People have different abilities. It's hard to argue with that. Most differences in skills and abilities are not easy to detect. However, the lack of talent in the field that social cognition studies is immediately apparent. If a person has insufficient knowledge and skills in the field of interaction in society, he is perceived as ill-mannered, strange, unadapted.
What is social cognition? This is a special area of cognition that studies the patterns by which people in general tend to work with information about society. Firstly, she is engaged in learning how people decrypt and encrypt data on social connections. A person who does not know how to do this will try to join the company, which by the positions of the bodies shows that it is closed. As a result, members of the company will feel uncomfortable, but a person violating unwritten rules may not even feel it right away.
Secondly, social cognition is interested in how people organize information about society in their minds. A person usually learns information about rules and exceptions, and based on knowledge of general principles can make decisions in non-standard social situations. This is precisely the process of making these decisions and is the subject of research. The specificity of social cognition is that the process of working with such information is not always easy to trace. Therefore, you have to take a lot in the form of hypotheses.
Thirdly, social cognition is studying the process of human search for social information. For example, one will ask a relative, the second will look for information on the Internet, and the third will simply fill out a library card for etiquette in the library. And these differences are also interesting to scientists engaged in the discussed scientific discipline.
Fourth, researchers are very interested in how a person manages the information he receives. After all, you can know a lot - and still make mistake after mistake, making ill-wishers and attracting a lot of criticism.
Recently, particularly serious ties have been formed between this discipline and neuropsychology. That is, the difficulties of a person in communicating with his own kind are considered in connection with studies of the characteristics of the functioning of the brain of the subject. They found that problems with the frontal lobes of the brain almost automatically mean difficulties in the social adaptation of a person. He becomes unable to make sound judgments about relationships between people, and the interactions themselves are hindered.
People with certain mental illnesses are also unable or incapable of working with information about society. Their vision of the world sometimes becomes so changed that it becomes difficult to interact with them conditionally healthy.
Especially interesting for modern researchers are questions about how mental illness is associated with cognitive processes involved in the formation of ideas about life in society. Or, on the contrary, these processes are affected by bad skills and knowledge. One of the signs that predict poor social adaptation is the inability to recognize faces. But it must be clarified that this symptom is diagnosed only for adults, in children the inability to recognize faces can be associated with the late maturation of the corresponding areas of the brain. Scientists argue how this inability can be innate.
Children with Williams syndrome or showing signs of autism are unable to recognize the faces of their loved ones, while normal children learn to do this before they reach the age of one year.
Social cognition is a young field of knowledge, more developed in the West. Perhaps it is you, the reader, who will become one of the first Russian luminaries of this science?