Attitude And Social Cognition — Psychology STD 12 Humanities — Question

Social cognition: refers to all those psychological processes that deal with the gathering and processing of information relating to social objects. These include all the processes that help in understanding, explaining and interpreting social behaviour.

• The processing of information relating to social objects particularly individuals, groups, people relationships, social issues, etc is different because people as social objects may themselves change as the cognitive process takes place.
• E.g. A teacher who observed a student in the school and the mother who observes the same student at home may draw different conclusions about him/her.
• Attitude, impression formation and attribution collectively called social cognition.
• In social cognition category, based schemes that are related to groups of people are called stereotypes.
• Social cognition is guided by mental units called schemas.