Social Cognition: Social cognition concerns our understanding of social situations.  How do we think about other people and how do we make sense of social situations.

Impression Formation: Impression formation concerns the evaluative judgments we make of other people.  These judgments are effected by...

Mere Exposure Effect: Mere familiarity with someone makes you like them more.  We like people we spend a lot of time with partly just because we spend a lot of time with them.

Primacy Effect: The intial judgment we make of someone powerfully influences all other judgments we make of that person.

Confirmation Bias: We tend to seek evidence that confirms our intitial impressions of people and to discount evidence that disconfirms our initial impression of people.

Self-fulfilling Prophecies: Sometimes our opinions of other people causes them to behave in ways that confirms those intial impressions.

Attribution Theory: Attribution theory concerns how people explain the causes of other people's behaviors.  One broad way of thinking about other people's behaviors is that they can be caused by characteristics of the personality or by characteristics of the situation.

Internal attribution: An internal attribution means that you've concluded that the person's behavior reflects their personality

External attribution: An external attribution means that you've concluded that the person's behavior reflects the situation.

How do people make these decisions?  One theory says that people are fairly rational in making these decisions.  For instance according to Kelly's (1973) theory people make use of information about consistency, distinctiveness and consensus information.

Consistency: Does this person always behave this way in this situation?
Disinctiveness: Does this person act this way in other situations as well?
Consensus: Do other people act this way as well?

While people do rely on this sort of information they also tend to fall prey to certain biases in attribution reasoning.

Fundamental Attribution Error: Tendency to over-emphasize internal causes for other people's behavior.

Self-Serving Bias: Tendency to emphasize internal explanations for our good behavior and external explanations for our bad behavior.
 

Attitudes include

• Cognitive component
• Affective component
• Behavioral component

Central Cues: Direct cues include the logic of the argument, the persuasiveness of the evidence, etc.

Peripheral Cues: Peripheral cues are cues related to how likely the argument is to be correct but not directly.  Length of the argument, how much you like, respect, trust the person making the argument, etc.

Cogntive dissonance is one approach that can at times be used to influence other people. The idea is that when people's behaviors and and beliefs do not coincide it makes them feel uncomfortable, a feeling called cognitive dissonance.  When that happens people will be motivated to change either their behavior or their beliefs.