An Introduction to Social Cognition

John F. Kihlstrom
University of California, Berkeley
Note: This paper is based on a presentation originally given to the
Berkeley Social Ontology Group, Fall 2010. I thank Jennifer Hudin for
the invitation, and John Searle and other members of the group for
their comments. For more thorough treatment of this subject, see the
Lecture Supplements prepared for Psychology 164, "Social Cognition"
(write jfkihlstrom@berkeley.edu for access).
And no, it's not by Renoir -- though that's a good guess. It's In the Orchard (1891) by
Edward Tarbell, an American impressionist painter, now in the Terra Museum of
American Art.

The cognitive point of view in social psychology is simply this: the individual's social behavior is not
determined by the situation he or she is in; rather, it is determined by the person's perception of that
situation, broadly construed to include relevant knowledge and memory, reasoning, judgment,
problem-solving, and decision-making.
While the point may seem obvious, it has not always been obvious to everyone in the field. The
cognitive point of view has its origins in the "Thomas Theorem" that ""If men define situations as
real, they are real in their consequences" (Thomas & Thomas, 1928, p. 529); Bartlett's (Bartlett,
1932,p. 3)) dictum that "The psychologist, of all people, must not stand in awe of the stimulus"; and
the fundamental proposition of symbolic interactionism, that "Human beings act toward things on
the basis of the meaning that the things have for them" (Blumer, 1969). However, these points were
neglected during the heyday of behaviorism in psychology in general, when social psychology
embraced Allport's (Allport, 1954) definition of the field as the study of social influence and a
Doctrine of Situationism that was allied with the behavioristic denial of the importance of internal,
mental processes (Zimbardo, 1999). The cognitive revolution of the 1960s, which began in the

hands of psychologists interested in attention, learning, memory, and language (Baars, 1986; Hirst
& Miller, 1988), restored the cognitive point of view to social psychology as well (E.E. Jones, 1985;
Zajonc, 1980).
With all due respect to Allport, social psychology is no more the study of social influence than
perception is the study of stimulus influence. Perception is the study of how people form internal,
mental representations of the external world, and how they use these representations to guide their
behavior. While most of psychology is concerned with the nature of mental life, and the role that
mind plays in the behavior of the individual, social psychology studies the relation between mental
structures and processes that reside in the mind of the individual to social structures and processes
that reside in the world outside the individual. The influence is a two-way street the social
environment surely shapes the individual's mind and behavior; but individuals also shape their
social environment through processes of cognitive construction (Kihlstrom, 2010a).
Psychology, including social psychology, embraces the Doctrine of Mentalism -- that mental states
stand in relation to action as cause to effect. As a behavioral science, psychology explains behavior
in terms of the individual's mental states. But psychology is uniquely positioned as both a biological
science, with an interest in uncovering the observer-independent principles that underlie mental life,
and as a social scientist, concerned with the observer-dependent meanings that the individual
ascribes to objects and events.

Cognition in the General Social Interaction Cycle

The role of cognition in mediating the person-situation interaction is illustrated by
the general social interaction cycle (Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1987; Kihlstrom, 2010) -- a
conceptual framework for analyzing any dyadic social interaction (Figure 4). Within
this framework, the two participants are assigned the role of Actor and Target,
respectively. This assignment is of course somewhat arbitrary, because each
individual is both an actor and the target of the other's actions. For convenience, the Actor role is
assigned to the individual who initiates the social interaction.
The general social interaction cycle is a variant on the general social interaction
sequence initially described by Darley and Fazio (1980) and Jones (1986). The
description of social interaction as a cycle rather than as a sequence is intended to
capture the bidirectional causality of reciprocal determinism, and to make clear that
social exchange continues until one or the other participant terminates the interaction by
leaving the situation. An alternative depiction is in terms of a connectionist network
representing the interaction of two cognitive-affective processing systems, representing
the two individuals that constitute the dyad (Shoda et al., 2002; Zayas, Shoda, & Ayduk,
2002).
First, the Actor enters the situation -- the immediate context in which he or she physically
encounters the Target (from this point on, for simplicity in exposition, we'll call the Actor "she" and
the Target "he". The Actor enters the situation with some goal in mind, something that she wants to
accomplish, like asking the Target for a date for Friday night. The Actor also carries into the
situation a fund of social knowledge concerning herself and the target. How badly does she want a
date? Does she know whether he is currently seeing someone else? Does she have any reason
to think he might be interested in her? The Actor also carries a fund of more generic social
knowledge relevant to her current goals: What movies are in town? Are there any parties? And

finally, the Actor carries a repertoire of skills to be used in the course of the interaction, such as
how to start a conversation, and how to bring it around to the subject of Friday night. Some of
these skills are cognitive in nature, such as her ability to "read people"; others are motoric, such as
a particular way of walking, or using her hands. This sort of social knowledge is constitutes the
individual's fund of social intelligence.
As she begins the interaction, the Actor forms an impression of the situation -- of the target,
and of the immediate environmental context: Does he still seem interested? Is this a good time to
ask? This impression combines knowledge derived from two general sources: information about
the current stimulus situation, extracted through the mechanisms of social perception; and preexisting knowledge about herself and the target, retrieved from social memory.
Finally, the Actor acts on the basis of her impression. She may approach the target or shy away,
she may pop the question or not. If she does not ask the Target for a date, the interaction will end
shortly. If she does, the interaction will continue. Assuming that the Actor has asked him for a
date, attention now shifts to the Target, who now has to do something in response to the Actor's
initial salvo.
The Target enters the situation -- either actively, by approaching and greeting the Actor when he
sees her, or passively, by being approached and greeted by her. He too brings his social
intelligence into the situation.
The Target forms an impression of the situation in which he now finds himself -- a situation that is
immediately clarified when the Actor asks him for a date. The Target knows he's free Friday night,
because the woman he's been dating is out of town, but that's not decisive. Should he play hard to
get? Should he wait to see if he gets a better offer from someone else? What if his current
girlfriend finds out?
On the basis of the impression he's formed, the Target responds. He decides to keep his options
open for Friday night, but doesn't want to spurn the Actor entirely, so he says he can't see her
Friday, but proposes that they go out on Saturday instead.
Now attention shifts back to the Actor.
The Actor must interpret the Target's response, and revise her impression of the situation
accordingly. Perhaps he's Jewish, or Muslim, and devout, and doesn't go out on Friday nights.
Perhaps he's seeing someone else. Obviously he's got something he'd rather do on Friday, while
she does not, and she has now clearly communicated this fact to him. As it happens, she's also
free Saturday night, but if she accepts his counteroffer she clearly communicates that she doesn't
have a date for either night. Should she let him have this information? If she says "yes", is she
becoming a pawn in whatever other relationship he may be pursuing? Or is the "Friday-night
woman" (because by now she is certain that he already has got a date for Friday night) a pawn in a
new game that he is now playing with her?
On the basis of her impression, the Actor responds to the Target: she decides to take a chance,
and accepts the date for Saturday night.
Now the ball is back in the Target's court.
The Target must interpret the Actor's response, revise his impression, and figure out what
to do next. And so it goes, with the cycle of exchanges continuing. Each participant is trying to
make sense of what the other one is doing. Each is trying to read the other's mind. And each
participant is planning and executing behavior in accordance with his or her evolving understanding
of the total situation.
In addition, the General Social Interaction Cycle also transpires at another level, within each
individual participant. According to the Doctrine of Reciprocal Determinism, behavior does not

simply affect the person toward whom it is directed; it also feeds back to affect the person who
emitted the behavior. The Actor may have wondered if she had the nerve, and the skill, to ask a
man for a date. Now she knows that she does (Bandura calls this kind of knowledge self-efficacy
expectations). Similarly, the Target may never have had to negotiate overlapping dating
relationships. Now he knows he can do this -- or else he's put himself in a situation where he has
to learn how.
In any event, each participant in this social interaction is behaving in accordance with his or her
construal of him- or herself, and of the other, and of the situation in which they meet. Each of these
construals is modified by the other's behavior, and his or her own. And it's these individual
construals, in the end, that lead the participants to behave the way they do.

