Social cognition combines cognitive psychology with social psychology and includes the study of how to understand and perceive mental processes of social information and respond to them, such as the attitudes of others, how the individual interacts with them, as well as the beliefs and behavior of others.
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| Valuable information about social cognitive with illustrative examples |
Basic components of Social cognition
1. Attention
The individual can focus on relevant social situations and not pay attention to anything else
For example
When an individual is talking to others, he pays attention to verbal signals and facial expressions, but he does not pay attention to other things that are out of conversation.
2. Perception
An individual can understand information and different social situations.
Through the manifestations of others, the individual can realize their behavior, impressions, classes, and level of education
3. Memory
Individual's memory is used to store information and remember past information and emotions during their interactions with others
4. Judgment and Decision Making
Decisions are made and evaluated based on the information available to the individual. It involves evaluating the actions, intentions, and behaviors of others and taking action on their social behavior
Social psychology processes are affected by several factors, including individual factors that depend on the nature of each individual, experiences of social upbringing, and general culture of the individual.
Social psychology and cognitive psychology study social cognitive processes to find the best explanation and understanding of individuals' perception of the social world, in addition to analyzing and gaining sufficient knowledge of phenomena such as interpersonal relationships, social influence, and bias.
Techniques to study social cognitive
There are many techniques and methods that psychologists use to study and analyze social cognitive processes, including:
1. Experimental studies
They are experiments used to study the impact of social variables on mental processes (perception, attention, and memory).
The teacher asked the students to solve a math problem in the notebook within 5 minutes, and the winning student finished the first Process analysis:
There are social pressures on students, including observing others, trying to finish the mathematical problem before others, and not enough time. These social pressures affect students' perceptions.
So students may understand the question incorrectly, also rate of attention and focus on solving the question may decrease because it is distracted, and remembering previous information may be more difficult
2. Questionnaires
The questionnaire uses a set of questions related to social cognition (perception, attention, and memory), these questions have short, long, and true/false answers.
Summary of Questionnaires Assess the influence of social factors on the individuals' mental processes Questionnaire
Why do you prefer your friend Sally over your friend Nonna?
Are you happy with your friends?
The answers to the questions are gathered to give an overall assessment of the influence of social factors on an individual's social-cognitive
Examples of social cognitive processes
1. Personal Perception
We can perceive an individual's behavior or attitude whether good or worse for the first meeting by some factors such as more or less smile, How the clothes look, how the response during conversations look
If an individual is more smiling and kind in response during the speech, then this individual is good as a new friend
2. Attribution
If the student fails the exam, then the failure may be due to external factors such as the difficulty of the test or the injustice of the teacher, and due to internal factors such as lack of study and preparation for the exam.
3. Profiling
A class in a school contains 4 disruptive students whose voices reach the whole school,so the school's management may generalize its ruling on the class and say that the class has unruly students, even though the unruly students are only 4 students
4. Perspective taking
Perspective-taking is putting yourself in someone else's shoes and trying to understand what he is feeling and thinking.
It helps you to be kind to others and consider their thoughts.
If your friend is sad, you can imagine how you would feel if you were in their shoes
Social cognitive problems with solution
Certainly! Here are some common social cognitive problems and solutions:
1. Prejudices
The problem
biased judgment and decisions are issued, whether in favor of or against the individual, because of affiliation to a particular party, gender, race, culture, or tribe, and this leads to unfair transactions.
Employment, the choice must be focused on the employee who has high skills, because it will improve the company's performance in the labor market.
As for the employee who was chosen based on custom, gender, or tribe, it will affect the company negatively
2. Viewpoints accepted
Not accepting other people's points of view and understanding people's feelings and thinking well of them An individual may speak about an issue and explain it in his own way (point of view), and this issue contradicts your understanding of it, which leads to rejecting the point of view.
Everyone must respect the views of others and practice a personal exercise to accept their viewpoints.
In a company, a manager may ask for employees' opinions on a problem, if the manager accepts the viewpoints, he may get the best solution to a problem, but if he does not respect the viewpoints, the employees will not be able to give the best solution because they know in advance that the manager does not respect the viewpoints.
Example of Social Cognitive
The son may be influenced by his father's style of dealing with others.
Example
The son watches his father giving money to a needy person, so the son may do the same work in the future.
Also, when an individual witnesses the bad dealings of members of society in life, for example, buying and selling, health and education, then the individual may acquire the same characteristics and apply bad behavior to others.