Global Voices and Social Vision
GSV1000, TTH 8:00AM-9:30AM
▪ Social cognition is a perspective in psychology that focuses on how people's
observations of others influence their own choices regarding behavior.
▪ The social cognitive perspective of personality theorizes that human personality is
an ever-changing amalgamation of the choices we make based on how we think
about and judge the actions of others. An accurate answer to the question "what is
social cognition?" should also mention that an individual's own behaviors and
environmental factors also play a role in determining their personality. However,
thinking about the behaviors of others when making choices for oneself is the
essence of a social cognitive perspective definition.
▪ There are many different schools of thought about
personality in psychology, including the psychoanalytic,
humanistic, trait, and behaviorist theories. The social
cognitive perspective definition of personality is distinct
in that it assumes that personality is a result of choice and
reaction to the environment. Although the behaviorist
perspective also purports that behavior is learned and
not innate, the social cognition perspective specifies that
behaviors are learned from watching other people. This
is different from the behaviorist perspective, which
theorizes that behavior can only be learned through
personal experience with rewards and punishments.
▪ Work on social cognition has raised important issues inherent in understanding
what it means to grow old as a social being. Our life stories, experiences, social
competence, core values, and general understanding of the social world have a
profound effect on our development at any age. To address these issues, we must
consider both basic cognitive processes and abilities in the aging adult as well as
everyday cognitive functioning in a social context. Cognitive capacity and speed of
processing do show losses in old age. Nevertheless, the vast majority of older
adults are skilled and effective in their interactions with their social environment.
The basic goal of the social cognitive approach is to understand how people make
sense of themselves, others, and events in everyday life.
▪ Social cognition refers to the awareness of one’s own and other people’s mental
states (i.e., acquiring a theory of mind), including emotions, motives, desires and
feelings. Socio-cognitive skills, such as the ability to understand, describe and
predict people’s mental states, allow children to develop a strong social cognition.
Developing social and cognitive awareness is especially important during infancy
to prepare children to interact properly with the social world prior to school entry.
For example, it is through group activities that children gradually learn the
importance of sharing. This crucial ability originates from children’s understanding
that other children may have a desire to play with the same toys.
▪ Recent evidence indicates that social cognition begins early in life, even before
language acquirement. Prior to age one, infants are able to follow the attention of
others, to participate in simple turn-taking games (e.g., pick-a-boo), and to have an
understanding of goal-directed behaviours, such as grasping or reaching for an
object. Then, around the age of two, children become increasingly aware that
others experience mental states that are different from their own. For example, they
recognize that somebody else may like something they do not like. As
preschoolers develop language abilities, they become able to understand the
perspective of others which leads to changes in social behaviour including an
increase in empathic and prosocial behaviours.
▪ As the cognitive revolution took hold throughout psychology in the middle to latter
part of the 20th century, researchers in social psychology began to import
methodologies from cognitive psychology to the study of social phenomena, giving
birth to what is now known as social cognition. However, to some degree the field
of social psychology was always centered around social cognition. Its founding
figures—Kurt Lewin (studying motivation), Leon Festinger (examining both social
comparison and cognitive dissonance), Carl Hovland (researching attitude
change), Gordon Allport (analyzing the nature of prejudice and stereotyping),
Solomon Asch (investigating both conformity and impression formation), Muzafer
Sherif (illustrating the informational value of social influence), Henri Tajfel
(developing a theory of social identity), and Fritz Heider (describing processes of
causal analysis)—all had a distinctly cognitive orientation, with the perceiver’s
construal of the social situation and thoughts about social stimuli the focal point of
their respective analyses.
▪ One criticism of some of the research on social cognition suggests that it is too
focused on individualistic behavior. Because the topic itself is so social, some
suggest that many of the information-processing models that have traditionally
been used to understand the cognitive processes behind social cognition are too
limited. Focusing on the collective and interactive aspects of human thought may
provide a better understanding of how people think about and understand social
behavior.
▪ https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199828340/obo-
9780199828340-0099.xml
▪ https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/social-cognition
▪ https://www.child-encyclopedia.com/social-cognition
▪ https://study.com/learn/lesson/social-cognition-perspective-personality-
examples.html
