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.(International Social Cognition Network: http://www.socialcognition.info) 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.
History Social cognition came to prominence with the rise of cognitive psychology in the late 1960s and early 1970s and is now the dominant model and approach in mainstream social psychology. Common to social cognition theories is the idea that information is represented in the brain as "cognitive elements" such as schemas, attributions, or stereotypes. A focus on how these cognitive elements are processed is often employed. Social cognition therefore applies and extends many themes, theories, and paradigms from cognitive psychology that can be identified in reasoning (representativeness heuristic, base rate fallacy and confirmation bias), attention (automaticity and priming) and memory (schemas, primacy and recency). It is likely that social psychology has always had a more cognitive than general psychology approach, as it traditionally discussed internal mental states such as beliefs and desires when mainstream psychology was dominated by behaviorism.
It has been suggested that other disciplines in social psychology such as social identity theory and social representations may be seeking to explain largely the same phenomena as social cognition, and that these different disciplines might be merged into a "coherent integrated whole". A parallel paradigm has arisen in the study of action, termed motor cognition, which is concerned with understanding the representation of action and the associated process.
Development According to the received view in cognitive sciences, the development of the human ability to process, store, and apply information about others begins in social learning at the onset of life. Very young organisms cognize social situations in social interaction with their caregivers when knowledge is developing yet limited. The essential question in studying Social cognition is how this ability appears and what neurophysiological processes underlie it in organisms in the sensorimotor stage of development with only simple reflexes which do not maintain bilateral communication. Professor Michael Tomasello introduced the psychological construct of shared intentionality to explain cognition beginning in the earlier developmental stage through unaware collaboration in mother-child dyads.Tomasello, M. (1999). The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1999.Tomasello, M. Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press; 2019. Other researchers developed the notion, by observing this collaborative interaction from different perspectives, e.g., psychophysiology,Val Danilov I. & Mihailova S. (2023). "Empirical Evidence of Shared Intentionality: Towards Bioengineering Systems Development." OBM Neurobiology 2023; 7(2): 167; doi:10.21926/obm.neurobiol.2302167. https://www.lidsen.com/journals/neurobiology/neurobiology-07-02-167McClung, J. S., Placì, S., Bangerter, A., Clément, F., & Bshary, R. (2017). "The language of cooperation: shared intentionality drives variation in helping as a function of group membership." Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 284(1863), 20171682. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.1682.Shteynberg, G., & Galinsky, A. D. (2011). "Implicit coordination: Sharing goals with similar others intensifies goal pursuit. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(6), 1291-1294., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2011.04.012. and neurobiology.Fishburn, F. A., Murty, V. P., Hlutkowsky, C. O., MacGillivray, C. E., Bemis, L. M., Murphy, M. E., ... & Perlman, S. B. (2018). "Putting our heads together: interpersonal neural synchronization as a biological mechanism for shared intentionality." Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 13(8), 841-849.
Currently, only one hypothesis attempts to explain neurophysiological processes occurring during shared intentionality in all its integral complexity, from the level of interpersonal dynamics to interaction at the neuronal level.Val Danilov, I. (2023). "Theoretical Grounds of Shared Intentionality for Neuroscience in Developing Bioengineering Systems." OBM Neurobiology 2023; 7(1): 156; doi:10.21926/obm.neurobiol.2301156. https://www.lidsen.com/journals/neurobiology/neurobiology-07-01-156 .Val Danilov I. (2023). "Low-Frequency Oscillations for Nonlocal Neuronal Coupling in Shared Intentionality Before and After Birth: Toward the Origin of Perception." OBM Neurobiology 2023; 7(4): 192; doi:10.21926/obm.neurobiol.2304192.https://www.lidsen.com/journals/neurobiology/neurobiology-07-04-192 By establishing the neurophysiological hypothesis of shared intentionality, Latvian Prof. Igor Val Danilov expanded the use of the term shared intentionality to include consideration of the interaction between an embryo and her mother. From this perspective, abilities to process, store, and apply information about others develop from the prenatal period. This insight continues the reflections of great thinkers (e.g., Kant) and