5 credits
In this course, students are oriented to key elements in social cognitive processing as a subspecialty of social psychology, including attribution theory, schema theory, social cognition relative to self, the role of attention/consciousness in social cognition, errors and biases in social thought, heuristics, person memory, affect and cognition, attitudes, social influence, and behavior relative to social cognition. Students investigate the structure and function of attitudes and how they are formed and maintained. They also examine the connection between attitudes and behavior and how attitudes are changed through the process of persuasion and cognitive dissonance.