0.6 Social cognition, personality, and emotion  (Page 7/18)

If someone is in a certain mood or emotional state, then this is going to change their behavior to some extent. That is why the impressions other people form and how other people respond to them is going to change. Not everything new that occurs in interaction happens between two people who have never met before. Furthermore, you never know how someone is going to respond to a new situation - and each situation you encounter someone in is going to be somewhat new.

For instance, if someone had a conversation recently or did something that is related to an interaction they have later on, then they are likely to make comparisons between the two interactions. People make comparisons between related things all of the time, much of which is without their awareness. If you think about it, you are going to relate the different conversations you have in one day to each other, consciously or unconsciously. Also you might also make specific comparisons between some of the contents of the interaction or the person you are interacting with.

What is the nature and consequences of an individuals conceptions of self, their conceptions of other people, their characteristic dispositions, and their characteristic attitudes and values. For instance, someone that is friendly and sociable might actually make the people and environment they are in friendly and sociable. Their values, dispositions, and conceptions of self and others are both complex and simple at the same time. If you think about it, there are going to be obvious, easy to observe values, dispositions etc, and there are going to be more advanced and subtle ones.

For instance, if someone values children or marriage, this might make them more friendly and kind than someone who doesn't value such things. To simplify that, you could have a category of values that are 'kind' values and another category of values that you could say are 'evil'. Most people probably have a mix, but making such categories still helps when trying to label and understand people.

An individuals beliefs about the social world may create their own social reality. What you believe about other people has am impact on how those people are. You exert an influence of sorts on how those people should be acting. This is probably so because maybe your opinion has some sort of value that the other person could benefit by. On the other hand, maybe your opinion is completely wrong, and you have to do a sort of 'reality-testing' in order to figure out if your beliefs are accurate.

Schemata are cognitive representations of generic concepts. They include the attributes that constitute the concept and relationships among the attributes. Social schemata are then abstract conceptions people hold about the social world-about persons, roles and events. People form hypotheses and develop expectations about extroverts, about college professors, about what events are likely to unfold when they enter a restaurant, and so forth.

So, basically, a schema is an idea or group of related ideas. You form a hypotheses or theory in your mind about something social - this is a social schema. This is important because all of the information in your mind is going to be related. For instance, if you have one theory about how you function socially in a restaurant, then this theory is going to be related to how you function at home. More importantly, schema are just things you think about the social world - that is different from the emotional reality of the social world that is also understood by you in another way. At some level you understand what is really going on because that is the truth - you come up with schema or theories to understand what is going on but those theories aren't necessarily correct.