Summary - IMPERATIVE CASE DOES GRAMMAR REALLY MATTER?

Contemporary models of how the mind operates and methods for testing them emerged from the cognitive revolution in the middle of the 20th century. Social psychology researchers of the 1970s and 1980s were inspired by these developments and launched the field of social cognition to understand how cognitive approaches could advance understanding of social processes. Decades later, core social psychology topics, such as impression formation, the self, attitudes, stereotyping and prejudice, and interpersonal relationships, are interpreted through the lens of cognitive psychology conceptualizations of attention, perception, categorization, memory, and reasoning. Social cognitive methods and theory have touched every area of modern social psychology. Twenty-first-century efforts are shoring up methodological practices and revisiting old theories, investigating a wider range of human experience, and tackling new avenues of social functioning. Keywords: social cognition, person perception, impression formation, social categorization, social attention, social perception, mentalizing, face processing Introduction The study of social cognition examines how individuals process and represent information about other people, themselves, and socially constructed events (Fiske & Taylor, 2013; Hamilton, 2005). Modern social cognition research has many influences, but as is evident by the equal footing given to “social” and “cognition” in the discipline’s name, the primary focus is at the intersection of social psychology and cognitive psychology. The research paradigms and theoretical models of how the mind operates are mostly derived from cognitive psychology. However, the topics of social cognition largely fall within social psychology. To appreciate how social cognition straddles its main parent disciplines, imagine that you are looking at a tree versus a person standing next to that tree. Although both instances of perception involve encoding and representing information about objects that are external to the perceiver, perceiving people involves added complexity. A tree, as is the case with most non-social objects, is largely predictable. If you can estimate wind speed and the firmness of the branches, you know how much the branches will sway. If you yell in Social Cognition Page 2 of 26 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, PSYCHOLOGY ( Press USA, 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 01 September 2020 the direction of the tree, you know with complete certainty that it will stay rooted in the ground and not attack you. People, on the other hand, are agents in their environments. As a result, they can modify their behavior to influence how you perceive them. They can perceive you back and act in ways that affect your well-being. They can form alliances, propagate beliefs and attitudes, set norms for behaving, wage war, and create institutions that codify the social order. Thus, social cognition research goes beyond standard cognitive conceptualizations because understanding people (and other animate objects) involves considerations that are less frequent (or entirely absent) when processing non-social objects (Ostrom, 1984). The field of social cognition gained traction within social psychology in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Early proponents were social psychologists who applied emerging cognitive models of information processing and mental representation to understand impression formation, causal attribution, and stereotyping (Fiske & Taylor, 1984; Hastie et al., 1980). The value of the cognitive approach to understand social phenomena was quickly recognized by other social psychologists and ideas spread to additional topic areas, such as attitudes, personality, the self, and close relationships. Over the years, social cognitive concepts, and relatedly the ontological commitments of social cognitive research, have been transformed by considerations of constructivism (Balcetis & Dunning, 2006; Bruner, 1957), functionalism (Cosmides, 1989), heuristics (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), automaticity (Bargh, 1994), and the interplay of affect, cognition, and motivation (Gollwitzer & Moskowitz, 1996; Isen, Daubman, & Nowicki, 1987; Zajonc, 1980). Most contemporary research in social psychology, even if not overtly focused on understanding information processing and mental representation, uses paradigms and theories that emerged from the social cognition tradition. The social cognition literature is now voluminous. It not only spans social and cognitive psychology, but also includes developmental, clinical, health, evolutionary, and neuroscience perspectives. This overview focuses on a subset of major findings and perspectives, mostly social psychological contributions and their cognitive psychology influences. For additional coverage and viewpoints, interested readers should consult the various social cognition handbooks (Banaji & Gelman, 2013; Carlston, 2013; Fiske & Macrae, 2012; Wyer & Srull, 1984, 1994), readers (Hamilton, 2005), and textbooks (Augoustinos, Walker, & Donaghue, 2014; Fiske & Taylor, 2013; Kunda, 1999; Moskowitz, 2005). Attending to the Social World A core tenet of social cognition is