Microsoft Word Chapter 1 done doc

 
3.1 INTRODUCTION : 
 
Social cognition refers to the ways in which individuals 
interpret, analyze, remember, and use information about social 
world. Social cognition studies the ways in which social information 
is processed by people, particularly encoding, storage, retrieval, 
and application to social situations. It means application of 
knowledge and methods of cognitive psychology and information 
processing theory to the field of social psychology. For example, if 
we want to buy a new mobile in a buy-back offer, then we neither 
meticulously mathematically calculate the exact price of the old and 
new mobile nor we do any probability calculations to maximizing 
our profits. We simply have a rough estimate of the prices and 
accept bargains more or less around that price. We can understand 
few interesting things about our mind from this example. (a) One, 
we have frameworks developed from the past experience (often 
called as ‘schema’) regarding selling and buying and we propose a 
lower price to buy and higher price to sell than our expectations.
(b) Two, the mental processes we carry out are faster, automatic 
and very quick. (c) Third, at the same time these mental 
frameworks are prone to systematic errors and biases in decisions 

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we make. In this chapter we shall discuss some of these aspects of 
social information processing.
Social cognition refers to the ways in which individuals 
interpret, analyze, remember, and use information about social 
world. 
3.2 SCHEMAS : MENTAL FRAMEWORK FOR 
ORGANIZING AND USING SOCIAL 
INFORMATION : 
Schemas are mental frameworks centering on specific 
theme that help us to organize social information. There are various 
types of schemas. "Self schema" is for organizing knowledge about 
our-self knowledge. Schemas for other individuals are "person 
schema". Schema for social roles are called "role schemas" and 
Schemas for events or situations are called "event schema" (event 
script).