... the building blocks of cognition. Our understanding of the social world is influenced by our concepts, beliefs, implicit theories, goals, and our memories and attention. Our basic cognitive processes such as attention and memory are affected by social factors such as our stereotypes, our expectancies, what others tell us especially when we try to make sense of our social world such as when evaluating other people and self. Certain pivotal roles that concepts perform in our everyday life are as follows: • Classification: We recognize certain exemplars of a social category as members of a certain concept - an offer to carry an old person's grocery can be recognized as help • Inferring additional attributes: Once we have classified an instance as belonging to a concept, we can use this concept to go beyond the information given about that particular instance on that particular occasion - a person classified as clinically depressed can also be thought ...

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