Social relationships and groups: New insights on embodied and distributed cognition

Abstract

The field of social psychology – defined by its focus on the social aspects of human cognition and behavior – has in recent years begun to make contact with emerging perspectives in the cognitive sciences generally, especially the themes of embodiment and distributed cognition. This chapter reviews contributions of social psychology in these areas, with a particular focus on the intersection of embodied and distributed cognition. Research regarding embodiment in psychology and cognitive science has generally focused on implications of embodiment for individual-level functioning – for example, on the role of sensori-motor systems in mental representations. But embodied cues also contribute to relational functioning – linking the perceiver to other people – and thereby influence a broad array of social/relational processes, such as liking, interpersonal coordination, and prosocial behavior. In the area of distributed cognition, research in social psychology on group interaction and problem-solving, and in cognitive science on collective search tasks, is now converging on powerful and insightful descriptions of the processes that allow a group to discover good potential solutions without closing off consideration of diverse alternatives. Research in this area has only begun to incorporate the insights of the embodiment principle, which offers interesting and novel hypotheses for potential exploration.