The characteristics of social cognition can explain how each of us processes the frantic flow of information from day to day. Man is a social being and is forced to constantly be in contact with other people, through him we learn the social environment and the world that is around us. The psychology of social cognition describes and studies how the individual can perceive, explain and reproduce the information received, processing its social aspects with the help of his thinking.
The formulation of cognition problems today is aimed at detailed studies of the detailed characteristics of the perception process and at the search for answers to such questions:
- How does a person form his conclusions based on the information received about the environment?
- Why do we pay attention to certain actions of some individuals, while ignoring others?
- What are the features of social cognition that are aimed at the search, perception and coding of information?
- How is the process of obtaining knowledge about surrounding individuals carried out?
- What tools does a person use to acquire social knowledge?
- How do people manage to accumulate a large amount of information about various events and other people?
When analyzing the psychological characteristics of social cognition, scientists focus on the fact that there is one main mechanism of cognition - this is categorization. It is she who carries stability in judgments and the fixation of information in a certain framework.
It is impossible to understand the whole essence of social psychology unless you separately distinguish a category such as an object of cognition. It is what human cognitive activity is aimed at: an object, a process or a phenomenon, that is, it can be anything from our environment. It is worth noting that it is around the study of the object that all social psychology revolves.
The scientist J. Bruner outlined in this context the problem of cognition, which is associated with people's perception of each other, and called it social perception. This concept characterizes a holistic and systemic perception by an individual of other living objects, namely: people, groups, various social communities. On the one hand, the question arises: how can subject knowledge of a person and an object differ? In fact, there are features of social cognition of how a person interprets his own behavior and the processes of the material world. For example, the one who is perceived cannot be passive or indifferent in relation to the one who studies it. An object will always try to evoke only positive and positive emotions, and an object or natural phenomenon simply cannot physically do this, because it is not a living creature.
If we continue research in this vein, it becomes quite obvious that some characteristics require a more detailed study of their influence on the final result of cognition:
- features of the object and subject of knowledge;
- age, gender, professional specifics of social characteristics;
- intergroup and interpersonal mechanisms of perception ;
- patterns of perception and cognition;
- the value of the first impression.
The peculiarities of social cognition can help us understand why we pay attention, for example, to the behavior of our best friend, but at the same time we don’t care at all in what mood the neighbor was this morning. Psychology is a very multifaceted science, but even it will not be able to answer all the questions that are related to our consciousness and cognition, it will only be able to help and open the veil, and a person can completely solve all the puzzles on his own.