How do we perceive the world around us? What catches our attention and makes us want to remember something?

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Social Cognition and Social Perception
How do we perceive the world around us? What catches our attention and makes us want to remember something? Why do we make some decisions on the spot while others take much longer to make? These are all questions asked by social cognition theorists.
Social cognition is defined as how we think about the social world and how we process the information that we receive. It deeply involves the field of cognitive psychology and helps us understand why we make the choices that we do (Fiske, 2019). One of the key topics studied by social cognition researchers are schemas. Schemas are the mental models that we create for the world (Fiske, 2019). For instance, we all have a schema or mental image of what a classroom looks like. You also have a schema for what happens in a doctor’s office because you have been in one. You may even have a schema for what Paris, France, is like, even if you have never been there. Social cognition studies how we create these schemas for events that we have experienced as well as for places we may have never been before.
The second topic from this module is social perception. Social perception is a component of social cognition and is focused on how we perceive and understand the behavior of others. One of the key topics studied by social perception theorists is nonverbal behaviors used in communication. The purpose of studying nonverbal behavior is to better understand and interpret another person’s body language so we can better communicate with them (Kassin et al., 2021).
Another topic studied by social perception theorists is attribution theory. Attribution theory, made famous by Fritz Heider, helps us find the source of a person’s behavior (Kassin et al., 2021). Heider stated that a person’s behavior is caused by an interaction between that person’s personality and their environment. However, Heider noted that if you are observing a person’s behavior, you tend to assume that their behavior is caused by their personality and not by their environment (Cialdini & Griskevicius, 2019). Simply put, if you are rushing because you are late for your train, a stranger observing you might think that you are a person who is always in a hurry even if this is an uncommon occurrence for you.
Social cognition and social perception theories are so essential to the field of social psychology that they can be found in every module in the course. These two topics can be used to help us understand behaviors such as prejudice and aggression, as well as more positive topics such as empathy and helping. There is hardly a topic in this course that has not been impacted by these two theories.
References
Cialdini, R. B., & Griskevicius, V. (2019). Social influence. In Finkel, E. J., & Baumeister, R. F., Advanced social psychology: The state of the science (2nd ed., pp. 157–178). Oxford University Press.
Fiske, S. T. (2019). Social cognition. In Finkel, E. J., & Baumeister, R. F., Advanced social psychology: The state of the science (2nd ed., pp. 117–156). Oxford University Press.
Kassin, S., Fein, S., & Markus, H. R. (2021). Social psychology (11th ed.). Cengage.