June 13, 2025
Social Cognition in Psychology

Are you the sort of person who is able to instantly pick up other people’s moods? Can you spot unspoken tension between two people? Or can you tell who’s feeling out of place and might need extra support? If so, you probably have a strong sense of social cognition—an ability that helps you read social cues, interpret emotions, and predict behavior.

Social cognition, a sub-topic of social psychology, involves how we process, interpret, and respond to social signals. These processes allow people to understand social behavior and react in appropriate and beneficial ways.

People with conditions like autism or schizophrenia sometimes struggle with social cognition, but even being under too much stress can make it harder to interpret social interactions. In such situations, a social cognitive therapist can help people develop skills, understand social cues, and strengthen their emotional regulation abilities.

Keep reading to learn more about social cognition, the processes involved, and how this ability forms. We’ll also take a closer look at how a social cognitive therapist helps people improve these skills.

Definition of Social Cognition

According to the American Psychological Association, social cognition is “cognition in which people perceive, think about, interpret, categorize, and judge their own social behaviors and those of others.”

In simple terms, social cognition focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about others and social situations.

On its own, cognition involves thinking, perception, learning, and judgment; social cognition focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in our social interactions. How we think about others can greatly influence how we think, feel, and interact with the world around us.

Types of Social Cognition

Social cognition can also be further broken down into three distinct areas. Three major types of social cognition are:

  • Social perception, such as perceiving a person’s body language
  • Social understanding, which involves decoding other people’s mental states and intentions
  • Social decision-making, or making decisions based on social contexts

Social Cognition Processes

Social cognition involves many different processes. A few common factors that many experts often highlight include:

  • The processes involved in perceiving other people and how we learn about the people in the world around us.
  • The study of the mental processes involved in perceiving, remembering, thinking about, and attending to the other people in our social world.
  • The reasons we attend to certain information about the social world, how it is stored in memory, and how it is used to interact with other people.

Social schemas are another critical aspect of social cognition. Social schemas refer to our mental representations of social patterns and norms. These representations can include information about societal roles and the expectations of different individuals within a group.

For example, we possess various social schemas, including self-schemas, role schemas, person schemas, and object schemas that allow us to understand and navigate social situations.

Key Topics in Social Cognition

Social cognition goes beyond being just a topic in social psychology; it serves as a method for examining any subject through a social psychology lens. Using a social-cognitive perspective, researchers can study a wide range of topics, including:

Looking at these topics from a social-cognitive perspective allows researchers to learn more about the mental processes that play a role in social behavior. For example, a social cognitive therapy might use this approach to help people recognize and reframe the harmful thought patterns that contribute to mental health challenges like anxiety or low self-esteem.

Real-Life Examples of Social Cognition

Imagine that you are getting ready to go on a blind date. Not only do you worry about the impression and signals you are sending to the other person, but you are also concerned with interpreting the signals given by your date.

Questions you might ask include:

  • How do you form a first impression of this person?
  • What meaning do you read into the other person’s behavior?
  • How do you attribute their actions?

This is just one example of how social cognition influences a single social interaction, but you can probably think of many more examples from your daily life. Other examples include gauging a friend’s mood based on their facial expression or adjusting your own body language to help create a more relaxed, comfortable mood when greeting new people.

We spend a significant amount of each day engaging with others, which is why this field of psychology was developed—to help us understand how we feel, think, and act in social contexts.

How Social Cognition Develops

Social cognition develops in childhood and adolescence. As kids grow, they become more aware not only of their own feelings, thoughts, and motives but also of the emotions and mental states of others.

Children become more adept at understanding how others feel, learning how to respond in social situations, engaging in prosocial behaviors, and taking the perspective of others.

While many theories look at how social cognition develops, a Swiss psychologist named Jean Piaget introduced one of the most popular. According to Piaget, a child’s cognitive development goes through several stages.

  • During the earliest stages of development, children are very egocentric. They see the world from their own limited perspective and struggle to think about how other people may view the world.
  • As children grow older, they become increasingly adept at perspective-taking and have an increased ability to think about how and why people act the way they do in social situations.

More recently, research has provided evidence that children develop the ability to think about other people’s perspectives at an earlier age than Piaget originally believed. Even young preschoolers exhibit some ability to think about how other people might view a situation.

One of the most important developments in the early emergence of social cognition is the growth of a theory of mind. A theory of mind refers to a person’s ability to understand and think about the mental states of other people.

It is the emergence of a theory of mind that is critical to being able to consider the thoughts, motives, desires, needs, feelings, and experiences that other people may have. Being able to think about how these mental states can influence how people act is critical to forming social impressions and explaining how and why people do the things that they do.

Disorders That Impact Social Cognition

Certain mental health conditions are characterized by disruptions in social cognition. Examples include:

How a Social Cognitive Therapist Can Help

A social cognitive therapist can help people with conditions that affect social cognitive abilities. They do this by teaching strategies that improve a person’s ability to understand social situations and interact more effectively.

For example, they might use cognitive-behavioral strategies, role-playing, and perspective-taking activities to help people better recognize social cues. With practice, people can often interpret and respond to social situations more accurately and effectively.

Social cognitive therapists also help people restructure and reframe maladaptive thoughts that can interfere with the trust, decision-making, and empathy that play an integral part in social relationships.

Therapy enhances these skills, leading to better social functioning and less distress.

Cultural Differences in Social Cognition

Social psychologists have also found that there are often important cultural differences in social cognition. In any social situation, it’s interesting to see how two people can have completely different interpretations of what’s happening. Each person brings a unique background of experiences, knowledge, social influences, feelings, and cultural variations.

Collective cultural influences can also affect how people interpret social situations. The same social behavior in one cultural setting might have a very different meaning and interpretation if it were to occur or be observed in another culture.

As people interpret behavior, extract meaning from the interaction, and then act based on their beliefs about the situation, they are then further reinforcing and reproducing the cultural norms that influence their social cognitions.

Research and Challenges in Social Cognition

Research into social cognition is ongoing. But there are also challenges to some established theories.

Future Areas of Study

So what are some of the different questions related to social cognition that researchers are interested in understanding? Our perceptions of others play such an important role in how we forge relationships, how we interact with others, how we treat others, and how others treat us.

Some of the topics that psychologists are interested in when it comes to social cognition include:

  • How do we develop attitudes? What role do these attitudes play in our social lives?
  • How do we interpret other people’s feelings and emotions? How do we figure out what they are thinking or feeling? What cues or indicators do we use to make these assumptions?
  • How is self-concept formed and how does it influence our relationships with others?
  • What influence do our thoughts have on our feelings?
  • What mental processes influence person perception, or how we form impressions of other people?

Challenges

One criticism of some of the research on social cognition suggests that it is too focused on individual behavior. Because the topic is so social, some suggest that many information-processing models traditionally 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.

Other critics have noted that the field often focuses too heavily on the reasons for a behavior and not on the underlying causes.

Takeaways

Social cognition refers to the cognitive processes that influence social behavior. Learning more about this perspective offers insights into how others shape our behaviors and choices. It also helps us understand how our unique cognitions affect how we see and respond to others. If you’re feeling a bit challenged socially, talking with a social cognitive therapist could be a helpful way to improve your social skills through therapy.

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