Social Cognition

Social cognition refers to how people think about others and themselves in the social world. The term emerged in the 1960s during what has been called the cognitive revolution, when research psychologists began focusing on the mechanisms underlying the perception, encoding, interpretation, and production of social behavior. Social cognition researchers attempt to understand cognitive processes such as how people read emotion in others’ facial expressions (known as emotion perception), how people infer what others are thinking or intending (known as mentalizing, perspective taking, or theory of mind), and how people store social information in their brains (e.g., in the form of social schemas). Since the early 2000s, the field of social cognitive neuroscience has sought to elucidate the brain circuitry that underlies these social information ...