social cognition

n. Several definitions of social cognition have been proposed. They generally converge on the view that social cognition is the study of (a) the factors that influence the acquisition, representation, and retrieval of information of the sort that is transmitted in a social context and (b) the influence of these processes on judgments and behavior. Subareas of social cognition, each of which focuses on a different stage of information processing, address the comprehension of information in terms of previously formed concepts and knowledge; the organization of information in memory and the construction of complex mental representations of the persons, objects, and events to which it pertains; the retrieval of the information from memory; the rules for construing and integrating the implications of different pieces of information; and the transformation of subjective inferences into overt judgments and behavior decisions. – RSW