The Scope of Social Cognition

Viewed broadly, "social cognition" embraces everything about the cognitive mediation of social
interaction. But viewed more narrowly, social cognition refers to cognition of social objects -- people
(including ourselves), the social situations in which we encounter them, and the interpersonal
behaviors that transpire in those situations. Paraphrasing Jerome Bruner and Renato Tagiuri (J.
Bruner & Tagiuri, 1954) (see also Tagiuri & Petrullo, 1958), social cognition places the "'knowing of
people' in the wider theoretical context of how we know the environment generally". As such, the
notional syllabus for a course in social cognition would look very much like that of a course in
cognitive psychology, including perception, memory, categorization, judgment, language, learning,
intelligence, development, and neuroscience (Kihlstrom & Park, 2002) -- except that the focus
would be on people and what they do.
A typical experiment on perception might ask subjects to identify an object briefly
presented on a computer screen. An experiment on social perception would ask
subjects to recognize a facial expression of emotion.
An experiment on memory might ask subjects to study a list of unrelated words;
in a study of social memory, those words might be the names of personality
traits, or sentences describing social behaviors.
You get the idea. In what follows, I will attempt to give an overview of each of these
areas, highlighting what I consider the salient issues in each.

Social Perception
Scientific psychology began under the influence of British empiricism, and the idea
that all knowledge comes to us through sensory experience. Not unreasonably, then,
the first scientific psychologists --psychophysicists like Ernst Weber and Gustav
Fechner, and physiological psychologists like Hermann von Helmholtz and Ewald Hering
-- focused their work on problems of sensation and perception. Not to put too fine a
point on it, sensation has to do with the detection of distal stimuli in the environment,
and the transduction of proximal stimulus energies into neural impulses that are
transmitted to the brain; perception is the process by which the perceiver forms an

internal, mental representation of the distal stimulus.

In the nonsocial domain, we perceive objects and their physical states: their
form, their location, their motion, and what Gibson called their affordances -- that
is, what the perceiver can do with the object.
Social perception has been studied mostly in the form of person perception,
meaning persons and their psychological states -- their personality
characteristics, beliefs, emotions, and motives. And, in a sense, we perceive their
affordances, too -- what can I do with this person?
Bruner and Tagiuri, in an early analysis of person perception, listed a number of
factors that influence perceptual organization, including the stimulus array itself,
selective attention, linguistic categories, and especially the internal state of the
perceiver -- his mental set, or expectations, and his own emotional and motivational
state (set, emotion, and motive were the hooks on which Bruner had earlier hung is
"New Look" in perception).
The stimulus array for nonsocial perception consists of the energy (light waves,
sound waves, etc.) that radiates from the distal stimulus, falls on the sensory
surfaces, and is transduced by receptor organs into neural impulses.
The stimulus array for person perception consists of the person's appearance and
behavior, and also the language that others use to describe the person.
Traditionally, the psychology of perception has been dominated by a constructivist
viewpoint that has come down to us from Helmholtz, and is represented in the modern
era by such figures as Richard Gregory, Julian Hochberg, and Irvin Rock. For the
constructivists, the information provided by the stimulus is vague, fragmentary, and
ambiguous, and is not sufficient to support perception. Accordingly, the perceiver must
draw on his expectations and knowledge of the world to fill in the gaps left by the
stimulus array, and make inferences about the object and its states. This is what
Helmholtz meant when he underscored the importance of "unconscious inferences" in
such things as the perception of size and distance. And it is what Bruner meant when
he argued that the perceiver must "go beyond the information given" by the stimulus.
The study of person perception has followed suit, beginning with Solomon Asch's
application of "Gestalt" principles to the problem of person perception.
In the late 20th century the constructivist view of perception was been challenged by
an ecological view of direct perception offered by J.J. Gibson. According to Gibson, the
stimulus array provides all the information necessary for perception, and the
perceptual apparatus has evolved in such a way as to extract this information,
permitting us to perceive the world without relying on "higher" mental processes of
inference and judgment. This ecological view has also had an impact on the study of
person perception. While most research on person perception has followed Asch's
"impression-formation" paradigm in employing verbal materials (like trait labels) as
stimuli, the proponents of the ecological view in person perception, such as Ruben
Baron and Leslie McArthur, ecologists have argued that researchers should stick closer
to the physical stimulus -- to the person's appearance and behavior. Accordingly, they
have focused on such matters as the person's facial expressions; bodily orientation,

movement, and posture; vocal cues; interpersonal distance; eye contact and touching;
physical appearance and manner of dress; and also those aspects of the local
behavioral environment -- the situational context -- that are under the target's control.
Personally, I side strongly with the constructivist view that the social perceiver must
go "beyond the information given" in order to construct a mental representation of the
target person. I also think that verbal cues (like trait adjectives) are underrated as
stimulus information for perception -- after all, language is an important medium for
knowledge representation, and we use language as a vehicle for social interaction. At
the same time, I agree with Baron and McArthur that studies of social perception rely
too heavily on verbal stimulus materials, and that we will not have a comprehensive
understanding of social perception unless we spend more time studying how people
actually present to us -- in appearance and in behavior, as well as in verbal
description.
Most research o social perception has focused on describing the stimulus and the
processes that operate on stimulus information to generate a mental representation of
the target's mental states. An understudied issue is accuracy: to what extent are our
mental representations of ourselves, other people, the situations in which we find
them, and the activities that transpire there accurate reflections of social reality? The
accuracy issue is usually framed in terms of judgments of personality traits: is a
person judged to be neurotic or extraverted really neurotic or extraverted? This, in
turn raises the question of the criterion: how do we know whether a person is really
neurotic or extraverted? Typically, self-ratings by the target, or aggregate ratings by a
number of judges, serve as criteria for validating an individual judge'sratings. The
general adaptiveness of social behavior can be taken as evidence of the general
accuracy of social perception -- or not, depending on your point of view. Still, the
accuracy issue underscores the basic point: accurate or not, or behavior in a situation
is determined by our perception of that situation. For a recent review, see Funder
(2012).

Social Memory
Perceiving an object or event changes the contents of memory, by leaving some trace
of perceptual experience that persists when the stimulus has disappeared. It is by
virtue of memory that we are able to guide or behavior in accordance with past
events, freeing us from reliance on the current stimulus environment -- and, by some
accounts, the same faculty of memory that allows us to remember the past, also
enables us to anticipate the future.
Ever since Ebbinghaus, psychologists have studied memory primarily by means of
some variant on the verbal learning paradigm: the subject studies a list of words, or
sentences, or a whole story, or pictures; this constitutes the encoding phase; then
some interval elapses, which represents the storage phase; finally, in the retrieval
phase, the subject attempts to remember what he studied. Precisely this same method
has been used in studies of person memory, analogous to person perception, in which

