Rated PG: Psychology Guidance Suggested

Psychology Major: The basis of social cognition in the field of social psychology has to do with categorizing our social world into schemas or mental frameworks based on our prior experiences. These experiences are usually shaped by the social learning theory where we acquire knowledge through modeling the actions of our social world. Different from other branches of Psychology such as Freud’s psychoanalysis, Pavlovian classical conditioning , or Skinner’s behaviorism is that social psychology has to us as the individual figuring out our social world and finding the causes of why people do the things they do and also why we do the things we do. It is less individual based where it not only look at our behaviors alone, but how we as an individual function in a social system in the social interactions that we have. It analyzes how these social dances then affect the ebb and flow the locus of control in our behaviors.

Non-Psychology Major: As humans, we are biologically predisposed to see patterns. Without such tendency, every stimulus that we come upon in our environment will flood our system and we will have to allocate time and energy in analyzing every little thing that we come upon, even if we have stumbled upon such stimuli before. This why is our mind use mental shortcuts or stereotypes in categorizing things in that we do not waste mental energy figuring out the familiar stimuli and allocate that effort into figuring out novel stimuli. For example, if we have no framework for dogs vs. tigers, we will spend precious time figuring out the differentiation between the two every time we come upon a 4 legged animal and whether it is dangerous or not, which by then could be too late and we would be dead. We also do the tendency when it comes to human beings whether grouping people by race, political party, or major. This is because it is more efficient. This is a branch in social psychology where we study how in our mind works in the presence of others because biologically, us humans are social creatures by nature and we operate in groups. So we operate using social cognition, which are the mental processes that we use in order to understand our social world and to attribute the causes behind not only other people’s actions but also our very own.