Social Cognition : Understanding People and Events

Social cognition is an approach to understanding how people think about people and events. We are constantly processing information to navigate the world we live in.

The authors will guide your students, using examples and up-to-date studies, through this approach; from explaining the processes themselves right through to demonstrating the role cognitive processes play in our social lives.

With chapters on the following processes:

·       Memory

·       Judgement

·       Attention

·       Attribution

·       Evaluation

·       Automatic processing.

This book will provide your students with a framework for understanding the most common areas of interest for Social Cognition, such as perception, attitudes and stereotyping.

David L. Hamilton received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. He was on the faculty at Yale University for eight years before moving to the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published extensively on topics in social perception, including stereotyping, impression formation, person memory, and perceptions of groups. He has served on numerous committees in professional organizations, including the Executive Committees of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology and the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, and for 25 years was co-organizer of the annual Person Memory Interest Group meetings. He has been associate editor of two journals and has served on several editorial boards. He received the MERIT Award from the National Institute of Mental Health in 1987. He has been awarded honorary degrees from two European universities, the University of Lisbon, Portugal (1997) and Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary (2000). In 2000 he received the Thomas M. Ostrom Award, presented by the Person Memory Interest Group, for "outstanding contributions to social cognition," and in 2008 received the Jean-Claude Codol Award from the European Association of Social Psychology for "contributions to the advancement of social psychology in Europe." In 2014 he received the Distinguished Alumni Award from his alma mater, Gettysburg College.

Steven J. Stroessner is a Professor of Communication at the University of California, Los Angeles. Before this position, he was a Professor of Psychology and an award-winning instructor at Barnard College, Columbia University. He also served as a Senior Research Scientist at Disney Research. His research examines cognitive and motivational aspects of stereotyping and prejudice, and he has published extensively on social categorization and the utilization of stereotypes in judgment. More recently, his research has examined social categorization processes in judgments of non-social entities ranging from shapes to robots. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Society and a Fellow and Executive Officer of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology. He co-edited a recent book, Social Perception from Individuals to Groups, and is an Associate Editor of the journal, Social Cognition. He holds B.A.s in Psychology and Social Work from Hope College in Holland, Michigan, and a Ph.D. in Social/Personality Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara.