Social cognition is a sub-topic of social psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about others and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in our social interactions. How we think about others plays a major role in how we think, feel, and interact with the world around us.

Social cognition refers to the different psychological processes that influence how people process, interpret, and respond to social signals. These processes allow people to understand social behavior and respond in ways that are appropriate and beneficial.

This article explores the processes involved in social cognition and how this ability forms. It also explores how psychologists study the processes involved in social cognition.

What Is Social Cognition?

Social cognition encompasses a range of processes. Some common factors that many experts have identified as being important include:

  • The processes involved in perceiving other people and how we learn about the people in the world around us.The study of the mental processes involved in perceiving, remembering, thinking about, and attending to the other people in our social world.The reasons we attend to certain information about the social world, how it is stored in memory, and how it is used to interact with other people.

Another important topic in social cognition is the concept of social schemas. Social schemas refer to people’s mental representations of social patterns and norms. These representations can include information about societal roles and the expectations of different individuals within a group.

Social cognition is not simply a topic within social psychology—it is an approach to studying any subject with social psychology. Using a social-cognitive perspective, researchers can study a wide range of topics, including:

  • Attitudes
  • Person perception
  • Prejudice
  • Stereotypes
  • Self-concept
  • Discrimination
  • Persuasion
  • Decision-making

Examples of Social Cognition

Imagine that you are getting ready to go on a blind date. Not only do you worry about the impression and signals that you are sending to the other person, but you are also concerned with interpreting the signals given by your date.

Questions you might ask include:

  • How do you form an impression of this person? What meaning do you read into the other person’s behavior?How do you attribute their actions?

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 this branch of psychology formed to help understand how we feel, think, and behave in social situations.

Development of Social Cognition

Social cognition develops in childhood and adolescence. 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.

While many different theories look at how social cognition develops, one of the most popular focuses on the work of the psychologist Jean Piaget. According to Piaget, a child’s cognitive development goes through several stages.

Children become more adept at understanding how others feel, learning how to respond in social situations, engaging in prosocial behaviors, and taking the perspective of others.

  • During the earliest stages of development, children are very egocentric. They see the world from their own perspective and struggle to think about how other people may view the world.
  • As children grow older, children become increasingly adept at perspective-taking and have an increased ability to think about how and why people act the way they do in social situations.

More recently, research has provided evidence that children develop the ability to think about other people’s perspectives at an earlier age than Piaget believed. Even young preschoolers exhibit some ability to think about how other people might view a situation.

It is the emergence of a theory of mind that is critical to being able to consider the thoughts, motives, desires, needs, feelings, and experiences that other people may have. Being able to think about how these mental states can influence how people act is critical to forming social impressions and explaining how and why people do the things that they do.

One of the most important developments in the early emergence of social cognition is the growth of a theory of mind. A theory of mind refers to a person’s ability to understand and think about the mental states of other people.

Disorders That Impact Social Cognition

Certain mental health conditions are characterized by disruptions in social cognition. Examples include:

  • Autism
  • Bipolar disorder
  • Borderline personality disorder (BPD)
  • Dementia
  • Depression
  • Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
  • Schizophrenia
  • Traumatic brain injury
  • Williams syndrome

Cultural Differences in Social Cognition

Social psychologists have also found that there are often important cultural differences in social cognition. When looking at a social situation, any two people may have wildly different interpretations. Each person brings a unique background of experiences, knowledge, social influences, feelings, and cultural variations.

As people interpret behavior, extract meaning from the interaction, and then act based upon their beliefs about the situation, they are then further reinforcing and reproducing the cultural norms that influence their social cognitions.

Collective cultural influences can also affect how people interpret social situations. The same social behavior in one cultural setting might have a very different meaning and interpretation if it were to occur or be observed in another culture.

Research and Challenges

Research into social cognition is ongoing. But there are also challenges to some established theories.

Future Areas of Study

So what are some of the different questions related to social cognition that researchers are interested in understanding? Our perceptions of others play such an important role in how we forge relationships, how we interact with others, how we treat others, and how others treat us.

Some of the topics that psychologists are interested in when it comes to social cognition include:

  • How do we develop attitudes? What role do these attitudes play in our social lives?
  • 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?
  • How is self-concept formed and how does it influence our relationships with others?
  • What influence do our thoughts have on our feelings?
  • What mental processes influence person perception, or how we form impressions of other people?

Challenges

One criticism of some of the research on social cognition suggests that it is too focused on individual behavior. Because the topic is so social, some suggest that many information-processing models traditionally used to understand the cognitive processes behind social cognition are too limited.

Other critics have noted that the field often focuses too heavily on the reasons for a behavior and not on the underlying causes.

Focusing on the collective and interactive aspects of human thought may provide a better understanding of how people think about and understand social behavior.

A Word From Verywell

Social cognition is the cognitive processes that influence social behavior. Learning more about this perspective offers insights into how other people shape our behaviors and choices. It also plays a role in understanding how individual cognitions affect how we perceive and respond to others.