Social Psychology W3 P1

Introduction to Social Psychology, University of Queensland, EdX.

-Impression Formation quickly influences who we want to spend time with. The impressions we leave are important too when it comes to things like job interviews or potential friendships. Impression formation is the process in which people combine information about others to make overall judgements.

-Recently, schemas have arisen as a way to predict impression formation. Schemas are cognitive structures that represent our knowledge about a concept or stimulus, and they are formed on a basis of past experiences.
-Event schemas are our generalized reactions to activities or events, and are associated with a particular situation; they tell us what to expect.
-Role schemas are the expectations that we have in the role of a specific person, and are usually tied to event schemas.
-Person schemas represent our individualized knowledge structures about specific types of people. This is where stereotypes are born.

-Heuristics are the shortcuts our brain uses when making judgements so we don't have to think everything through.
-Availability heuristic: When people judge an events frequency by the ease at which it can come to mind.
-Representative heuristic: When people judge others by comparing them to the prototype of a group to see if that person belongs.

-To infer the cause of people's behavior and to better understand people around us, we use attribution. this could be stimuli, personality, or more.
-This again can lead to a variety of stereotypes based on our preconceived notions and evaluations of the person in question.