PSY220H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Amos Tversky, Cognitive Psychology, Representativeness Heuristic
Document Summary
Social cognition (borrowing heavily from cognitive psychology) has become the dominant paradigm in social psych in the past 20 years. Concept: a unit of knowledge (usually about a category). What do concepts do: reduce the amount of processing we need to do when there is too much information available, add information when there is too little available, guide attention, interpretation. Bottom line: category guides your interpretation and aids in comprehension. White subjects watched videotape of two men in a discussion. At this point, the tape is stopped, and subjects are asked to characterize what just happened. What subjects didn"t know: there were two versions of the tape: in one the shover was black, in the other, shover was white. Bottom line: incoming information is assimilated into the concept that is activated. There are severe costs of using concepts and social categories (stereotypes, lazy thinking). There are also clear benefits: solidify/reify ambiguous information, conserve cognitive resources.
