社會認(rèn)知是心理學(xué)各分支的一個分支，它關(guān)注的是人們?nèi)绾翁幚?、存儲和?yīng)用關(guān)于他人和社會情境的信息。它關(guān)注的是認(rèn)知過程在社會互動中的作用更嚴(yán)格地說，社會認(rèn)知指的是人們?nèi)绾翁幚硗N(同種成員)甚至跨物種(如寵物)的信息，包括四個階段:編碼、存儲、檢索和處理。在社會心理學(xué)領(lǐng)域，社會認(rèn)知是指運(yùn)用認(rèn)知心理學(xué)方法和信息加工理論對這些過程進(jìn)行研究的一種具體方法。根據(jù)這一觀點(diǎn)，社會認(rèn)知是一個層次的分析，目的是通過調(diào)查社會心理現(xiàn)象背后的認(rèn)知過程來了解社會心理現(xiàn)象。該方法的主要關(guān)注點(diǎn)是涉及社會刺激的感知、判斷和記憶的過程;社會和情感因素對信息加工的影響以及認(rèn)知過程對行為和人際關(guān)系的影響。這種層次的分析可以應(yīng)用于社會心理學(xué)的任何內(nèi)容領(lǐng)域，包括對個人內(nèi)部、人際關(guān)系、團(tuán)隊(duì)內(nèi)部和群體間過程的研究。“社會認(rèn)知”一詞已在心理學(xué)和認(rèn)知神經(jīng)科學(xué)的多個領(lǐng)域得到應(yīng)用，最常指自閉癥、[3]型精神分裂癥和其他疾病中被破壞的各種社會能力。認(rèn)知神經(jīng)科學(xué)研究了社會認(rèn)知的生物學(xué)基礎(chǔ)。發(fā)展心理學(xué)家研究社會認(rèn)知能力的發(fā)展

Social cognition is a sub-topic of various branches of psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions.[1]More technically, social cognition refers to how people deal with conspecifics (members of the same species) or even across species (such as pet) information, include four stages: encoding, storage, retrieval, and processing. In the area of social psychology, social cognition refers to a specific approach in which these processes are studied according to the methods of cognitive psychology and information processing theory. According to this view, social cognition is a level of analysis that aims to understand social psychological phenomena by investigating the cognitive processes that underlie them.[2] The major concerns of the approach are the processes involved in the perception, judgment, and memory of social stimuli; the effects of social and affective factors on information processing; and the behavioral and interpersonal consequences of cognitive processes. This level of analysis may be applied to any content area within social psychology, including research on intrapersonal, interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup processes.The term social cognition has been used in multiple areas in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, most often to refer to various social abilities disrupted in autism,[3] schizophrenia[4] and other disorders.[5] In cognitive neuroscience the biological basis of social cognition is investigated.[6][7][8] Developmental psychologists study the development of social cognition abilities.[9]