PSYC 473 Chapter Notes - Chapter 13: Stereotype Threat, Construals, Social Cognition
25 Apr 2013
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Document Summary
Social cognition prepares us for social interaction and instructs us as to what is appropriate. The zimbardo prison experiment suggests that categorizing people in the environment according to roles will produce the behaviors consistent with those roles (schemas). Triggering these mental representations thus predisposes people to act in ways consistent with the expectancies suggested by the schemas. Action can be initiated upon the mere detection of appropriate cues associated with that action, without any conscious decision to act needing to intervene. The most obvious determinant of how one acts is how one construes the social environment. The construal of a given person is now shaped not only by his/her own expectancies and goals, but by the behavior of the person with whom he/she is interacting. In this interaction sequence, the construal of others is said to be affected by the goals and the expectancies of the perceiver, which give meaning to the behavior of the person being perceived.
