Introduction: Social Cognition

The name of the primary text for this course is Social Cognition: Making Sense of People by Ziva Kunda. The first chapter gives an overview of the book and gives a bit of an overview to social cognition. It makes the point that the notion that motives can influence our beliefs lies at the core of social psychology theories. This point is very interesting to me, especially as someone who has studied pastoral theology and religious theology in general. Why do we believe what we believe? Do we believe what we believe because it conflicts the least with our preconceived ideas? Or is it that we want to believe what makes sense?

Part of what is interesting about social cognition is that it tries to make sense of social events. Why does one person react completely differently from another to the same set of given circumstances? How does our mood affect how we perceive and remember things.

I'll be very interested to learn about modeling in this course. How can the mind be understood in a mathematical, testable way? Can we set up an algorithm that can simulate the way we categorize and learn? I'm a double major: psychology and mathematics, and it's always interesting to see bridges between the two. I enjoy watching the show Numb3rs because it often shows fairly good mathematics probing into the human psyche. It's amazing that what we do is often understandable in mathematical patterns. What we see as random behavior can often be predicted when given enough data.