Thinking about the Social World SOCIAL COGNITION Thinking about the Social World

Early in the morning on February 4, 1999, four white police officers approached Amadou Diallo on a street in the Bronx, New York. Because the officers believed that Diallo, a black immigrant from West Africa, looked like sketches they had seen on a serial rapist. In fact, Diallo had no criminal record. He was working long hours as a street vendor and his spare time was earning high school credits so that he could go to college. When the police approached Diallo, he reached for his wallet, probably so that he could show some identification. Alarmed by the sight of a black man reaching into his pocket, the four officers did not hesitate. They fired a total of forty-one shots at Diallo, killing him instantly.

Police officers often have to make extremely quick decisions and have little time to stop and analyze whether someone poses a threat. In Diallo case, many people wondered whether the officers decisions to open fire so quickly were influenced by the victims’ race. Would the officers have acted any differently if Diallo were white ? More generally, how do people size up their social worlds and decide how to act, in life-and-death situation ? The ways in which people analyze and think about the social world is the topic of social cognition.

SOCIAL COGNITION How people think about themselves and the social world, or how people select, interpret, remember and use social information to make judgments and decisions. The assumption is that people are generally trying to form accurate impressions of the world and do so much of the time. However people sometimes form erroneous impressions-such as the police officers assumption that Amadou Diallo was reaching for a gun.

To understand how people think about their social worlds and how accurate their impressions are likely to be, we need to distinguish between two different kinds of social cognition : Automatic thinking Thinking that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary and effortless The police who killed Diallo was acted “without thinking”, without consciously deliberating about what they saw (when Diallo reached his pocket) and whether their assumption were correct. Whether we hear someone speaking of religious sects or sex depends not only on the word spoken but on how we automatically interpret the sound

Thinking that is more effortful and deliberate (pertimbangan) 2. Controlled thinking Thinking that is more effortful and deliberate (pertimbangan) People do pause and think about themselves and their environments and think carefully about the right of action. We may spent hours deliberating over important decisions in our life, such as where to go to college, whether to break up with your boy/girlfriend

Rodin’s famous sculpture, The Thinker, mimics controlled thinking, where people sit down and consider something slowly and deliberately. Even when we do not know it, however, we are engaging in automatic thinking, which is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary and effortless