Concept
Social cognition
Overview
Social cognition is a topic within psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions.
More technically, social cognition refers to how people deal with information about conspecifics (members of the same species) or even across species (such as pets), and includes four stages: encoding, storage, retrieval, and processing. In the area of social psychology, social cognition refers to a specific approach in which these processes are studied according to the methods of cognitive psychology and information processing theory. According to this view, social cognition is a level of analysis that aims to understand social psychological phenomena by investigating the cognitive processes that underlie them. The major concerns of the approach are the processes involved in the perception, judgment, and memory of social stimuli; the effects of social and affective factors on information processing; and the behavioral and interpersonal consequences of cognitive processes. This level of analysis may be applied to any content area within social psychology, including research on intrapersonal, interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup processes.
The term social cognition has been used in multiple areas in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, most often to refer to various social abilities disrupted in autism, schizophrenia and psychopathy. In cognitive neuroscience the biological basis of social cognition is investigated. Developmental psychologists study the development of social cognition abilities.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Then follows in the second stage of expression in speech, an analysis of that total idea into its parts, in which these parts are always put into close relations with each other. Such relations are called by grammarians subject and predicate, noun and adjective, verb and adverb, &c. The grammatical meaning of these categories shows clearly that this analysis consists of a system of primary and secondary relations…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, An Introduction to Psychology Translated from the Second German Edition
States what Social cognition is.
What are termed faculties--attention, memory, thinking, perception, even the sentiments, are arrangements, associations, and complications, formed by the interaction of these submerged presentations with one another and with new presentations. Perception, for example, is the complication of presentations which result from the rise of old presentations to greet and combine with new ones; memory is the evoking of an…
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
States what Social cognition is.
I do not myself believe that the analysis of knowledge can be effected entirely by means of purely external observation, such as behaviourists employ. I shall discuss this question in later lectures. In the present lecture I shall attempt the analysis of memory-knowledge, both as an introduction to the problem of knowledge in general, and because memory, in some form, is presupposed in almost all other knowledge…
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind
States what Social cognition is.
Philosophers who discussed Social cognition
Related ideas
- Belief
- Cognition
- Harvard University Press
- Japan
- Psychology
- Psychosis
- Social psychology
- Schizophrenia
- Memory
- Buddhism
- Sage Publishing
- Neurophysiology
- Phineas Gage
- McGraw Hill Education
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Cognitive bias
- Behavior
- Theory of mind
- Communication
- China
- Behaviorism
- Cognitive science
- Confucianism
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Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Embodied cognition.