making in context with our behavioral and circumstantial factors. Social cognition traces its origins in social psychology and hence inculcates in it the element of how social experience affects perceptions of humans regarding complex objects, i.e. events and people, and regarding decision-making. The cognitive factors underlying such phenomena are used in relation to the storage of specific information and in putting it together so that it can be used when needed. Social cognition has been studied by employing the models of cognitive psychology and information processing theory amongst many other theories. The goal has been the same: exploring mental processes that form the basis of social interaction. Social cognition has been researched upon by applying it to intrapersonal, interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup processes (ISCON, 2010). The experimental approaches used to explore the judgment, influence and perception of the human mind on social stimuli has contributed greatly to the understanding of social cognition. Cognitive psychology has played an integral role in the study of social cognition. As noted by Neisser in his book Cognition and Reality, study of social cognition gained scope when cognitive psychology attempted to comprehend the mental processes involved in an ordinary social environment. He was of the point of view that cognitive psychologists should focus more on the fabric of social interactions that ties human beings together. Conversely, social psychologists attempted to focus more on the social environment rather than the social world. Using attitudes, social issues, people and events, they researched to explore the impact of information on social behavior. Initial studies used people’s attitudes to comprehend cognitions and feelings. Social cognition can be seen to originate in the researches of the Australian-born psychologist Fritz Heider. Heider believed that people made an effort to understand the social and cultural elements embedded in the daily flow of social interaction through cause and effect. His models focused on the hypothesis that people tend to look for trends of regularity and predictability in the social environment. Experiments demonstrated how people have a tendency to go beyond the information given and the nature of humans to explain the causes if their behavior and the way other people are interacting. The attributions of cause and effect, as applied by Heider, provide insight into the perception of causality and other people’s behavior. Heider’s works are relevant to the field of social cognition since they help identify the causes and comprehend how people cater to situations that require them to make decisions, delegate responsibilities, and evaluate risks. One aspect of assessing social circumstance from the viewpoint of social psychology involves simplifying real-life situations into models that can be studied and researched upon easily. As a consequence, the practicability of such research findings is reduced, since cutting the social scenario into a more concise form can account for differences in the perceptions in the laboratory and the real life. One of the core theories that shape social cognition is the social schema theory. It helps to explain the process of how humans interpret ideas. A major part of our perceptions is shaped by information regarding the world around us. Although the information is merely substantial in nature, people categorize this information according to their perceptions. These perceptions are largely dependent on the knowledge, expectations and the assumptions about the environment. Therefore, when one sees a particular concept, he or she tends to draw on the information that he has stored regarding it. As a result, the person’s view is influenced by this mental representation of information that he has in store by past experiences; this mental representation or cognitive structure is known as schema and helps explain the fact that our social perception is influenced by our understanding of the way things happen normally. Since this mental structure containing information about a certain subject is influenced by the workings of the social world, it is not necessary that the judgments that the person makes after seeing a particular object are accurate. The notion of schema was first given by Barlett in the 1930s in an experiment where people were tested to see how well they could recall facts regarding a story over a period of one year (Bell, 2009). The experiment results depicted the shift of people’s perceptions to mould the facts into information that represented their personal perceptions about the world around them. English people were narrated a Native American Story and it was seen that the facts got distorted as it was retold. After a year, the story had evolved into a more English version of folktales. Schema theory gives an idea of how people fit into the social world and how their memory plays a part in their perceptions. The two constituents of the theory are congruence and adaptation. If the ideas are not congruent to the schemas of the individual, chances are that the perceived information will change over time, as happened with the folktale. The scheme theory was further researched upon by J. Randler and D. E. Rumelhart. Many psychologists including Naomi Quinn and Dorothy Holland came to the conclusion that schema accounts for cultural variations and plays a role in the perfection of a certain task. The importance of scheme theory in relation to its contributions to a better understanding of social cognition is that it has helped social psychologists to explain how information that has been stored by the brain, and with repeated use, is a component of a system of integrated knowledge (Richardson, et al., 2008). Schemas can be of various types ranging from role schemas to person schemas and script schemas. Schemas simplify the complexity of a situation and provide general characteristics of that situation, helping us filter knowledge. Schemas have helped contribute to better understanding of social cognition since they filter out unnecessary information perceived by the person and hence become part of the filtering process. Scheme theory is widely acknowledged today as one of the genuine theories through which children acquire learning skills, even though it has been criticized for its vagueness and lack of clear definition (Richardson, et al., 2008). One of the limitations of the schematic system of cognition is that the assumptions made my people can go wrong. Moreover, schemas also lead to stereotypes and overgeneralizations. However recent studies show that sometimes when people are interdependent on each other for the achievement of a goal, they often break away from typical congruency of schematic processes and look for more accurate impressions. In one of the research studies conducted to find out the relationship between incongruency of schemas when people are dependent on each other, it was found out that such people are more inclined to research more about the other person since his or her performance is affected by the other person’s. Such experiments have proved that motivational relevance forms an integral part of social perception, enabling people to go beyond the stereotypical attitudes of a certain subject and form perceptions that are not biased. Attribution theories have also contributed to a better understanding of social cognition. Attribution theories focus on mental processes where people give causes for their behavior or other people’s behavior. In any social environment, human beings tend to make judgments and attribute causes to a person’s behavior. These causes can be both within the person and in the environment. Many psychologists adhere to the theory that internal causes are more reliable since they give more information about the behavior and thinking of the person and how they might react in similar situations, whereas external attribution only give information on how the person will react in the current situation. George Kelley was the pioneer of cognitive theories. He spread a particular event into the three levels of social information, i.e. consistency, consensus and distinctiveness (CCD), and predicted how the event influenced individuals involved in it. Researches testing Kelley’s models are based on giving individuals behavioral events, or vignettes, with varying levels of the aforementioned CCD parameters, and asking them to assign a cause to it. This data has enabled psychologists understand how people respond or understand and perceive a social situation. The advantage of these vignettes is that they give control over the independent variable and are not difficult to use along with being representative of the whole population; however one of their shortcomings is that they have low ecological validity since a laboratory setting differs from real life settings. In conclusion, social interaction is a dynamic process where people who interact have their own characteristics (Hamilton, 2005). The comprehension of social cognition has been increased markedly by many researches and experiments. These include the attribution theory and the schematic models of perception amongst many others. Reference List Bell, G., 2009. Building Social Web Applications. California (CA): OReilly Media, Inc. Hamilton, D. E., 2005. Social cognition: key readings. East Sussex: Psychology Press. ISCON, 2010. What is social cognition? [Online] Available at: http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/labs/sherman/iscon/ [Accessed 25 May 2010]. Richardson, J. S., Morgan, R. F. & Fleener, C. E., 2008. Reading to Learn in the Content Areas. 7th ed. California (CA): Cengage Learning. Read More