Social Cognition: How We Process Social Information

2012 Words9 Pages
Running head: SOCIAL COGNITION: HOW WE PROCESS SOCIAL INFORMATION Social Cognition: How We Process Social Information Rick Taylor Florida Technical College Professor Sara Olsen Abstract This paper hopes to bring awareness of how we process information through reasoning, use of heuristics or rule of thumb, biases, counterfactual thinking, and how negativity bias tends to be the norm for all social interaction whether business or personal as it deals with our lives. In gathering information for this paper, it became apparent, that before the written word can be put on paper, a better understanding of cognition and social cognition was in order. The definition of cognition; Ability to acquire knowledge, the mental faculty or process of acquiring knowledge by the use of reasoning, intuition, or perception and Knowledge acquired, knowledge acquired through reasoning, intuition, or perception; and the definition of social cognition; Thought process for understanding people, or how we think about the world. This thought process and how heavily involved we are in understanding and dealing with other people, is just the tip of the iceberg of information requiring critical thinking when attempting to explain such a vast highway of knowledge and information. Armed with this information, this paper hopes to bring awareness to how we process information through reasoning, use of heuristics or rule of thumb, biases, counterfactual thinking, and how negativity bias tends to be the norm for all social interaction whether business or personal as it deals with our lives. As unpleasant as it is for humans to admit, that our understanding and how we deal with other people and most important, our perception of the individual(s) mostly derives from biases and other tainted information. In deciding which information is relevant and entering the information into memory,
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