the stimulus materials are, typically, lists of trait adjectives that describe the target's
personality, or sentences describing his behaviors. The basic verbal-learning paradigm
has been used to explore how knowledge about specific people is represented in
memory, and what the relations are between knowledge about a target in general, and
his specific behaviors.
Terry Winograd, John Anderson, and others have characterized these sorts of memory
contents as declarative knowledge -- factual knowledge (meaning that it can be true
or false) that can be represented in sentence-like propositions such as Judy is
intelligent or Judy won the chess tournament. And Endel Tulving has, in turn,
distinguished between two forms of declarative knowledge stored in memory: episodic
memory refers to knowledge of events that have a unique location in space and time
(two things can't happen at the same time in the same place); semantic memory is
more abstract and generic. The fact that Judy is intelligent is a piece of semantic
knowledge, because it's about Judy in general; the fact that Judy won the chess
tournament is a piece of episodic knowledge, because it refers to an event that
occurred at a particular place and a particular time.
An important issue concerns how knowledge about persons is represented in social
memory. Within an associative-network model of memory, persons can be represented
as nodes, linked to other nodes that represent their typical features (semantic
knowledge) and specific behaviors (episodic knowledge). One intuitively appealing
model suggests that specific behavioral episodes are clustered around the generic
pesonality characteristics that those behaviors exemplify. Another model, grounded in
self-perception theory, holds that only episodic information is stored in memory, and
semantic information is generated online, as it were, as needed. However, evidence
from priming studies, and from studies of amnesic patients, strongly suggests that
semantic knowledge about a person is stored in memory, and that it is stored
independently of episodic knowledge.
For personality and social psychologists, a particularly interesting form of episodic
memory is autobiographical memory -- a person's memory for his or her own life.
Technically, all episodic memories -- including my memory for the episode in which I
learned that Judy is intelligent -- are autobiographical in nature, because they refer to
events and experiences in the individual subject's life. And, conversely, all
autobiographical memory is episodic in nature, because it is a record of discrete
events and experiences. But autobiographical memory isn't merely episodic: there's
more to it than just a list of personal events and experiences (Kihlstrom, 2009a). In
the first place, autobiographical memory has a very explicit self-reference. In the
standard verbal-learning experiment, the items to be remembered are words or
pictures that the person has studied, and so each item in episodic memory implicitly
contains some degree of self-reference. But autobiographical memories very explicitly
refer to the rememberer, as the agent or patient of some action, or the stimulus or
experiencer of some state; they also will refer to the internal mental context of the
event in question: what the subject was thinking, feeling, and wanting at the time.
Autobiographical memories also have what might be called an Aristotelian plot
structure: first, they are organized in a sort of temporal sequence, with each one
following another; more important, autobiographical memory represents the causal

relations among individual events.

The social knowledge stored in memory is not limited to our declarative knowledge of
particular people. We also store declarative knowledge about people in general -- and
this knowledge, too, forms part of the cognitive background for processing particular
events and experiences. Bruner and Tagiuri referred to this as the perceiver's implicit
personality theory -- the assumptions that the person makes about human nature
(e.g., the role of nature vs. nurture), fundamental dimensions of individual differences
(e.g., the Big Five personality traits -- or, as I like to think of them, "The Big Five Blind
Date Questions"), assumptions about their central tendencies and variability (are most
people neurotic, or extraverted?) and the correlations among them (do socially
desirable characteristics tend to go together, as the "halo effect" would suggest?).
In addition to this declarative knowledge, people store in memory their procedural
knowledge of the skills and rules which they use in the course of adaptive behavior.
Some of these skills are motoric, in that they guide our actual overt behavior as we tie
our shoelaces or drive a standard-shift car; others are cognitive, in that they guide our
covert, mental activity when we engage in inductive or deductive reasoning, or find
square roots without using a calculator. In much the same way, our repertoire of
procedural social knowledge enables us to navigate in the social world. How do you
behave at a funeral? How do you liven up a party? How do you handle an obstreperous
customer in a restaurant, or a bully in a bar, or a disruptive student in class? How do
you ask someone out on a date, and how do you say no to someone who asks you
out? How strong should your grip be when you shake hands with a stranger? How
close should you stand when you talk to someone?

Social Intelligence
Taken together, our fund of declarative and procedural social knowledge constitutes
our repertoire of social intelligence (Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1987; Kihlstrom & Cantor,
2000, 2010). Traditionally, social intelligence has been construed as a sort of "social
IQ", meaning that some people are socially smart while others are social geniuses, and
that these individual differences can be measured by the social equivalent of standard
intelligence tests. It is this view of social intelligence that has been revived by Daniel
Goleman (Goleman, 2006), as an extension of his best-selling books on emotional
intelligence. And it raises the question of whether social intelligence is a set of
distinctive abilities -- or just, as David Wechsler himself claimed, "just general
intelligence applied to social situations".
Goleman's view is what Nancy Cantor and I have characterized as the "psychometric"
or "ability" view of social intelligence. As an alternative, we have proposed a
"knowledge" view of social intelligence, which simply refers to the individual's fund of
knowledge about the social world. In contract to the ability view, the knowledge view
does not characterize social intelligence as a trait, or group of traits, which can be
measured, on which individuals can be ranked from low to high, and thus compared
one to the other. Rather, the knowledge view of social intelligence simply assumes that

social behavior is intelligent, in that it is mediated by what the person knows (or
believes to be the case) about the social world. Individual differences in social
knowledge lead to individual differences in social behavior. But it does not make sense
to us to construct measures of social IQ. The important variable is now how much
social intelligence the person has, but rather what he knows about himself, other
people, the situations in which he meets them, and the behaviors they exchange.

Social Learning
One consequence of psychology's emergence from British empiricism was its early
emphasis on sensation and perception. Another was its emphasis on learning -- the
fact that knowledge is acquired through experience. For much of its history, the
psychology of learning was the psychology of animal learning, and the animals learned
in isolation -- Pavlov's dogs in their harnesses, Thorndike's cats in their puzzle boxes,
Skinner's pigeons in their operant chambers, etc. And most of what they learned was
about how to get food, or how to predict and control avoid shock.
As it happened, and despite the distractions of radical behaviorism, we learned quite a
bit about how animals learn, and much of that proved to be generalizable to the
human case. But at the same time, Neal Miller (a psychologist working in the
traditional of Clark Hull's drive-reduction theory) and John Dollard (a sociologist)
advanced the concept of social learning to account for complex human behavior. They
asserted that most learning is about social behavior, and most learning takes place in
a social context. Later, Albert Bandura expanded on their view, distinguishing between
learning via direct experience and vicarious learning via observation.
Learning by direct experience is the usual "trial and error" learning, familiar from
studies of classical and instrumental conditioning. Pavlov, Thorndike, and practically
everyone else who studied learning well into the 20th century, all thought that the
animal was passive during conditioning -- which is where the term "conditioning"
comes from. And that learning was a simple matter of forming associations between
stimuli and responses, following the principles of the association of ideas originally laid
down by John Locke and David Hume, and others affiliated with British empiricism.
One exception was Edward C. Tolman, who argued that even animals were actively
engaged in the learning process, trying to figure out what is going on in their
environment, and what to do about it -- a position ridiculed by some who
characterized Tolman's maze-running rats as "lost in thought at the choice point". But
we now know that Tolman got it right. The learning organism is actively generating,
testing, and revising expectations and hypotheses about its world; when it learns, it
learns to predict and control events in its environment. That's true for dogs and cats,
rats and pigeons -- and it's also true for humans. We are always trying to make sense
of the social world, and we do that, in large part, by generating hypotheses based on
our current understanding, testing them against reality, and revising our
understanding accordingly.
Bandura, for his part, was more interested in a different type of learning, one that had

also been described by Miller and Dollard -- observational or vicarious learning -- not
by direct experience, but by observing other people. We do learn by direct
experience, but we also learn from other people, and learning from other people is by
far the more efficient. If you stick your finger in an electrical socket, you'll eventually
learn not to do that; but if I tell you not to do it, you'll learn a lot more quickly. It's
observational learning, learning from other people, which lies at the heart of social
learning theory.
Bandura further distinguished between two major forms of social learning. Learning by
example is learning by observing other people. This includes various forms of
imitation, some of which occur automatically and unconsciously, as well as conscious
deliberate, modeling. Young children learn gender roles by observing other people who
look like them (and, for that matter, others who don't). Learning by precept includes
both informal and formal, sponsored teaching. Many social interactions, involve one
person in the role of teacher and the other in the role of learner. And society has
developed a wide variety of institutions to generate and conserve knowledge, and
transmit it to the next generation -- not the least of which is the college and
university. There is no more efficient way for students to learn, I think, than from a
well-organized course with a well-written textbook. Unfortunately, there's also no more
efficient way for people to acquire maladaptive social knowledge in the form of
prejudices and stereotypes. As Rogers and Hammerstein wrote in South Pacific,
"You've got to be [carefully] taught to be afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made,
and people whose skin is a different shade".

