Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

 UNDERSTANDING WHAT OTHERS ARE LIKE 
Consider for a moment the enormous amount of information about other people to 
which we are exposed. How can we decide what is important and what is not and 
make judgments about the characteristics of others? Social psychologists interested 
in this question study  social cognition  —the way people understand and make sense 
of others and themselves. Those psychologists have learned that individuals have 
highly developed  schemas,  sets of cognitions about people and social experiences. 
Those schemas organize information stored in memory; represent in our minds the 
way the social world operates; and give us a framework to recognize, categorize, and 
recall information relating to social stimuli such as people and groups (Brewer & 
Hewstone, 2003; Moskowitz, 2004; Smith & Semin, 2007).
We typically hold schemas for specifi c types of people. Our schema for “teacher,” 
for instance, generally consists of a number of characteristics: knowledge of the sub-
ject matter he or she is teaching, a desire to impart that knowledge, and an awareness 
of the student’s need to understand what is being said. Or we may hold a schema 
for “mother” that includes the characteristics of warmth, nurturance, and caring. 
Regardless of their accuracy, schemas are important because they organize the way 
in which we recall, recognize, and categorize information about others. Moreover, 
they help us predict what others are like on the basis of relatively little information 
because we tend to fi t people into schemas even when we do not have much concrete 
evidence to go on (Bargh & Chartrand, 2000; Ruscher, Fiske, & Schnake, 2000).
 IMPRESSION FORMATION 
How do we decide that Sayreeta is a fl irt, Jacob is obnoxious, or Hector is a really 
nice guy? The earliest work on social cognition examined impression formation, the 
process by which an individual organizes information about another person to form 
an overall impression of that person. In a classic study, for instance, students learned