Cognitive miser

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section needs to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please help improve this article with relevant internal links. (November 2007)

The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject. Please help improve the article with a good introductory style.

Cognitive Miser refers to the idea that a small amount of information is actively perceived by individuals, with many cognitive shortcuts used to attend to relevant information.

An idea fundamental in the information-processing model of social cognition that because it would be enormously taxing on individuals to attend to all information in the world scientifically (basically, with a high degree of analysis), with individuals' becoming overwhelmed by the confusion and complexity of the social stimuli that they are attending to. As a result, people ignore large amounts of information from the social world, and in doing so, make rapid inferences about information, and use categories to organize information. As a result, people aim to expend the minimum amount of cognitive resources as required.

Stereotypes are an example of cognitive miserliness, as people assign different stimuli, such as people of certain races, to particular categories with certain characteristics so that they can attend to just the category, rather than the individual when engaged in social situations.

As of late, this idea has received lessening support from the field of social psychology, with the metaphor of people being motivated tacticians instead gaining traction!

[edit] References

• Fiske, S. T. (1992). Thinking is for doing: Portraits of social cognition from Daguerrotypes to Laserphoto. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 877-839.
• Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (1991). Social cognition (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.