Social Judgment
From a constructivist point of view, both social and nonsocial percepts and memories
are influenced by what the person thinks. The role of reasoning, problem-solving,
judgment, and decision-making in perception and memory -- even, according to
signal-detection theory, down to the most elementary sensory process of detecting the
presence of a stimulus -- moots the classical distinction between "lower" and "higher"
cognitive processes. But judgment, reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making
are particularly prominent in two critical aspects of social cognition, categorization
causal attribution.

Impression Formation
One important class of social judgments has already been discussed, under the rubric
of person perception. Whereas some "neo-Gibsonian" advocates of the ecological view
of perception insist that person peception merely unpacks information provided by the
stimulus, the classic view, grounded in constructivist and Gestalt theory, argues that
the perceiver makes his own contribution to the perceptual process, by supplying
generic and specific knowledge retrieved from memory. This memory-based

knowledge is then combined with stimulus-based knowledge in what is, ultimately, an

act of judgment. Memory-based and inferential processes are arguably more important
when stimulus information is itself represented linguistically -- as in typical forms of
personality description.

Social Categorization
Bruner noted that (I'm paraphrasing here) every act of perception involves an act of
categorization: in the course of identifying an object we naturally make inferences
about its category membership, and decisions about category membership allow us to
make inferences about unobserved features of the object. This is no less true in social
perception than it is in nonsocial perception, and probably more so -- because social
stimuli are so vague, fragmentary, and ambiguous. The importance of categorization is
especially clear in the case of person perception, which also goes by the name of
impression formation. For example, we speak of personality types such as melancholic
or sanguine, extravert and introvert, represented linguistically by nouns. And we speak
of personality traits, which are essentially categories of behaviors, represented
linguistically by adjectives as extraverted and conscientious. People who display a lot
of extraverted or conscientious behaviors may in turn be labeled as highly extraverted
or highly conscientious, which are continuous dimensions rather than discrete
pigeonholes, but nevertheless perform the cognitive function of categories. When we
form an impression of a person, we do so by classifying his characteristic behaviors in
terms of traits, and then assigning him to a type based on the traits he displays in his
behavior.
Most studies of nonsocial categorization have been concerned with the structure of
categories in the abstract -- as in the debate between the classical Aristotelian view of
categories as proper sets, and the revisionist view of categories as fuzzy sets, the
debate between the prototype view and the exemplar view, and the dispute over the
role of similarity in categorization. Content has been almost irrelevant to these
psychologists -- as evidenced by their willingness to use artificial as well as natural
categories to test their theories. But this begs the question: what are the natural
categories of persons? Following the suggestions of Roger Brown (Brown, 1980) we
can list a number of possibilities, including sex (gender), kinship, age, socioeconomic
status, sociopolitical affiliation, national, racial, and ethnic origin, and personality -- as
well as categories specific to local culture, such as the jocks, preppies, and goths who
can be found on any college campus. When we perceive people, we perceive them
through these and other categorical filters; and once we've assigned them to a
category, we have some idea of what they're like.
Of course, some of these represent stereotypes, but that's the point -- a stereotype is
a category. Walter Lippman (1922) defined a stereotype as "an oversimplified picture
of the world, one that satisfies a need to see the world as more understandable than it
really is", and that's exactly what a category is. A stereotype is a set of beliefs, shared
by members of some ingroup, about the character of some outgroup, and it's applied
to all members of that outgroup, regardless of their actual characteristics. The belief is

that members of a certain group share features in common, so that identifying a

person's group membership permits us to make inferences about that individual's
characteristics. Stereotypes are insidious because they serve as a basis for emotional
prejudice and behavioral discrimination by ingroup members toward outgroup
members, so they have negative implications that don't arise when we categorize
objects as tools or animals, but that just shows that social categories are special in
some ways.
Psychiatric diagnoses are also social categories. Here, symptoms such as anxiety or
impaired reality-testing are features that allow us to classify a patient as neurotic or
psychotic, and then into subcategories such as schizophrenic or manic-depressive, and
sub-subcategories such as hebephrenic vs. paranoid schizophrenic. This is not to get
into a debate about the biological reality of various forms of mental illness. It's simply
to note that whatever else they are, psychiatric diagnoses are social categories that
one group of people use to label another group of people, and that these labels have
consequences for the people so labeled.

Causal Attribution
Causal attribution has to do with the explanation of behavior -- not the explanations
that scientific psychologists come up with, on the basis of controlled experiments, but
what Fritz Heider referred to as phenomenal causality -- how causation appears to the
ordinary person in the street. In Heider's view (which you can also find in the
developmental theories of Jean Piaget, and elsewhere) the person acts as a kind naive
scientist, generating and testing hypotheses about the way the world works. One
prominent early theory of causal attribution, Harold Kelley's covariation calculus of
causal attribution,, made this analogy explicit. Kelley proposed that, over many
observations of interactions between an actor and a target, people extracted
information about the consensus of behavior across actors, the consistency of behavior
across targets, and the distinctiveness of the actor's behavior toward the target; and
then they entered this data into a kind of informal analysis of variance in order to
determine whether the cause of the behavior in question to something about the actor
(for example, his personality traits), something about the target (again, typically his
personality traits), or to the situation in which the actor and the target encountered
each other. Just what a scientific psychologist would do, only without SPSS.
Because the target is part of the situation, studies of causal attribution quickly focused
on a dichotomy between internal, personal causes of behavior, such as personality
traits, and external, situational ones, such as the presence of others. And, just as
quickly, researchers began to discover that people didn't make causal attributions
according to the rules. There then developed a rather large literature documenting
"errors and biases" in causal attribution and other aspects of social judgment, the
most famous of which were the fundamental attribution error (people attribute
behavior to the actor's personality dispositions, and ignore or downplay the role of the
situation), the self-other difference (people make dispositional attributions about
others' behaviors, but situational attributions about their own) and the egocentric bias

(people make personal attributions about their successes, but negative attributions
about their failures. (A Google search on "errors and biases" will retrieve a Wikipedia
list of more than 100 cognitive errors and biases, from the "actor-observer bias" to the
"zero-risk bias".)
Unfortunately, this entire classic literature on causal attribution got off on the wrong
foot. Part of this was due to a misinterpretation of Kurt Lewin's "grand truism", B=f(P,
E), as justifying a dichotomy between personal and environmental causes of behavior
(and, for that matter, an institutional separation between personality and social
psychology) -- when, in fact, Lewin was an interactionist who insisted that the person
and the situation were inextricably intertwined (Kihlstrom, 2010a). Just as important,
there was a misunderstanding of Heider's own seminal work -- ignoring his distinction
between intentional action and unintentional behavior, and his construal of "personal
dispositions" as mental states rather than as personality traits (Malle, 2008).
Malle and his colleagues have now gone back to the drawing board, and produced a
theory of causal attribution that avoids the Procrustean bed of the person-situation
dichotomy, and more faithfully represents what actually goes on when people make
causal attributions (Malle, 2004). One result is that the actor-observer difference in
causal attribution takes quite a different shape from what is presented in textbooks.
Another is a complete re-evaluation of the fundamental error. From a psychological
point of view, intentional behavior is always caused by the person's mental states.
Thus, the fundamental attribution error is not an error; but it is fundamental.

