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Social Cognition

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Social cognition that is as defined in the title is about how individuals think about themselves and their social world; it involves how people make decisions and judgements in their everyday lives (Aroson et al., 2005). This is categorised as either automatic low effort thinking which is automatic or merely effort less or controlled high effort thinking that is controlled thinking processes. Social cognition assumes important roles such as decision making and perception of information in everyday life and therefore comprises of cognitive structures that influence and are influenced by the happenings in the social world. From this individual beings form shortcuts to ease the processing of information this is termed as being social misers towards a cognitive economy. This is due to a limitation in cognitive capacity and the existence of mental structural guides of cognition Examples of this shortcut is schemas. These categories simplify concepts. categorisation is done by grouping similar traits together that forms cognitive economy(Bruner et al.,1956) however it is not always that a common factor exist in a category this is known as the prototypical approach(Barsalou, 1991). Schemas and heuristics shape the categorisation process. This essay will look at schema and heuristics and examples of the same giving examples and evaluation for each. First this essay will look at schemas
A schema can be defined as a packet of information containing fixed values and alternative values to represent the knowledge and experiences embodied, that an individual experiences in the world. (Gross 2010). Schemas enable encoding of large information in a short period of time. There are four types of schemas. Person schemas that comprise of attributes and skills that often take form of what is attributed to an individual. Another is event schemas that are also called cognitive scripts

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