PSYB10H3 Chapter 4: Chapter 4
Document Summary
As this story makes clear, social judgments can have serious consequences. Mistaking a serial killer as someone whose gentle and safe to be around can be a lethal error. The field of social cognition is the study of how people think about the social world and arrive at judgments that help them interpret the past, present and future. Social stimuli rarely influence people"s behavior directly; they do so indirectly through the way they"re interpreted and construed. Mistakes are informative to psychologists because they provide particularly helpful clues about how people think about others and make inferences about them. Errors provide hints about the strategies, or rules, people follow to make judgments both those that turn out to be successful and those that lead to disaster. Understanding other people depends on accurate information. But sometimes people have little or no information on which to base their assessments.
