The mental processes by which people make sense of themselves, others, and their social situations. (p. 5) go to glossary index

how people think about themselves and the social world; more specifically, how people select, interpret, remember, and use social information to make judgments and decisions

experiential knowledge and understanding of society and the rules of social behavior.

Thesaurus of psychological index terms Cognitive processes and activity that accompany and mediate social interactions.

Social cognition is the study of how people process social information, especially its encoding, storage, retrieval, and application to social situations. Social cognition’s focus on information processing has many affinities with its sister discipline, cognitive psychology.