leading child development theorists (beginning from Montessori and Vygotsky) about the beginning of cognition in interactions with the environment.OECD (2007). "Understanding the Brain: The Birth of a Learning Science." OECD Publishing. p. 165. ISBN 978-92-64-02913-2.Chapter 2: The Montessori philosophy. From Lillard, P. P. Lillard (1972). Montessori: A Modern Approach. Schocken Books, New York. Based on experimental data from research on child behavior in the prenatal period,Castiello, U.; Becchio, C.; Zoia, S.; Nelini, C.; Sartori, L.; Blason, L.; D'Ottavio, G.; Bulgheroni, M.; Gallese, V. (2010). "Wired to be social: the ontogeny of human interaction." PloS one, 5(10), p.e13199.Kisilevsky, B.C. (2016). "Fetal Auditory Processing: Implications for Language Development? Fetal Development." Research on Brain and Behavior, Environmental In uences, and Emerging Technologies,: 133-152.Lee, G.Y.C.; Kisilevsky, B.S. (2014). "Fetuses respond to father's voice but prefer mother's voice after birth." Developmental Psychobiology, 56: 1-11.Hepper, P.G.; Scott, D.; Shahidullah, S. (1993). "Newborn and fetal response to maternal voice." Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology, 11: 147-153.Lecanuet, J.P.; Granier‐Deferre, C.; Jacquet, A.Y.; Capponi, I.; Ledru, L. (1993). "Prenatal discrimination of a male and a female voice uttering the same sentence." Early development and parenting, 2(4): 217-228.Hepper P. (2015). "Behavior during the prenatal period: Adaptive for development and survival." Child Development Perspectives, 9(1): 38-43. DOI: 10.1111/cdep.12104.Jardri, R.; Houfflin-Debarge, V.; Delion, P.; Pruvo, J-P.; Thomas, P.; Pins, D. (2012). "Assessing fetal response to maternal speech using a noninvasive functional brain imaging technique." International Journal of Developmental Neuroscience, 2012, 30: 159–161. doi:10.1016/j.ijdevneu.2011.11.002. and advances in inter-brain neuroscience research, this neurophysiological hypothesis introduced the notion of non-local neuronal coupling of the mother and fetus neuronal networks. The notion of non-local neuronal coupling filled a gap in knowledge – both in the Core Knowledge Theory and the group of positions in Externalism – about the beginning of cognition, the gap that the binding problem has also shown. This insight also shed light on neurophysiological processes that underlie the human ability to process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations beginning from the reflexes stage of development, when even aware goal-directed behavior is questioned. While exactly due to the ability of shared intentionality, very young babies express social behavior. This ability manifests in recognizing and selectively responding to social stimuli. From this perspective, Social cognition contributes to cognitive development of newborns and even embryos when communication is still impossible. A development of the human ability to process, store, and apply information about others begins in the prenatal period.
Social schemas One theory of social cognition is social schema theory, although it is not the basis of all social cognition studies (for example, see attribution theory). Social schema theory builds on and uses terminology from schema theory in cognitive psychology, which describes how ideas or "concepts" are represented in the mind and how they are categorized. According to this view, when we see or think of a concept a mental representation or schema is "activated" bringing to mind other information which is linked to the original concept by association. This activation often happens unconsciously. As a result of activating such schemas, judgements are formed which go beyond the information actually available, since many of the associations the schema evokes extend outside the given information. This may influence social cognition and behaviour regardless of whether these judgements are accurate or not. For example, if an individual is introduced as a teacher, then a "teacher schema" may be activated. Subsequently, we might associate this person with wisdom or authority, or past experiences of teachers that we remember and consider important.
When a schema is more accessible it can be more quickly activated and used in a particular situation. Two cognitive processes that increase accessibility of schemas are salience and priming. Salience is the degree to which a particular social object stands out relative to other social objects in a situation. The higher the salience of an object the more likely that schemas for that object will be made accessible. For example, if there is one female in a group of seven males, female gender schemas may be more accessible and influence the group's thinking and behavior toward the female group member. Priming refers to any experience immediately prior to a situation that causes a schema to be more accessible. For example, watching a scary movie late at night might increase the accessibility of frightening schemas, increasing the likelihood that a person will perceive shadows and background noises as potential threats.