Social Cognition: Making Sense of People
Ziva Kunda
Language: English
Pages: 602
ISBN: 0262611430
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
How do we make sense of other people and of ourselves? What do we know about the people we encounter in our daily lives and about the situations in which we encounter them, and how do we use this knowledge in our attempt to understand, predict, or recall their behavior? Are our social judgments fully determined by our social knowledge, or are they also influenced by our feelings and desires?
Social cognition researchers look at how we make sense of other people and of ourselves. In this book Ziva Kunda provides a comprehensive and accessible survey of research and theory about social cognition at a level appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as researchers in the field.
The first part of the book reviews basic processes in social cognition, including the representation of social concepts, rules of inference, memory, "hot" cognition driven by motivation or affect, and automatic processing. The second part reviews three basic topics in social cognition: group stereotypes, knowledge of other individuals, and the self. A final chapter revisits many of these issues from a cross-cultural perspective.
someone who holds a full-time job and takes correspondence courses a student? The difficulty we have with such examples suggests that we do not categorize by applying clear-cut definitions. These and other problems have led psychologists to lose faith in the ability of the classical view to account for how people represent concepts, and to favor, instead, a probabilistic view of representation. Probabilistic View Wittgenstein, who launched the initial attack on the classical view, also laid
they store and access information from memory, and which rules they use to solve problems (for an analysis of the cognitive revolution, see Thagard 1992). Social psychologists were quick to recognize the relevance of these new ideas to their own traditional concerns. Theories and methods developed to examine how concepts such as bird or apple are represented could be readily used to study the representation of social concepts such as extravert or librarian. Experimental tools used to determine
phenomenon the dilution effect, showed that nondiagnostic information can also dilute the impact of other kinds of diagnostic information (Nisbett, Zukier, and Lemley 1981). For example, people given information that they consider indicative of whether a social-work client is likely to be a child abuser (e.g., "He is aroused by sadomasochistic sexual fantasies," 'He has a drinking problem") viewed this person as quite likely to be a child abuser. But other people, who were given, in addition to
Predictions Think of someone you have met only recently and whom you do not yet know well. Over the next few months, do you suppose you will go to at least one movie with this person? Will you go out of your way to avoid seeing this person? Before answering, take a moment to think of the reasons for why you may or may not perform these behaviors. One might imagine that contemplating the reasons for your predictions in this manner will increase the accuracy of your predictions. In fact the
violate our expectancies may be especially well remembered not only because they capture our attention but also because we may work hard to reconcile these incongruent events with our expectancies (Hastie 1984; Hastie and Kumar 1979); we may, for example, try to understand why the usually warm Laura behaved so coldly today, and may think about how this behavior relates to other things we know about Laura, such as her strained relationship with her parents. All this cognitive work will render