User:Matthew M/Week 4 - Social Thinking

Week 4 - 12/08/08 – Social Thinking
The subject of social psychology was initially influenced through behaviourism in the 1039’s to the 1950’s; however it was in the 1970’s when cognitive psychology increased the discussion and study of social thinking. What seemed to interest me this week was the topic under social cognition about the cognitive miser. Social Cognition is the study of thoughts about people and the social relationships which occur. This study seemed inevitable as it seems that humans tend to think about how other humans think a lot of the time. This is once again due to the fact that people are social animals and tend to always look for a way to be socially accepted. In order to become socially accepted we need to know what other people think of us and without that knowledge, it would seem like an impossible task. Human beings have the ability to think better than most other creatures on this earth and you would think that people would want to do something with this ability. However it could not be further from the truth. This is the part I found interesting, the fact that people always tend to be lazy or careless about their thinking. This is where the term ‘cognitive miser’ comes into play, which defines the human’s defiance to doing any unnecessary extra thinking. The belief is that we as people will automatically attempt to use as little cognitive effort at all so that we can save that effort for the things that we choose to think about. We generally avoid thinking too much or too hard. The human brain uses certain processing tools in order to help us think and some of these include stereotypes, schemas and scripts. Stereotypes are the beliefs on actions and traits which people automatically have when associating them with a particular group. Schemas are defined in the textbook as “knowledge structures that represent substantial information about a concept, its attributes and its relations to other concepts”. Lastly Scripts are a process in the human mind which consists of knowledge structures stored in the brain which will define certain situations as well as guide the behaviour of people.