Social Cognition is essentially thinking about people. That is, cognition about social activities and the people therein. The techniques used in social cognition have often been borrowed from cognitive psychology, so, in a sense, social cognition is cognitive psychology applied to social events and people. .
Studying social events and people is different from other less contextualized information. For example, give one group of people a list of trait words (e.g., intelligent, ugly, kind, picky, etc.), and ask them to recall the words later, and a second group of people the same list but in this case tell them that the words all refer to a particular person, and you'll find that the people in the latter group will recall the words much better than those in the former group. .
I am familiar with social cognition through my work on mood and judgment, as well as work with Mark Baldwin on relational schemas. More recently, I have done studies on responsibility (with Michael Wohl and Barry Kelly), blame, and forgiveness (with Marian Morry). .
Susan Fiske and Shelly Taylor have written a text on this topic, which is appropriately titled Social Cognition. Also, Robert Wyer and Thom Srull have written several articles on social cognition, as well as editing a series of books on aspects of social cognition; the series is entitled Advances in Social Cognition, and there have been at least a half dozen volumes published. .
Yet there is no alternative but to affirm that to perceive the universe we must construct it in thought, and that our knowledge of the universe is but the unfolding of the mind's inner nature" .
--Bowne, 1882 in James, 1890.
Humankind's attitude towards cognition has a long and colorful history from Greek philosophical musings, down through the Baroque, Renaissance and Romanticism periods to our present century. .
The associationist and constructivist roots of cognitive studies set out to describe how elements of the social world get combined by the perceiver and how the perceiver constructs the social world, respectively.
