Requirements: A midterm and a final exam (each accounting for 20% of final grade or 17.5% for graduate students) based on a set of study questions to be passed out at the beginning of a section.

A set of weekly "reaction papers" (5 page commentaries on the readings to show me that you've read and understood and thought about those readings) worth the same total points or percentages.

A term paper (literature review or research design) (45%, or 40% for graduate students)

Class participation (15%)

A class presentation (10%) (Graduate students only)

1. Introduction: The nature and concerns of "social cognition," as it was, as it is, and as it might be; the relationship of social cognition to traditional social psychology on the one hand, and to traditional and contemporary cognitive psychology on the other; reestablishing the "social" in social cognition; an attempted integration and a personal perspective on the "proper" study of social and everyday cognition.

2. Some traditional and current models of social cognition (and some variations); their assumptions; some examples from general, cognitive, and social psychology; and the attractions and limitations of each; "social representations" and other European alternatives.

3. "Person perception" and person Knowledge: The processes of impression formation and interpersonal judgment; the study of category accessibility and priming in person judgments; the structure and representation of person memory and person knowledge (implicit personality theory); the role of processing goals and the relationship between person memory and judgment; the question of accuracy in person perception.

4. The cognitive bases (and results) of stereotyping: "Classical" approaches to stereotypes; the effects of distinctiveness, salience, and categorization; self-categorization and social identity theory; perceptions of groups; the role of affect and cognitive biases in memory and judgment.

5. Political cognition and attitudes: The study of belief systems and ideologies; research on political expertise and the effects of attitudes, beliefs, and expertise on political information processing and candidate evaluations; the representation, organization, and dynamics of attitudes and beliefs.

6. Self-knowledge and autobiographical memory:Cognitive models of the self and self-knowledge; research on the self in memory and judgment; the relationship between personal and social identities; research and theory on the nature, representation, and retrieval of autobiographical memories, and the relationship between such memories and self-judgments.

7. Social attribution and research on judgment biases: The three traditional models of attribution and some recent revisions/extensions (e.g., natural logic models, knowledge structure and conversational models); the study of judgment heuristics and biases in general and their application to the attribution process in particular; some recent critiques of the "heuristics and biases" viewpoint.

8. Other possible topics (student choice)

a. The interaction of affect and cognition
b. Cognition and social behavior
c. The development of social cognition: Research on role-taking, empathy, and referential communication; the development of person perception and social attribution; the child's understanding of rules, scripts, conventions, and moral principles; social and family influences.
d. The impact of culture and social structure on cognition and language.
e. Applied social cognition(e.g., legal and parole decision-making; cognitive factors in stress and coping; cognitive factors in close relationships, social cognitive principles applied to clinical issues, organizational psychology, etc.