Social cognition is a subtopic of social psychology which 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 an important role in the way we think, feel, and interact with the world around us. People do not approach situations as neutral observers, but rather we carry our own desires and expectations, which influence what we see and remember.
social cognition has become an approach, a way of addressing issues studied in and Social: Social relationships (aggression, altruism, cooperation), depend in part on the perception and knowledge we have, both of the other people involved, as well as the situation in which the relationships take place.
In the study of the issues classic and social (attitudes, stereotypes, prejudices), the cognitive approach occupies a prominent place. Psychology studies cognition in general, and Social Psychology focuses on the cognition of social phenomena (group members, other people, the Self). Moscovici: “What differentiates the social from the non-social is not the nature of the object, but the relationship established with such object”
It would be more appropriate to talk about “social information processing” than to talk about “social information processing.”
Leyens and Dardenne. Social cognition is social:
- Because of the contents you study.
- Because it has a social origin.
- Because social knowledge is shared.
Two different perspectives within social cognition: The European: Emphasizes the social dimension of knowledge. Knowledge has a sociocultural origin since it is something shared by social groups. “Social representations” (Moscovici): ideas, thoughts, images and knowledge that the members of a community share. Dual function:
- Know the reality to plan action.
- Facilitate communication.
The American: Emphasizes the individual and their psychological processes. The individual builds his own cognitive structures from interactions with his physical and social environment. They are therefore idiosyncratic. The main function of social knowledge is to manage the enormous amount of information that is available to us. Two key elements intervene in social knowledge:
- Reality: stimuli, data.
- Mental representations: the prior knowledge that the perceiver already has when he detects a stimulus (structural or static dimension of social knowledge).
- The act of perceiving or knowing involves relating external stimuli with prior knowledge, using procedures and rules.
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