Moral Judgment
Among the many judgments that are studied in social cognition, perhaps the most
social are those that involve morality -- is a person good or bad, is a behavior right or
wrong? Early accounts of moral judgment emphasized rational processes, as
exemplified by Lawrence Kohlberg's neo-Piagetian theory of moral reasoning. More
recently, reflecting the "affective counterrevolution" in social psychology, an approach
known as social intuitionism has emphasized the role of irrational, or at least nonrational, "gut feelings" (e.g., Haidt, 2001). Link to a paper on "Reason and Emotion in
Moral Judgment".

The Language of Social Interaction

Language permeates the study of social cognition, and not just because social
cognition researchers favor verbal stimulus materials. Noam Chomsky correctly argued
that language was not just a tool for communication, but also a tool for thought. But
that doesn't mean that language isn't also a tool for communication. We use language
to represent our thoughts about other people, and language is an important medium
of social interaction -- which is why Roger Brown (Brown, 1965) devoted a major
section of his classic textbook on social psychology to the subject.

First, as any inspection of the "personals" ads in your favorite periodical will confirm,
we tend to describe ourselves, and others in the language of traits. Allport and Odbert
famously counted 17,953 words in an unabridged English dictionary that could be used
to capture individual differences between people (there were actually 17,954 such
words, but they miscounted). A long tradition of factor-analytic research has reduced
this mass to the "Big Five" dimensions of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness,
conscientiousness, and openness to experience; or perhaps, the "Big Two" dimensions
of intellectual and social desirability. Lewis Goldberg (Goldberg, 1982), among others,
has proposed that the Big Five is a universal structure for representing individual
differences in personality, applicable to people of any age, any epoch, or any culture.
Even if that's an overstatement (and I'm not sure that it is), the language of traits and
types gives us an important framework for social categorization, and for identifying
just what it is about people that cause them to behave the way they do.
Studies of the language of personality description have focused on the semantic
relations among various trait terms. A good example is the work of Seymour
Rosenberg and his colleagues, who identified two large dimensions running through
the personality trait lexicon: intellectual and social good-bad. These two dimenions are
themselves related, creating a "good-bad" superdimension that accounts for the "Halo
Effect" the tendency of people to perceive socially desirable traits as correlated with
each other.
Another favorite representation of the semantic relations among personality
characteristics has been the circumplex, introduced by Timothy Leary (he of
psychedelia fame) in 1957. A circumplex is a circular arrangement of items in which
the angular distance between terms indicates the semantic distance between them.
Capitalizing on the greater computational power of the modern high-speed compuer,
Jerry Wiggins (1980) generated a modified ciricumplex structure of personality.
Circumplex models have also been popular for representing the relations among
different affective states, yielding two competing models. One, offered by Russell
(1980), is based on two bipolar dimensions, positive-negative and strong-weak
(Wundt offered the first such representation in the late 19th century). An alternative,
offered by Tellegen and Watson (1985), represents positive and negative affect as
independent of each other, lying on orthogonal dimensions, rather than diametrically
opposed. At conventions, fistfights have been known to break out over whether
positive and negative affect are opposite poles of a single dimension, or two
indepenent dimensions. Note that the one circumplex is, essentially, a 45-degree
rotation of the other.
These linguistic relations capture what is known as implicit personality theory: people's
intuitive beliefs, derived from social learning, concerning the nature and scope of
individual differences in personality.
Another connection between language and social cognition takes the form of the SapirWhorf hypothesis -- that, in some important way, the language we use constrains the
thoughts we can think. For example, the very existence of so many trait terms in
English may encourage us to characterize people, and explain their behavior, in terms
of stable dispositions. Or, it may be the other way around -- that so many trait terms

exist because we think of people that way. Which is why the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is
such a provocative idea, and why it has remained controversial to this day.
My favorite example of the language of social cognition comes from a study by Roger
Brown and Deborah Fish of the causality implicit in language (Brown & Fish, 1983). If I
tell you that Ted charms Paul and ask you to speculate why that might be, you'll
probably attribute the liking to the subject of the sentence, Ted-- that he's charming.
But if I tell you that Ted loathes Paul, you'll probably attribute the loathing to the
object of the sentence, Paul -- that he's loathsome. Based on Charles Fillmore's case
grammar, Brown and Fish suggested that causality is implicit in the semantic role:
behavioral actions are generally attributive to the agent who instigates the action, not
the patient who is the recipient; but mental states are generally attributive to the
stimulus who gives rise to the experience, not the experiencer who has it. At first
blush, this looks like a Whorffian result -- that linguistic semantics constrains the
causal attributions we make. But in fact, Brown and Fish argue the opposite, noting
that English could have adjectives like charmable that would be attributive to Paul, and
like loatheful that would be attributive to Ted -- it just doesn't, perhaps because we
don't think of things that way. So, to Brown and Fish, this looks like a "contraWhorffian result, of thought containing language.

Social-Cognitive Development
Cognitive and social psychologists are interested in cognitive and social development,
and theorists of social cognition are interested in the phylogenetic and ontogenetic
origins of social cognition. And so social cognition has dealt with debates over nature
and nurture (rationalism vs. empiricism), concrete vs. abstract thought, the Piagetian
stages (especially egocentrism), novices and experts, and the like -- everything that
our developmental colleagues have gone through for the past century.
Interestingly, the prevailing theory of cognitive development is expressly a theory of
social cognition. I'm thinking of the idea of the theory of mind, which argues that, as
development proceeds, children come to recognize that their mental states are their
own, and that other people may have different beliefs, feelings, and desires. The
theory of mind is part of a broader theory theory which holds that development
consists of the generation, testing, and revision of theories about how various aspects
of the world works -- children elaborate theories of physics and biology as well as
theories of mind; and, for that matter, they develop theories of society as well
(although this has not been studied all that much). Among these is an intuitive theory
of personality.
The theory of mind is often operationalized in the false belief test: Sally and Jane hid a
puppet in an oatmeal container; after Jane has left the room, Sally and the
experimenter move the puppet to a shoebox; then Sally is asked where Jane will look
when she returns and searches for the puppet. Before about age 3, Sally will say that
Jane will look in the shoebox, because "That's where it is". But by about age 5, Sally
will say that Jane will look in the oatmeal container, because "That's where she thinks

it is". The older Sally has a theory of mind: she is now able to make inferences about
another person's mental states -- and, in the final analysis, that's what social cognition
is all about. One of the more interesting developments in the theory of mind has been
the use of nonverbal versions of the false-belief task to push the milestone back -leading to the discovery that even very young children have a rudimentary theory of
mind; but, so far as we can tell, even adult chimpanzees don't.

Computational Modeling of Social Cognition

These days, cognitive psychologists like to write their theories in the form of operating
computer programs -- an exercise that John Searle refers to as "Weak Artificial
Intelligence", because it does not imply that the machine actually has mental states.
And social cognition has been no exception. I'll spend relatively little time on this,
except to say that the computational modeling of social cognition looks pretty much
like the computational modeling of nonsocial cognition. There are, for example, a
number of "symbolic" or "locationist" models of person memory, where individual
people, their traits, and their behaviors are all represented as nodes in a vast
associative network. And there are also some "connectionist" or "neural network"
models, in which knowledge is represented by the pattern of activation in the network
as a whole. They both work, and they both have their advantages and disadvantages.
Connectionist networks are often favored because they are "neurally plausible", but
they have a serious liability in "catastrophic interference", meaning that they forget
what they know as soon as they learn something new. Since this is something that
human brains don't do, it's not clear how "neurally plausible" connectionist models are.
But something like a connectionist model is probably necessary to represent the
bidirectional causal influences inherent in social interaction, so they're well worth
continued exploration.

