Socially Situated Cognition: Cognition in its Social Context

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter proposes a new integration of social psychology and situated cognition—that is, socially situated cognition (SSC). This new approach rests directly on recent developments in psychology and cognitive science captured by the label situated cognition. It highlights four core assumptions that are common to social psychology and the situated cognition perspective: Cognition is for the adaptive regulation of action, and mental representations are action oriented; cognition is embodied, drawing on our sensorimotor abilities and environments as well as human brains; cognition and action are the emergent outcome of dynamic processes of interaction between an agent and an environment; and cognition is distributed across brains and the environment and across social agents. With regard to each of these themes, the chapter reviews and integrates relevant social psychological research and suggests ways in which the theme can be advanced by rethinking current assumptions. The overall goals are to make social psychology part of the interdisciplinary integration emerging around the concept of situated cognition, and to advance these four themes as high-level conceptual principles that can organize seemingly disparate areas of research and theory within social psychology itself.