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Social Cognition's Benefit To The Understanding Of Perception And Interpretation Of Information

Social Cognition strikes a useful balance between the schools of Social and Cognitive Psychology, blending the two into a practical and functional approach of understanding, not only in how the environment affects one’s behaviours and feelings etc and the processes of the mind and brain in regards to learning memory etc. respectively, but collectively, bridges the gap that both Social and Cognitive Psychology, sheds little light on; the natural reflexes of the mind to maintain a sense of balance in our memories, learning, perceptions, emotions and behaviours as it encounters stimuli from the environment and others. As Higgins (2000) puts it, social cognitive principles reveals what it means to be human, while highlighting what it means also to be “only human”.

The principles and theories which lay the ground work for Social Cognition, puts into perspective possible explanations for why person’s perceive and interpret information and the world differently. Kunda (1999) explains, that to make sense of our social world, we must rely on concepts, to simplify the thinking process, lessening the time required to develop an understanding without overburdening our cognitive processes., and without these concepts we would be unable to extract meaning from the world, generalize our past experiences to those yet to come, and we would be unable to communicate with each other. Concepts thus are the simple building blocks from which we are able to formulate our understanding of the world, of others, and of ourselves in relation to environmental factors.

Concepts are the mental representations of how we view the world, and are specified along the lines of the nature of the representation (context), for instance our scripts for events, and our prototypal understandings of individual groups. However the baseline of all of this is that of Category Formation or Schema Development, schemas/categories, being the grouping of our concepts (Kunda, 1999).

The main principle...