Social-Cognitive Neuroscience
Cognitive psychology is interested in the neural substrates of cognition, leading to the
development of cognitive neuroscience as a new interdisciplinary field. Social
psychologists have followed suit, leading to the development of what is variously called
social-cognitive neuropsychology (my favored term) or social-cognitive neuroscience
(Kihlstrom, 2009b). Social-cognitive neuroscience had its deep origins when social
psychologists began to take an interest in psychophysiological methods, and also in
the lives of brain-damaged patients -- not to mention the textbook case of Phineas
Gage. But it really took off when the advent of brain-imaging techniques such as
positron-emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic-resonance imaging
(fMRI) which allowed investigators to view the operations of the brain while subjects
performed various tasks -- including tasks involving social perception and judgment.

Social-cognitive neuroscience, like cognitive (and, for that matter, affective)

neuroscience is predicated on Jerry Fodor's (Fodor, 1983) Doctrine of Modularity, which
postulates that the mind is not a general information-processing system, much like a
computer, but rather an assembly of interconnected modules, each of which performs
a specialized task; in addition, the Doctrine assumes that each of these modules is
associated with a "fixed neural architecture" -- that is, that each mental module is
associated with a module in the brain. Like cognitive neuroscience, social-cognitive
neuroscience proceeds by engaging subjects in a task designed to activate this
module, and then identifies which brain area (if any), is specifically activated during
that task. A review by Matt Lieberman published only 6 years after the field's formal
debut in the pages of American Psychologist, had already identified 21 such areas,
each apparently dedicated to some aspect of social cognition.
Of course, the identification of such modules is only as valid as the tasks used to
identify it -- and particularly the control task employed. For example, something of a
consensus has emerged that a particular area of the medial temporal lobe, known as
the fusiform gyrus, is dedicated to the identification of individual faces: Nancy
Kanwisher has christened this area the fusiform face area. It's a very appealing idea:
the face is the primary social stimulus, and if the brain has evolved a module
dedicated to any aspect of social cognition, it's got to be face recognition. On the other
hand, Isabel Gauthier and others have gathered evidence that the fusiform area is
activated when subjects identify birds and snowflakes as well as when they identify
faces. So, it's possible that the fusiform gyrus is a "flexible fusiform area", that
mediates the identification of all sorts of objects at a subordinate level of classification,
and that faces are just particularly familiar examples of this general point. Or, I
suppose, it might be the case that the fusiform gyrus is specialized for faces after all,
and that people become experts in identifying birds or snowflakes by co-opting that
area for this purpose.
The important point here is not that Kanwisher or Gautier is wrong, and the other one
right. It is that neuroscientific data cannot settle questions of psychological theory. A
lot of cognitive and social neuroscientists, whether explicitly or implicitly, adhere to
what I have called the rhetoric of constraint -- the idea that, somehow, data about
brain structure and function will tell us which psychological theories are right and
which are wrong. I think this idea is wrong, and not just because, if it were true,
psychology really would be, in Ulric Neisser's (Neisser, 1967) immortal phrase, just
"something to do until the biochemist comes". Going more deeply, I agree with the
philosopher Gary Hatfield (Hatfield, 2000) that psychology is the science that studies
mental functions directly; and to the extent that neuroscience wishes to identify the
brain functions that correspond to mental functions, neuroscience depends on
psychology, not the other way around.
But none of this means that social neuroscience isn't a promising enterprise. Right
from the beginning, psychologists have been interested in "mind in body", or the
connections between what goes on in the mind and what goes on in the brain and the
rest of the nervous system. For a long time, social psychologists thought that social
interaction, including social cognition, was too complex to be approached with the
blunt "slash and burn" methods that characterized the earlier physiological psychology.

And they were right. But now, with PET, fMRI, and all the other tools of modern
neuroscience, were now in a position to reveal the biological substrates of mental life,
as we never were before.

The Current Scene

The turn toward neuroscience is one of the most interesting trends in the
contemporary study of social cognition, but there are others.

Judgment Heuristics
One trend, which I alluded to earlier in my discussion of causal attribution, has been
the documentation of various errors and biases in social cognition. The origins of this
trend lie in the work of Herbert Simon, and especially Daniel Kahneman and Amos
Tversky, who documented the use of various judgment heuristics. Previous work on
judgment and decision-making, as exemplified by neoclassical economics, had been
based on assumptions of normative rationality -- the idea that people employed logical
procedures known as algorithms to optimize the outcomes of various choices -algorithms that, when employed correctly, are guaranteed to yield the right answer to
the problem at hand. Kahneman and Tversky showed that people relied instead on
heuristics, or shortcuts, that bypassed the algorithms of normative rationality and
allowed people to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty -- which, after all, is
pretty much the definition of real life. Simon, Kahneman and Tversky, and their
confreres substituted a description of how people actually think for the logicians'
prescription of how people did think. And in so doing they worked a revolution in
economics, and in the psychology of judgment and decision-making, that continues to
rack up Nobel Prizes.

Automaticity
Just as early approaches to social cognition assumed, at least implicitly, that social
cognition followed the principles of normative rationality, so it was it was assumed,
again at least implicitly, that social cognition involved conscious, deliberate, thought.
Beginning in the 1970s, however, cognitive psychology began to articulate a distinction
between automatic and controlled processing. Controlled processing is, indeed,
conscious and deliberate; it consumes cognitive resources, and involves serial
processing. Automatic processes by contrast, are inevitably evoked by the appearance
of an effective environmental stimulus; once evoked, they are incorrigibly executed, in
a "ballistic" fashion; they consume few or no cognitive resources; and they don't
interfere with each other, or with controlled processes. Automatic processes are reflexlike, in some respects, but they are not innate: in principle, any process, no matter
how complex, can be automatized if it is practiced enough.

Whether they are innate or acquired, automatic processes are unconscious in the strict
sense of the term: they operate outside conscious awareness, and independent of
conscious control. In fact, automaticity has been dubbed "the new unconscious"
(Hassin, Uleman, & Bargh, 2005) -- the "old" unconscious being the "monsters from
the id" envisioned by Sigmund Freud and other proponents of psychoanalysis. Indeed,
widespread acceptance of the concept of automaticity has helped legitimize the
concept of unconscious mental life, but it is not the entirety of the psychological
unconscious. In theory, automatic processes operate on conscious mental contents -percepts, memories, thoughts, and the like -- to generate other conscious mental
contents. We are aware of what we think, but we're not aware of the automatic
processes that generate what we think. But, beginning with the study of implicit
memory in amnesic patients, it's become clear that mental contents themselves -percepts, memories, thoughts, feelings, motives -- can also be unconscious, yet exert
an influence on the person's ongoing experience, thought, and action. Implicit
cognition, emotion, and motivation join automatic processing to comprise unconscious
mental life (Kihlstrom, 2008b, 2010b).
Within cognitive psychology, there is a general consensus that every task has both
automatic and controlled components, and considerable effort has been devoted to
measuring their differential contributions to performance. In social psychology,
however, a view has developed that social cognition and behavior is overwhelmingly
governed by automatic processes -- what I have called "the automaticity juggernaut"
(Kihlstrom, 2008a). Somewhat ironically, John Bargh (J. A. Bargh, 1984; J.A. Bargh &
Ferguson, 2000) has expressly linked automaticity to Skinnerian behaviorism. His
position is not exactly a revival of behaviorism, because he adopts the central dogma
of the cognitive revolution, that cognitive and other mental states and processes
intervene between environmental stimulus and organismal response. But when the
intervening processes are automatically evoked by environmental stimuli, the embrace
of automaticity looks more and more like (with apologies to Susan Sontag)
behaviorism with a cognitive face -- leading to wonder whether, in the end, we had a
cognitive revolution only to learn that Skinner had it right the first time.
Some proponents of automaticity have linked themselves to Copernicus
and Darwin in revealing some unpleasant truths of human existence:
Copernicus demonstrated that the Earth is not the center of the
universe, while Darwin showed that Man is just another animal. Freud,
who also positioned himself in this line of "naturalization", sorrowfully
informed his readers that man was irrational after all, driven by seething, if
unconscious, sexual and aggressive urges. Bargh and Dan Wegner (Wegner & Bargh,
1998), another driver of the automaticity juggernaut, have suggested, with apologies
to Freud, that free will is severely compromised, if not simply illusory, and that the
psychological truth is that we are automatons after all.
There is no doubt that automaticity plays some role in social cognition and behavior;
the question is whether, as Bargh put it, behavior is "99.44%" automatic. In fact, what
we have in the literature are mostly demonstration experiments, that show that
automaticity plays some role in social interaction. But many of these experiments
involve a very loose operationalization of automaticity, and the few comparative

experiments published to date reveal more of a balance between automatic and

controlled components of processing -- except in special circumstances, like very
narrow response windows, where controlled processing simply cannot come into play.
Nothing in the literature supports the idea that social behavior is wholly, or even
largely driven by automatic processes -- or that, as some have concluded, conscious
will is an illusion and consciousness only gets in the way of adaptive behavior.

