Week 3 post 2

 Social Cognition and Deception

People tend to make a lot of errors and have biases when they make social judgements. For instance, people are likely to believe that something happens a lot if they are more familiar with it, even if truly is uncommon. 

We also evaluate behavior through 3 main forms of information, listed below.

Consensus info- weather other people preform same behavior or not

Distinctiveness info- only preformed toward particular target of person or other targets as well

Consistency info- weather behavior is preformed all the time or not

    We also assume 3 main attributes in social contexts that give us information about the situation and aid our social judgment. The first is personal attribution. This is when we see a low amount of consensus information and attribute the cause of behavior to person preforming behavior. The second is target attribution. This is when we notice a higher amount of distinctiveness information and we conclude that the behavior is caused because of the target of the behavior. The 3rd and final is situation attribution. This is when we observe low consistency information and we deduce that the behavior is preformed in some contexts but not others.

    Social Cognition is how people process, store, and apply information about others and about social situations. If we can be aware of the Consensus, Distinctiveness, and Consistency information of the social situation, we can predict how others may judge our actions using the three types of attributions which are directly connected to these three types of social information. Personal attribution is connected to low consensus information, target attribution is connected to high Distinctiveness information, and situation attribution is connected to low consistency information. If we can predict how others will perceive us based on the situation, taking these factors into effect, it could drastically improve our chances of successfully deceiving someone.