1. Introduction
Social cognition is the study of how people make sense of other people and themselves. It focuses on
how ordinary people think and feel about people – including themselves. Phenomenology means
describing systematically how ordinary people say they experience their world. Naïve psychology is
people’s everyday theories about each other.
Approaches to studying the social thinker
Asch’s competing models
Asch theorised that we experience another person as a psychological unit, that we fit the person’s
various qualities (traits) into a single unifying theme (impression). He argued that switching the traits
warm and cold created completely different descriptions of the target person. Asch proposed two
models to account for these results: the configural and the algebraic model. The configural model
hypothesises that people form a unified overall impression of other people; the unifying forces shape
individual elements to bring them in line with the overall impression. The pressure toward unity
changes the meaning of the individual elements to fit better in context. In addition to meaning change,
people use a variety of strategies to organise and unify the components of an impression; they not
only change the meaning of ambiguous terms, but they also resolve apparently discrepant terms with
considerable ingenuity. Perceivers’ mental activity results, according to the model, in an impression
made up of traits and their relationships, just as a schema later will comprise attributes and their
relationships.
The algebraic model directly contrasts with the previous model and, by extension, with the subsequent
schema models. The model takes each individual trait, evaluates it in isolation, and combines the
evaluations into a summary evaluation. It is as if, upon meeting someone new, you were simply to
combine together all the person’s pros and cons to form your impression.
Both models are right, but people follow each process under different informational and motivational
circumstances that mimic the respective research paradigms of the two approaches. The two broad
intellectual approaches to the study of social cognition are the elemental and holistic approach. The
elemental approach breaks scientific problems down into pieces and analyses the pieces in separate
detail before combining them. The holistic approach analyses the pieces in the context of other pieces
and focuses on the entire configuration of relationships among them.
Elemental origins of social cognition research
Any concept, whether concrete or abstract, is a basic element, and any element can be associated with
any other element. The bonds between concepts create mental chemistry. In the elemental view, ideas
first come from our sensations and perceptions. Then they become associated by contiguity in space
and time. Repetition is the key to moving from simple contiguity to a mental compound. If sneezes and
tissues go together throughout your life, when you think of sneezes you will automatically think of
tissues. Sneeze-and-tissue becomes a mental compound. Frequency of repetition is a major factor that
determines the strength of an association. One elemental model is Asch’s algebraic model.
Holistic origins of social cognition research
Kant argued for tackling the whole mind at once. He thought that mental phenomena are inherently
subjective. That is, the mind actively constructs a reality that goes beyond the original thing in and of
itself. Gestalt psychologists drew on these initial holistic insights. In contrast to analysis in elements,
those who use Gestalt methods first describe the phenomenon of interest, the immediate experience
,of perception, without analysis. This method, introduced as phenomenology, focuses on systematically
describing people’s experience of perceiving and thinking.
Gestalt psychologists focused on people’s experience of dynamic wholes, and elementalists focused
on the expert’s ability to break the whole into pieces. Gestalt psychologists saw the mental chemistry
metaphor of the elementalists as misguided because a chemical compound has properties not
predictable from its isolated elements. Similarly, the perceptual whole has properties not discernible
from the isolated parts. For example, the note middle C can seem high in the context of many lower
notes or low in the context of many higher notes, but it would not stand out at all in the context of
other notes close to it.
Lewin’s person-situation field theory
Lewin imported Gestalt ideas to social psychology and ultimately to social cognition research. Lewin
focused on the person’s subjective perception, not on “objective” analysis. He stressed the influence
of the social environment, as perceived by the individual, which he called the psychological field. A full
understanding of a person’s psychological field cannot result from an “objective” description by others
of what surrounds the person because what matters is the person’s own interpretation. Just as in
Gestalt psychology, he stressed the individual’s phenomenology, the individual’s construction of the
situation.
Lewin also insisted on describing the total situation, not its isolated elements. One must understand
all the psychological forces operating on the person in any given situation in order to predict anything.
No one force predicts action, but the dynamic equilibrium among them, the ever-changing balance of
forces, does predict action.
The total psychological field (and hence behaviour) is determined by two pairs of factors. The first pair
consists of the person in the situation. The study of social cognition focuses on perceiving, thinking,
and remembering as a function of who and where a person is. The second pair is cognition and
motivation. Jointly they predict behaviour. Cognition provides the perceiver’s interpretation of the
world; without clear cognitions, behaviour is not predictable. If a person has incomplete or confused
cognitions about a new setting, behaviour will be unstable. Cognitions help determine what a person
will do, which direction behaviour will take. Motivation’s strength predicts whether the behaviour will
occur at all and, if it does, how much of it will occur. Knowing what to do does not mean doing it;
cognition alone is not enough. Motivation provides the motor of behaviour.