An Affective Counter-Revolution
The cognitive revolution in psychology began with the recognition that internal mental
states mediated between stimulus and response. And we call the cognitive revolution a
cognitive revolution because the analysis of these intervening states focused on
cognition -- expectations, attention, short-term memory, the syntax of language, and
the like. Some cognitive scientists use the term "cognitive" to refer to all mental
states, including emotional and motivational states. And, as the cognitive revolution
began to spread, some social psychologists adopted the view that emotional and
motivational states were themselves cognitive constructions -- that is, beliefs about
what one was feeling or desiring, depending on one's perception of the situation. That
point of view took social psychology a long way, but fairly soon some psychologists
began to object to the "cold, rational" view of social interaction implicit in early
theories of social cognition, with their focus on algebraic rules for impression
formation, the analysis of variance for causal attribution, and the like. And they also
began to promote the idea that feelings and desires were to an important extent
independent of beliefs.
The issue began to be joined with arguments for hot cognition, or the view that
emotion and motivation influenced cognition -- a viewpoint that was foreshadowed by
Bruner's (J.S. Bruner & Klein, 1960) the "New Look" in perception. And it came to a
head in a debate between Robert Zajonc, who argued that "preferences need no
inferences", and Richard Lazarus, who argued instead for "the primacy of cognition".
Research by Paul Ekman on the facial expression of emotion supported the hypothesis
that certain emotional reactions are innate, universal, and essentially reflexive in
nature. These "basic emotions" do not require cognitive mediation, nor is any required
for us to "read" these emotional states in the faces of other people. The prevailing
view now is that at least some aspects of emotion, and probably motivation as well,
are indeed independent of cognition -- not least because they are evoked
automatically by particular environmental stimuli.
In fact, the emerging view is that affect is not just independent of cognition, and
deserves special status, but rather that affect is more important than cognition. This
view can be seen clearly in the current emphasis on the role of intuition and emotion
in decision-making. Antonio Damasio has written of "Descartes' error" in elevating
reason above emotion -- and in separating mind from body (Damasio, 1994). And
Joshua Greene cites the "Trolley Problem" as evidence that feelings, rather than
reasons, guide our moral judgments. But intuitions are at least as "cognitive" as they
are emotional: they play a role in recognition judgments and problem-solving, when

emotion has nothing to do with anything (Dorfman, Shames, & Kihlstrom, 1996;
Kihlstrom, Shames, & Dorfman, 1996), for example . And the fact that people fall back
on emotion when an experiment has been deliberately constructed that reason
necessarily fails them, does not mean that cognition is irrelevant to moral judgment in
the world outside the laboratory. Paraphrasing Paula Niedenthal (Niedenthal, 1992),
affect is information for cognition. But emotion doesn't rule cognition; rather, along
with motivation, they rule side by side.
It is something of a mystery why, once the cognitive revolution took hold, it should
have taken psychology so long to become serious about emotion. Part of the reason
surely lies in the roots of psychology in British empiricism -- that is, with problems of
knowledge acquisition. The implication of Cartesian dualism is that emotions are part
of our animal nature, closely tied to the body, and that what is distinctive about
humans is that we can think. The same sort of implication can be found in MacLean's
concept of the triune brain, including the "reptilian" brainstem, concerned primarily
with biological motives; the "mammalian paleocortex" of the limbic system, generating
emotions; and the neocortex, sitting on top of everything, and making thought
possible. The behaviorists, of course, threw emotion and motivation out with cognition.
As Robert S. Woodworth (Woodworth, 1929) put it:
First psychology lost its soul, then it lost its mind...
It has behavior, still, of a kind.
Psychology eventually got its mind back, but it came back first with a focus on
cognition. The revival of interest in emotion is a necessary corrective to what has been
the hegemony of cognition. But independence doesn't mean superiority. Just as we
didn't have a cognitive revolution only to find out that Skinner got it right the first
time, we didn't evolve a neocortex to discover that the paleocortex is enough. And we
don't need another revolution. What we need is peaceful coexistence, with each
element -- cognition, emotion, and motivation -- occupying its rightful place in the
mental economy of behavior. Still, the affective counterrevolution in psychology has
set the stage for the development of new graduate groups in affective psychology,
paralleling cognitive psychology, and an "affective neuroscience" independent of
cognitive neuroscience.

Stupidism
Sometimes, it seems as if the "errors and biases" movement, the automaticity
juggernaut, and the affective counterrevolution have come together to generate a new
approach to psychology, which I have come to call the "People Are Stupid" school of
social psychology (Kihlstrom, 2004), which is organized around a small number of
related propositions:
People are fundamentally irrational: In the ordinary course of everyday living, we

do not think very hard about anything, preferring heuristic shortcuts that lead us
astray; and we let our feelings and motives get in the way of our thought
processes [e.g., \Nisbett, 1980 #17881;Ross, 1977 #21628].
We are on automatic pilot: We do not pay much attention to what is going on
around us, and to what we are doing; as a result, our thoughts and actions are
inordinately swayed by first impressions and immediate responses; free will is an
illusion [e.g., \Bargh, 1995 #6251;Wegner, 2002 #19543;Gilbert, 1991 #21632].
We don't know what we're doing: When all is said and done, our behavior is
mostly unconscious; the reasons we give are little more than post-hoc
rationalizations, and our forecasts are invalid; to make things worse,
consciousness actually gets in the way of adaptive behavior [e.g., \Nisbett, 1977
#17107;Wilson, 2002 #11237].
We don't know what we want: We're extremely poor at predicting how we will feel
about various eventualities (Wilson & Gilbert, 2005), and we're so poor at making
choices that we might just as well let others choose for us (Iyengar, 2010) -largely because, again, we don't have introspective access to our beliefs, feelings,
and desires. One is reminded of the joke about the two behaviorists who had sex:
one said to the other: "It was good for you, but was it good for me?".
We don't even know how stupid we are: Because of the limitations on our
cognitive abilities, we fail to appreciate when our judgments and behaviors are
less than optimal (Dunning, Heath, & Suls, 2004).
The "People Are Stupid" School -- to the extent that it's not just a figment of my
imagination -- had its origins in a very reasonable program of research that employed
evidence of errors to produce a more realistic description of how people actually make
judgments and decisions. But there are even deeper roots of social psychology's
preference for the thoughtless, the unconscious, and the automatic. Somehow, fairly
early on, social psychology got defined as the study of the effect of the social situation
on the individual's experience, thought, and action. Think, for example, of the classic
work on the "Four As" of social psychology: attitudes, attraction, aggression, and
altruism; think, too, on the history of research on conformity and compliance, from
Asch and before to Milgram and beyond. In each case, the experimenter manipulates
some aspect of the environment, and observes its effect on subjects' behavior.
Sometimes there were inferences about intervening mental states, but not very often - otherwise, the cognitive revolution in social psychology wouldn't have been a
revolution. Almost inevitably, the emphasis on how people are pushed around by
situational factors led to a kind of "Candid Camera" or "People Are Funny" rhetorical
stance in which social psychologists' lectures and textbooks focused inordinately on
just how ridiculous -- how stupid -- people can be, depending on the situation -- a
situation that, in many cases, has been expressly contrived to make people look
ridiculous and stupid.

