SW2312-Social Psychology and Human Behaviour

Unit 2: Affect, Behaviour, and Cognition

Part 1
 Social Cognition: Thinking and Learning about Others
Part 2
 Social Affect: Feelings about Ourselves and Others
 Social Behaviour: Interacting with Others.
 Social perception: Process through which we seek to understand other persons.
Affect, Behaviour, Cognition,
Social psychology is based on the ABCs of affect, behaviour, and cognition.
In order to effectively maintain and enhance our own lives through successful
interaction with others, we rely on these three basic and interrelated human
capacities:
1. Affect (feelings) 2. Behaviour (interactions) 3. Cognition (thought)
Human beings rely on the three capacities of affect, behaviour, and cognition, which
work together to help them create successful social interactions.

AFFECT
Affect is the outward expression of feelings and emotion. Affect can be a tone of
voice, a smile, a frown, a laugh, a smirk, a tear, pressed lips, a crinkled forehead, a
scrunched nose, furrowed eyebrows, or an eye gaze. It’s really any facial expression
or body movement that indicates emotion. Affect is what people use in
communication with each other to decipher the way another person feels about
something.
An immediately expressed and observed emotion. A feeling state becomes an affect
when it is observable, for example, as overall demeanor or tone and modulation of
voice. Affect is to be distinguished from mood, which refers to a pervasive and
sustained emotion. Common examples of affect are euphoria, anger, and sadness.
Affect is inappropriate when it is clearly discordant with the content of the person's
speech or ideation. Eg. Angela's father passed away suddenly, and although she
cried constantly, she laughed in nervousness during the funeral. Friends and family
looked at her in shock and disbelief. Although Angela was feeling immense grief on
the inside, the outward appearance of emotion, or affect, indicated happiness, which
was quite confusing and concerning to others.
Affect is labile when it is characterized by repeated, rapid, and abrupt shifts.
Example: An elderly man is tearful one moment and combative the next. Affect is
often noted by psychologists and therapists because it can be a major indicator of
mental illness.
BEHAVIOUR: Behaviour is an action that is observable and measurable. Behaviour
is observable. It is what we see or hear, such as a student sitting down, standing up,
speaking, whispering, yelling, or writing. ... For example, a student may show anger
by making a face, yelling, crossing his arms, and turning away from the teacher.
In psychology, behaviour consists of an organism's external reactions to its
environment. Other aspects of psychology, such as emotions, thoughts, and other
internal mental processes, don't usually fall under the category of behaviour.
COGNITION: is a term referring to the mental processes involved in gaining
knowledge and comprehension. These cognitive processes include thinking,
knowing, remembering, judging, and problem-solving. These are higher-level
functions of the brain and encompass language, imagination, perception, and
planning.
Cognition is defined as 'the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and
understanding through thought, experience, and the senses. At Cambridge,
Cognition we look at it as the mental processes relating to the input and storage of
information and how that information is then used to guide your behaviour.
Cognition is thinking, and it encompasses the processes associated with perception,
knowledge, problem solving, judgment, language, and memory. Eg. Upon waking
each morning, you begin thinking—contemplating the tasks that you must complete
that day. In what order should you run your errands? Should you go to the bank, the
cleaners, or the grocery store first? Can you get these things done before you head
to class or will they need to wait until school is done? These thoughts are one
example of cognition at work.
You can see that these three aspects directly reflect the idea in our definition of
social psychology—the study of the feelings, behaviours, and thoughts of individuals
in the social situation. Although we will frequently discuss each of the capacities
separately, keep in mind that all three work together to produce human experience.
Now let’s consider separately the roles of cognition, affect, and behaviour.
SOCIAL COGNITION: Thinking and Learning about Others

Social cognition is a sub-topic of social psychology that focuses on how people

process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It
focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in our social interactions. The way
we think about others plays a major role in how we think, feel, and interact with the
world around us.

What Is Social Cognition?

While there is no single definition, there are some common factors that many experts
have identified as being important.

Social cognition involves:

 The processes involved in perceiving other people and how we come to know
about the people in the world around us.
 The study of the mental processes that are involved in perceiving,
remembering, thinking about, and attending to the other people in our social
world.
 The reasons we attend to certain information about the social world, how this
information is stored in memory, and how it is then used to interact with other
people.

Social cognition is not simply a topic within social psychology—it is an approach to

studying any subject with social psychology. Using a social-cognitive perspective,
researchers can study a wide range of topics including attitudes, person-
perception, prejudice,stereotypes, self-concept, discrimination, persuasion, decision-
making, and other areas.

Development

Social cognition develops in childhood and adolescence. As children grow, they

become more aware not only of their own feelings, thoughts, and motives but also of
the emotions and mental states of others. Children become more adept at
understanding how others feel, learning how to respond in social situations,
engaging in prosocial behaviors, and taking the perspective of others.

