Social Cognition Understanding Self and Others

An ideal text for undergraduate- and graduate-level courses, this accessible yet authoritative volume examines how people come to know themselves and understand the behavior of others. Core social-psychological questions are addressed as students gain an understanding of the mental processes involved in perceiving, attending to, remembering, thinking about, and responding to the people in our social world. Particular attention is given to how we know what we know: the often hidden ways in which our perceptions are shaped by contextual factors and personal and cultural biases. While the text's coverage is sophisticated and comprehensive, synthesizing decades of research in this dynamic field, every chapter brings theories and findings down to earth with lively, easy-to-grasp examples.

Gordon B. Moskowitz, PhD, was drawn to social psychology as an undergraduate at McGill University. He received his PhD from New York University in 1993. While at NYU, he developed interests in impression formation, automaticity, minority influence, accessibility effects, stereotypes, and the effects of goals on each of these processes. Following graduate training, Dr. Moskowitz did a year of postdoctoral study at Max Planck Institute in Munich. After a year as a faculty member at the University of Konstanz, he decided to return to the United States and moved to Princeton University, where he was Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology from 1994 to 2001. In the fall of 2001 Dr. Moskowitz moved to Lehigh University, where he is now Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology. In addition to his research presented in journals such as [i]Journal of Personality and Social Psychology[/i] and [i]Journal of Experimental Social Psychology[/i], Dr. Moskowitz has edited a book titled [i]Cognitive Social Psychology[/i], has served on the editorial boards of several journals, and has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation for his research on the control of stereotyping.