0.15 Social cognition, personality, and emotion  (Page 6/18)

So a good question would be, what types of people have which types of observational goals? If you think about it, each person is going to have a unique way of gathering information or perceiving other people. This in part is going to be due to his or her own perception of themselves. How they evaluate themselves and the schema they have of themselves. A schema is something like, "I am a good soccer player" or "I am a strong individual". If you think about it, if you perceive yourself as being a strong individual, this is going to influence how you observe and perceive other people. All of the ideas you have about yourself, which in part forms who you are, is going to determine to some extent how you perceive other people.

So, how someone perceives themselves is going to determine how they perceive other people. It is possible that how you perceive yourself changes many times in a day. In that case, for one interaction, you might perceive yourself as strong, while in another interaction you might perceive yourself as being weak. There could be countless ideas about yourself that might change over the course of one interaction that you could carry into the next, only to have those ideas change back or become new.

Not only how you perceive yourself is going to determine your cognition, but who you are is going to determine how you respond in situations and what you think. All of your personality traits are going to determine what you think and what you do. If you are a person that is easily troubled (or a 'disturbed' person), then this is going to influence how you perceive others, how you respond to others, what you think about yourself and others, and your other thought processes in general. Similarly, if you are nice person, or a stubborn person, or any other personality trait, your thinking is going to be influenced accordingly.

If you have a specific opinion about yourself (a 'self-schema'), then this idea might intervene in a specific instance in a social interaction. If you think you are a good soccer player, then perhaps when you see someone else who looks like they are also then your thinking might change - you might identify with that person or try to analyze them further. That is just one example, there are many ideas people have about themselves that could intervene in their thoughts in a social situation.

When someone meets someone else, for the first time or even if they already know the person, an impression is formed. That means that they form opinions of what the person is like as soon as they meet the person at the beginning because this person is new. They also make predictions about the persons behavior based off of this impression. They get an idea of what the other person is like, and then they guess how that person that they have created in their mind is going to act. This applies to people who even already know each other because, even though the person stays the same, their moods and emotions, and even their opinions probably, change on a daily or hourly basis.