Social Cognition

The Understanding of Social Cognition. The work is to be 6 pages with three to five sources, with in-text citations and a reference page. Experimental researchers deploy methods and strategies in a controlled situation to observe reactions and behaviors in an attempt to explain the diverse and complex human behavior.This essay talks about the research designs, methodologies, and other commonalities that are usually employed in experimental researches. Moreover, this paper will also evaluate the contributions of these experimental researches in our everyday understanding of social cognition, the way people perceive, understand and explain events and situations in the social environment.One of the most direct ways to learn about behavior is to listen and watch- observing how individuals behave in a given situation. According to Heider (1958) in order to understand social behavior, we must pay attention to how people perceive and struggle to make sense of their social worlds, usually in terms of cause and effect. People learn about things through observing and interacting with others, they see how their actions affect other people around them. Along with our differences in cognition and knowledge are our differences in social perception. We interpret our observations through schema, a mental structure containing knowledge relating to a particular kind of subject and the social perception of how things usually happen in the social world.An experiment conducted by Rusher et al. (2000) provided an example of schematic processing. In this experiment, a group of students was observed as to the extent of stereotypical impressions versus their motivational relevance. The student participants were presented with a fictional task that involved monetary reward. There were two groups for the experiment, paired and individual participants. The task was simple, they were to make an impression of a person basing on the cards that describe that particular person’s attributes.