0.2 Personality and social cognition  (Page 2/4)

So first there is some sort of stimulus, any stimulus, say for instance you see a person - you then compare to see if this stimulus is new - is this a new person, or are there or were there other people in the environment? - then you process it - this stimulus either causes you to make an automatic response or is something that you have to think about further.

So if you have to think about it further then you assign some meaning to it. What is the purpose of the object, what are the possibilities for it. You assess what is happening in the current situation with regards to the stimulus. That is obvious, you make a logical assessment as to what is going on. Furthermore, you have your own beliefs and values related to this stimulus.

So maybe you then make the assessment "that person is dangerous" - that is a belief of yours about the stimulus (the person). Next you start to form a behavior intent, such as, "I am going to walk away from them because they might be dangerous".

There is no telling how complex your assessment is after you identify a stimulus. You could go through many different beliefs you have that you could assign to it or opinions about what the stimulus is.

This means there is a deeper meaning that people give to everything they encounter. Some things you are going to respond more automatically too, while other things are going to trigger some kind of complex unconscious response. The behavioral intentions you form could have been determined unconsciously. If you do something that you didn't consciously plan, and that is true for a lot of the things you do throughout a day, then that was something that was determined unconsciously.

And its more than the things you aren't aware of that you do, you form complex beliefs and thoughts about things you aren't aware of. That is true probably for people especially. You could also form an unconscious belief for something simple, say there was an object you might not get, you might form an unconscious belief that the probability of you getting it was a lot higher than the assessment you would have made if you thought about it more consciously. That is typical, people are often under the sway of their emotions and that influences their beliefs and assessments.

How do people perceive and evaluate other people? They probably do this mostly automatically. If you think about it, people come to conclusions about other people unconsciously and then respond to them based off of those unconscious conclusions. People observe tone of voice, posture, gestures, their physical appearance - all of those things are consciously and unconsciously noted. For instance, maybe you realized later that you were responding to someone in a certain way because they did one of those behaviors differently.

When people are observing other people in an interaction, each person may have a different observational goal. That is, what does a person observe about people, and is this observation conscious or unconscious? For instance some people might empathize with other people while other people might try to get social information from them, such as a deeper perspective as to what they are like. I could image there might be individual quirks, that is, some people might try to observe specific things about the people they meet. One person might be constantly trying to find out how nice the people he interacts with are, while another how intelligent.