Is Social Cognition "Special"?

In the study of social cognition, the default assumption is that the cognitive processes

used to perceive, remember, and think about social objects such as people are the
same as those used to perceive, remember, and think about nonsocial objects. After
all, you have to start somewhere, and in fact, in a wide variety of areas the default
assumption appears to be reasonably valid. At the same time, there are important
differences between social and nonsocial cognition. Some of these are quantitative in
nature -- differences in degree; others are qualitative in nature -- actual differences in
kind.
With respect to quantitative differences, the first and most important one is the
poverty of the stimulus. Helmholtz noted that the stimulus environment was too vague
and ambiguous, and contained too many conflicting cues, to support perception alone
-- which is why perception required the perceiver to make unconscious inferences.
This is all the more so, it seems to me, in the case of the social environment. Similarly,
context seems to be even more important in social perception than in nonsocial
perception. And so do emotion and motivation. Perception is inherently constructive,
and memory is inherently reconstructive, but, again, constructive processes seem
even more important in the social case -- where, to come full circle, the stimulus
environment is especially vague, ambiguous, and full of conflicting cues.

Some Examples of Ambiguous Social Stimuli

Here's another example. This photograph by Spencer Platt is titled "Beirut

Residents continue to Flock to Southern Neighborhoods". As explained by
Ken Johnson, art critic for the New York Times ("Poignant Images, with
Posterity the Ultimate Winner", 11/15/2013):

In a photograph shot by Spence Platt in Lebanon in 2006, the spectacle of five attractive,
fashionably dressed young people in a glossy red convertible occupies the foreground. By
surrealistic contrast, the immediate background is filled with the smoking wreckage of bombed
buildings, where a few pedestrians pass by.... [T]he impression you get is of obnoxious rich kids
out for a sensation-seeking drive.
But the truth of Mr. Platt's picture, which won the 2006 World Press Photo of the Year award,
was not what it seemed. In response to widespread criticism, the car's driver and passengers
protested to news reporters that they were not disaster tourists but residents of the neighborhood

returning to recover their belongings.

Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of the importance of context to

social cognition is the famous photograph of the "Vancouver Riot Kiss",
taken by Rich Lam during a riot that broke out in Vancouver, British
Columbia, in June 2011, after the Canucks lost in the Stanley Cup hockey finals.
Stripped of its context, the photo appears to show a couple engaged in foreplay. But
the original photograph shows that "The Kiss" actually took place against
a background of a street protest, with a police officer wielding a
truncheon in the foreground. But that only makes the photo more
ambiguous. What's going on here? Is this a piece of performance art?
An ironic act of social protest? A Photoshopped hoax? Is he taking advantage of her?
It turned out that the couple involved, Scott Jones and Alexandra Thomas, were
caught up in the mayhem. She was hurt in the melee, and he was trying to comfort
her.
Bruner (J. S. Bruner, 1957) wrote (and here I'm paraphrasing) that the purpose of
perception is action, and that's certainly true for the nonsocial case. In order to grasp
a mug of coffee, you have to identify it as a mug, note its location and distance, and
also apprehend its precise shape, so that you know mold your hand around it. Gibson
was onto something when he discussed perception in terms of affordances -- what you
can do with the object of perception. Action is even more important in the social case.
As discussed at the outset, the cognitive point of view in social psychology is that a
person's social interactions are (largely) determined by cognitions -- by his perception
of the situation, memories of previous encounters, and reasoning about what to do
next. In most of cognitive psychology, the concept of action is rather impoverished -pointing at a target, grasping a mug, typing at a keyboard. But in social psychology
the concept of action is very broad, encompassing the person's actual behavior in a
real world populated by other people. Social psychology shouldn't be defined as the
study of attitudes, and it shouldn't be defined as the study of social influence. But if
biological psychology is the study of mind in body, social psychology might well be
defined as the study of mind in action.
What about qualitative differences? Are there any features of cognition that are unique
to the social case? One possibility comes from social neuroscience, and the Doctrine of
Modularity. That is, it is entirely possible that there are some aspects of social
cognition that are performed by dedicated mental modules that differ from those
active in the nonsocial case. We have seen hints of this -- as well as the difficulties
inherent in making the case. But it's a possibility, and cognitive scientists like Ray
Jackendoff (Jackendoff, 1992) have convincingly argued that there are some aspects
of social cognition that have no counterparts in the nonsocial case, and which are so
universal that there might well, indeed, be specialized mental modules for them,
associated with a fixed neural architecture.
A second qualitative difference has to do with the self, which from the cognitive point
of view may be construed as a mental representation of oneself (Kihlstrom, Beer, &
Klein, 2002; Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984). Usually, there is a clear distinction between

the knower and the object of cognition, but this is dissolved when it comes to the self
in a way that simply does not occur in the nonsocial case. Viewed more broadly, the
world of nonsocial cognition is mostly a world of observer-independent facts: features
of the world that would exist even if there were no one to experience them. But the
world of social cognition is a mostly world of meaning, a world of observer-dependent
facts. It's true that I can think the moon is beautiful tonight, and this is an observerdependent fact about the social world, so with respect to social cognition the issue of
observer-dependence and --independence may be a quantitative, not qualitative one.
But when it comes to the self, the distinction is qualitative: people may have a view of
me that differs from my view of myself, but my self-concept is mine alone, nobody has
it but me, and the existence of a self depends utterly on my existence as a sentient
being.
Which brings me to the last qualitative difference between social and
nonsocial cognition, and it's a big one. In social cognition, the object of
cognition is itself a sentient being, possessed of intelligence and
consciousness, aware of being cognized (as it were), and trying to shape
the cognitions of the cognizer (I'm sorry, but I had to keep it going). In
social cognition, impression management by the object is counterpoised to impression
formation by the subject. And, of course, the subject knows this; and the object knows
he knows it, raising the possibility of an infinite series. It's not completely clear how
far the series goes (Cargile, 1970), but one thing is clear: there's nothing at all like it
in the nonsocial world.
In nonsocial cognition, the objects of cognition have an existence that is independent
of the observer's mind. But to some extent, at least, the objects of social cognition
depend on the mind of the observer. In social cognition, belief can create reality, in the
form of variants on the self-fulfilling prophecy (E. E. Jones, 1986; Miller & Turnbull,
1986; Snyder, 1984); and, because social reality consists of other persons, these
behavioral and perceptual confirmation effects, imposed on the object by the
perceiver, are opposed by self-verification effects imposed on the perceiver by the
object (Swann & Ely, 1984). Belief can create reality in the nonsocial world, but there
is nothing like this "battle of wills" outside of social interaction.

A Step to a Cognitive Social Science

Social psychology links psychology to the other social sciences, and all the social
sciences share a focus on observer-created reality: that is, a reality that is a product
of individual and collective mental activity, as people seek, and give, meaning in what
they find in the world around them. This is yet another aspect of social cognition: the
idea that cognition is not just about individual minds trying to understand and cope
with external reality. Rather, cognition is also a matter of minds working together,
trying to understand a reality that is, at least partly, the creation of their own minds.
Social cognition, then, may be an essential first step toward a cognitive social science.
Already, economics has felt the influence of the cognitive point of view -- that
economic systems cannot be understood simply in terms of the operation of some

"invisible hand", but that what happens in an economy is determined by individuals

trying to understand, and control, a system that is of their own making. So too,
perhaps, social cognition, and the cognitive viewpoint in social psychology generally, is
coming to be felt in fields such as sociology, anthropology, history, and political
science.

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