Social Encoding

Social encoding is the process of seeking information from an external social environment and is extremely subjective revolving around the stimulus which captures an individuals attention

There are four stages to social encoding:

1. Pre-attentive analysis (a general scan of an individuals environment)
2. Focal attention (stimuli is consciously noticed, identified and categorised)
3. Comprehension (stimuli is given semantic meaning)
4. Elaborative reasoning (that stimuli is then linked to other knowledge in order for complex inferences to be made)

Key terms related to social encoding include:

• Salient stimuli: a property of a stimulus which captures attention from other stimulus in a particular context
• Vivid stimuli: an intrinsic property of a stimulus itself (e.g. violent crime)
• Priming: the influence of accessible categories or schemas on the way information is processed