Social Knowledge

During the period between the late 1960s and early 1970s, theoretical and methodological advances in cognitive psychology provided social psychologists with the inspiration and framework to conceptualize the mechanisms that instantiate social psychological processes (Hamilton, D. L., & Carlston, D. E. (2013). The emergence of social cognition. The Oxford handbook of social cognition, pp. 16–32). Social cognition, the product of this revolution, is the study of how individuals understand themselves and others (Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (2013). From affect to social cognition. In: Social cognition from brains to culture, 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Sage Publications, pp. 370–371–393). Since its inception, social cognition has helped provide an understanding of the cognitive mechanisms, both bottom-up- and top-down-oriented, that engender and support social knowledge, that is, the representation of one's social world. The social cognitive perspective encompasses a wide variety of research that highlights how social knowledge develops and influences individuals' perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors. The goal of this article is to provide an overview of how perceptual, attentional, categorical, attributional, memory encoding, and self-oriented processes contribute to the development and maintenance of social knowledge. Definitions and contributions from each of these areas are discussed in detail.