THE ROLE OF AUTOMATIZATION IN SOCIAL SETTINGS

There are several areas of social psychological research for which issues of control and automaticity have special relevance. Attaining an understanding of a person is a seriously important activity in social life. Control and automatic processes are both involved in this enterprise, but the general trend in this area of research has been to examine the degree to which social cognition proceeds automatically- against the background assumption that the balance of the processes involved include the exercise of conscious control. The purpose of this chapter is to present some operational implications of automatic and controlled processes in the field of social cognition. Initially the role of automatization on attitude is presented; then the reflective-reflexive model based in neurocognitive systems and the techniques of neuroimaging that can make great contributions to the understanding of judgment and decision-making are presented. Afterwards the role of automatization on social attribution and stereotyping is explained. Finally the role of automatization on emotions is presented, particularly the “modal model” of emotion that is important as an initial framework for the field. Using this framework, emotion researchers have developed methods that have yielded a large number of empirical findings.