Fortunately, we form impressions of people quickly and effortlessly, without much conscious analysis of what we are doing. We do these things by engaging in an automatic analysis of our environments, based on our past experiences and knowledge of the world. Automatic thinking is thought that is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless. Although different kinds of automatic thinking meet these criteria to varying degrees (Bargh et al., 2012; Hassin, 2013; Hicks & McNulty, 2019; Payne & Gawronski, 2010), for our purposes we can define automaticity as thinking that satisfies all or most of them.

People with this disorder lose the ability to form new memories and must approach every situation as if they were encountering it for the first time, even if they have actually experienced it many times before.

Schemas are useful for helping us organize and make sense of the world and to fill in the gaps of our knowledge. Think for a moment what it would be like to have no schemas at all.

Rodin’s famous sculpture, The Thinker, mimics controlled thinking, where people sit down and consider something slowly and deliberately. Even when we do not know it, however, we are engaging in automatic thinking, which is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless.

Rodin’s famous sculpture, The Thinker, mimics controlled thinking, where people sit down and consider something slowly and deliberately. Even when we do not know it, however, we are engaging in automatic thinking, which is nonconscious, unintentional, involuntary, and effortless.

People are good at sizing up a new situation quickly and accurately. They figure out who is there, what is happening, and what might happen next. When you attended your first college class, for example, you probably made quick assumptions about who people were (the person standing at the lectern was the professor) and how to behave.

More generally, people are extremely good at social cognition, which, as we saw in Chapter 1, refers to the ways in which people think about themselves and the social world, including how they select, interpret, remember, and use social information.

They are increasingly being used by doctors to diagnose diseases and by companies to choose job applicants

it just a matter of time before computers take over the world? It’s not hard to envision a dystopian future where robots roam the earth and outsmart human beings (think of movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Matrix, or The Terminator series). Indeed, the physicist Stephen Hawking warned that, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race”