1. By
Col Mukteshwar Prasad(Retd)
Social Cognition
(Social Psychology-15)

2. Social Cognition
 Definition:
 Social cognition is a sub-topic of social 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 our social interactions.
 The way we think about others plays a major role in how we think, feel, and interact
with the world around us.
 For example, imagine that you are getting ready to go for interview.
 Not only do you worry about the impression and signals that you are sending to the
other person, you are also concerned with interpreting the signals given by the
other individual.
 How do you form an impression of this person? What meaning do you read into
the other person's behavior?
 This is just one example of how social cognition influences a single social
interaction, but you can probably think of many more examples from your
daily life.
 We spend a considerable portion of every day interacting with others, which is why
an entire branch of psychology formed to help understand how we feel, think, and

3. Social Cognition
 As children grow, they become more aware not only of their own feelings, thoughts,
and motives, but also of the emotions and mental states of others.
 As this awareness increases, children become more adept at understanding how
others are feeling, knowing how to respond in social situations, engaging
in prosocial behaviors, and taking the perspective of others.

4. Questions About Social
Cognition
 How do we interpret other people's feelings and emotions?
 How do we figure out what they are thinking or feeling?
 What cues or indicators do we use to make these assumptions?
 What influence do our thoughts have on our feelings?
 How do we develop attitudes?
 What role do these attitudes play in our social lives?
 How is self-concept formed and how does it influence our relationships with
others?
 What mental processes influence person perception, or how we form
impressions of other people?

5. Defining Social Cognition
 How exactly do psychologists define social cognition? Here are just a few
explanations:
 "Thus the study of the processes involved in perceiving each other and
coming to "know what we know" about the people in our world is
essentially a question not only of what behavior we have seen, but of our
cognition as individual perceivers-our social cognition . Social cognition,
therefore, is the study of the mental processes involved in perceiving,
attending to, remembering, thinking about, and making sense of the
people in our social world."
(Gordon B. Moskowitz, Social Cognition: Understanding Self and Others)
 "Social cognition is a conceptual and empirical approach to
understanding social psychological topics by investigating the
cognitive underpinnings of whatever social phenomenon is being
studied. That is, its focus is on an analysis of how information is processed,
stored, represented in memory, and subsequently used in perceiving and
interacting with the social world.

6. Defining Social Cognition
 Social cognition is not a content area within social psychology; rather, it is an
approach to studying any topic area in social psychology. Thus, a social
cognition perspective can be adopted in studying topics as wide-ranging
as person perception, attitudes and attitude change, stereotyping and
prejudice, decision-making, the self-concept, social communication and
influence, and intergroup discrimination."
(David L. Hamilton (Ed.)., Social Cognition: Key Reading in Social
Psychology)

7. On Cultural Differences
 Social psychologists have also found that there are often important cultural
differences in social cognition.
 "One of the cornerstones of social cognition theory and research is that
different individuals may understand the same situation quite
differently, if they view it through the lenses of different knowledge
structures, goals, and feelings. Kitayama and his colleagues (1997)
reasoned that different cultures may give rise to different collective,
culturally shared ways of constructing, defining, and extracting
meaning from situations. Similar situations may therefore carry
different meaning in different cultures...As individuals follow the dictates
of their respective cultures, fulfilling the culturally dictated patterns of
thought, feeling, and behavior, they ultimately reinforce the very culture
that had given rise to these patterns in the first place. As you think and
act in accordance with your culture, you support and reproduce it."
(Ziva Kunda, Social Cognition: Making Sense of People)

8. On Possible Shortcomings
 "Currently, research and theory in social cognition are driven by an
overwhelming individualistic orientation which forgets that the contents
of cognition originate in social life, in human interaction and
communication. Unfortunately, the information processing models central to
social cognition focus on cognitive processes at the expense of
content and context. As such, societal, collective, shared, interactive,
and symbolic features of human thought, experience, and interaction
are often ignored and forgotten."
(Augoustinos, Walker, & Donaghue, Social Cognition: An Integrated
Introduction)