The ebb and flow of cognition in psychology
Cognition in experimental psychology
Wundt’s work relied heavily on trained introspection. However, experimental psychology ultimately
abandoned introspection as a method because it did not conform to scientific standards, namely: one’s
data should be publicly reproducible. Psychologists shifted away from studying internal (cognitive)
processes and toward external, publicly observable events. The ultimate development of this approach
was American behaviourist psychology. Thorndike’s theory of instrumental learning held no place for
cognition. Accordingly, behaviour has certain rewarding and punishing effects, which cause organisms
to repeat or avoid the behaviour later.
Several events caused experimental psychologists to take a fresh interest in cognition. First, linguists
criticised the failure of the stimulus-response framework’s attempts to account for language. Second,
a new approach called information processing arose out of work on how people acquire knowledge
and skills. Information processing refers to the idea that mental operations can be broken down into
sequential stages. Such theories specify the steps intervening between stimulus and response. The
, main feature is sequential processing of information. Unlike behaviourists, information-processing
approaches aim to specify cognitive mechanisms.
Cognition in social psychology
Social psychology has always been cognitive in three ways. First, since Lewin, social psychologists have
decided that social behaviour is more usefully understood as a function of people’s perceptions of their
world rather than as a function of objective descriptions of their stimulus environment. Other people
can influence a person’s actions without even being present, which is the ultimate reliance on
perceptions to the exclusion of objective stimuli. Second, social psychologists view not only causes but
also the end result of social perception and interaction in heavily cognitive terms. Third, the person in
between the presumed cause and the result is viewed as a thinking organism; this view contrasts with
regarding the person as an emotional organism or a mindless automaton. A strict stimulus-response
theory does not include the thinking organism that seems essential to account for such problems.
Keeping in mind cognition and motivation, five general views of the thinker emerge in social
psychology: consistency seeker, naïve scientist, cognitive miser, motivated tactician, and activated
actor.
The first view emerged from the massive quantities of work on attitude change after WWII. The
consistency theories viewed people as consistency seekers motivated by perceived discrepancies
among their cognitions. Dissonance theory is the best-know example. Two points are crucial. First,
these theories rely on perceived inconsistency, which places cognitive activity in a central role. Actual
consistency that is not perceived as such does not yield psychological inconsistency. Second, upon
perceiving inconsistency, the person is presumed to feel uncomfortable (a negative drive state) and
motivated to reduce the inconsistency. Reducing the aversive drive state is a pleasant relief, rewarding
in itself. This sort of motivational model is called a drive reduction model.
The first view within the social cognition framework is the naïve scientist, a model of how people
uncover the causes of behaviour. Attribution theories concern how people explain their own and other
people’s behaviour. Attribution theorists initially assumed that people are fairly rational distinguishing
among various potential causes. These theories started with the working hypothesis that, given
enough time, people will gather all the relevant data and arrive at the most logical conclusion. Thus,
the role of cognition in the naïve scientist model is as an outcome of fairly rational analysis. Attribution
theorists traditionally did not view unresolved attributions as causing an aversive drive state.
Motivations for predicting and controlling one’s social world presumably set attributions in motion:
hence, motivation does help to catalyse the attribution process, just as it catalyses the entire
consistency-seeking process. Nevertheless, motivation is far more explicit in consistency theories than
in attribution theories.
Unfortunately, people are not always careful naïve scientists. The cognitive system’s capacity is limited,
so people take shortcuts. People are often simply not very thorough. Hence, the third general view is
the cognitive miser model which states that people are limited in their capacity to process information,
so they take shortcuts whenever they can. Consequently, in this view, errors and biases stem from
inherent features of the cognitive system, not necessarily from motivations.
As the cognitive miser viewpoint matured, the importance of motivations and emotions again became
evident. There was a growing emphasis on motivated social cognition. The view of the social perceiver
might be best termed the motivated tactician, a fully engaged thinker with multiple cognitive
strategies available, who (consciously or unconsciously) chooses among them based on goals, motives,
and needs. Sometimes the motivated tactician chooses wisely, in the interests of adaptability and
accuracy, and sometimes he chooses defensively, in the interests of speed of self-esteem.