Humans are highly intelligent, and they use cognition in every part of their social
lives. Psychologists refer to cognition as the mental activity of processing information
and using that information in judgment. Social cognition is cognition that relates to
social activities and that helps us understand and predict the behaviour of ourselves
and others.
Over time, people develop a set of social knowledge that contains information about
the self, other people, social relationships, and social groups.
Two types of knowledge are particularly important in social psychology: schemas
and attitudes.
A schema is a knowledge representation that includes information about a person or
group (e.g., our knowledge that Joe is a friendly guy or that Italians are romantic).
An attitude is a knowledge representation that includes primarily our liking or
disliking of a person, thing, or group (“I really like Julie”; I dislike my new apartment”).
Once we have formed them, both schemas and attitudes allow us to judge quickly
and without much thought whether someone or something we encounter is good or
bad, helpful or hurtful, to be sought out or avoided. Thus schemas and attitudes have
an important influence on our social information processing and social behaviour.
Social cognition involves the active interpretation of events. As a result, different
people may draw different conclusions about the same events.
When Mary smiles at Robert, he might think that she is romantically attracted to him,
whereas she might think that she’s just being friendly.
When Mike tells a joke about Polish people, he might think its funny, but Tom might
think he is being prejudiced.
The 12 members of a jury who are deliberating about the outcome in a trial have all
heard the same evidence, but each juror’s own schemas and attitudes may lead him
or her to interpret the evidence differently.
The fact that different people interpret the same events differently makes life
interesting, but it can sometimes lead to disagreement and conflict. Social
psychologists study how people interpret and understand their worlds and,
particularly, how they make judgments about the causes of other peoples’
behaviour.
Social cognition—cognition that relates to social activities and that helps us
understand and predict the behaviour of ourselves and others.
A fundamental part of social cognition involves learning, the relatively permanent
change in knowledge that is acquired through experience.
We will see that a good part of our learning and our judgment of other people
operates out of our awareness—we are profoundly affected by things that we do not
know are influencing us. However, we also consciously think about and analyse our
lives and our relationships with others, seeking out the best ways to fulfil our goals
and aspirations.
As we investigate the role of cognition in everyday life, we will consider the ways that
people use their cognitive abilities to make good decisions and to inform their
behaviour in a useful and accurate way. We will also consider the potential for
mistakes and biases in human judgment. We will see that although we are generally
pretty good at sizing up other people and creating effective social interactions, we
are not perfect. And we will further see that the errors we make frequently occur
because of our reliance on our schemas and a general tendency to take shortcuts
through the use of cognitive heuristics, information-processing rules of thumb that
enable us to think in ways that are quick and easy but that may sometimes lead to
error. In short, although our cognitive abilities are often “good enough,” there is
definitely room for improvement in our social cognition.
Human beings have proportionately very large brains and highly developed cognitive
capacities in comparison with other species. Thus it should come as no surprise that
we meet the challenges of everyday life largely by thinking about them and then
planning what to do. Over time, we develop a huge amount of knowledge about
ourselves, other people, social relationships, and social groups. This knowledge
guides our responses to the people we interact with every day. But where does this
social knowledge come from? Our Knowledge Accumulates as a Result of Learning.
  Operant Learning: If a child touches a hot radiator, he or she quickly learns
that the radiator is dangerous and is not likely to touch it again. Changes in
our understanding of our environments represent operant learning. , the
principle that experiences that are followed by positive emotions
(reinforcements or rewards) are likely to be repeated, whereas experiences
that are followed by negative emotions (punishments) are less likely to be
repeated. In operant learning, the person thus learns from the consequences
of his or her own actions.
 Associational Learning: occurs when an object or event comes to be
associated with a natural response, such as an automatic behaviour or a
positive or negative emotion. If you have ever become hungry when you drive
by one of your favourite pizza stores, it is probably because the sight of the
pizzeria has become associated with your experiences of enjoying the pizzas.
We may enjoy smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and eating not only
because they give us pleasure themselves but also because they have been
associated with pleasant social experiences in the past.
Associational learning has long been, and continues to be, an effective tool in
marketing and advertising. The general idea is to create an advertisement that
has positive features so that it creates enjoyment in the person exposed to it.
Because the product being advertised is mentioned in the ad, it becomes
associated with the positive feelings that the ad creates. In the end, if
everything has gone well, seeing the product online or in a store will then
create a positive response in the buyer, leading him or her to be more likely to
purchase the product.
Associational learning has also been implicated in the development of unfair
and unjustified racial prejudices. We may dislike people from certain racial or
ethnic groups because we frequently see them portrayed in the media as
associated with violence, drug use, or terrorism. And we may avoid people
with certain physical characteristics simply because they remind us of other
people we do not like.
 Observational Learning: In addition to operant and associational learning,
people learn by observing the behaviour of others. This is known as
observational learning. Observational learning is useful because it allows
people to learn without having to actually engage in what might be a risky
behaviour.
Schemas as Social Knowledge
The outcome of learning is knowledge, and this knowledge is stored in the form of
schemas, which are knowledge representations that include information about a
person, group, or situation.
How Schemas Develop: Accommodation and Assimilation
Because they represent our past experience, and because past experience is
useful for prediction, our schemas influence our expectations about future events.
For instance, if you have watched Italian movies or if you have visited Italy, you
might have come to the conclusion that Italians frequently gesture a lot with their
hands when they talk—that they are quite nonverbally expressive. If so, this
knowledge will be contained in your group schema about Italians. Therefore, when
you meet someone who is Italian, or even when you meet someone who reminds
you of an Italian person, you may well expect that he or she will gesture when
talking.
The fact that different people have different past experiences—and thus that their
schemas and attitudes are different—helps explain why different people draw
different conclusions about the same events.
When existing schemas change on the basis of new information, we call the process
accommodation. Assimilation occurs when our knowledge acts to influence new
information in a way that makes the conflicting information fit with our existing
schemas.
• Because our expectations influence our attention and responses to, and our
memory for, new information, often in a way that leads our expectations to be
maintained, assimilation is generally more likely than accommodation. • Schemas
serve as energy savers. We are particularly likely to use them when we are tired or
when the situation that we must analyse is complex.

Social cognition refers to our thoughts about and interpretations of ourselves and
other people. Over time, we develop schemas and attitudes to help us better
understand and more successfully interact with others. Affect refers to the feelings
that we experience as part of life and includes both moods and emotions.