Social cognition

Social cognition deals with the manner in which we construe the thoughts and actions of other people against the backdrop of our own plans and goals. We have already considered the analogue case with fictional characters and we can expect the same basic processes that were involved there to be equally central in social cognition. However, they are labelled differently. Categorisation comes under the heading of social stereotyping; reasoning comes in the form of social attribution; and knowledge updating appears in various guises including impression formation, attitude change, and persuasion. The research parallels are real and substantial and they reflect large-scale borrowings by social psychologists from methods and explanations that were first developed in the cognitive laboratory.