Understanding Social Cognition

You’re at a social gathering and you have to interact with someone you’ve only heard of before. You’re worried about the impression you’re giving them of yourself, but you are also concerned with interpreting their subtle signals and mannerisms. How do you initiate an interaction and form an impression of this person?

This is an example of how social cognition influences a social interaction.

Social cognition is an ongoing study of how individuals process, store and apply information in social contexts to predict their own behavior or that of others.

Social cognition is a branch of social psychology. It focuses on cognitive processes and their influence on our social interactions. The way we choose to think about those around us plays an important role in how we interact with or think about the environments we find ourselves in.

As of now, there is no universal definition of social cognition. However, many psychologists have identified the following key components:

• Processes involved in perceiving other individuals and how we learn of other people around us.
• Study of the mental processes involved in perceiving, storing memory, thinking about, and attending to other people in our social world.
• The reasons we attend to certain information about the social world, how this information is stored in our memory, and how it is applied to make judgements and decisions for other social interactions.

Furthermore, there are 2 types of social cognition: automatic thinking and controlled thinking.

In automatic thinking, our thoughts are quick, involuntary and effortless. This is when a judgement is made without conscious deliberation, perception or assumptions. As human beings, our brain needs to make sense of things around us; therefore we go into automatic thinking to draw a framework of ideas to make sense of what we find ourselves in.

In controlled thinking, our thoughts are deliberate and require effort. We think about ourselves and our environment to carefully decide on the correct course of action or judgement. In this type of social cognition, we consider the impact our actions and personal perception can have on a situation.

Moreover, it is known that social cognition develops in childhood and adolescence. As children grow, they become aware of how to respond in social interactions, understanding different perspectives and other peoples feelings.

One of the most popular social cognition theory in children is that of Jean Piaget’s. According to Piaget, a child’s cognitive development goes through stages. In early stages, a child sees the world through their own perspective and are not able to fathom that other people have different perspectives. In later stages, children become more aware of the perspectives & feelings of others around them which equips them to handle social interactions.

Recently, research has shown that children develop the ability to think about the perspectives of other people at an earlier age than Piaget proved.

While social cognition remains a bit of a gray area psychologically, it is the key to understanding how our perceptions are formed which effect the behavior we put out. Understanding the fundamentals of social cognition can help individuals understand where they learnt certain patterns of feelings and behavior; which can potentially bring them a step closer to the clarity that psychology provides on the human mind.