Social Cognition 2.0: Toward Mechanistic Theorizing

Abstract

Social cognition emerged in the 1970s and 80s as an attempt to answer social-psychological questions by adopting experimental techniques and theoretical concepts from cognitive psychology. Recently, cognitive psychologists began to build complementary bridges between cognitive and social psychology by showing increasing interest in the cognitive implications of social situations. Here, we take a closer look at the remaining obstacles to join cognitive and social perspectives on human behavior. Using conformity as an example, we attempt to demonstrate that the social-cognition approach has been successful in adopting cognitive concepts and experimental methods, but is still lagging behind with respect to (1) mechanistic theorizing, as it often engages in merely describing phenomena in terms of reasons rather than explaining it in terms of causes and (2) reflecting the sociohistorical context of the phenomenon under investigation. As we try to show, developing mechanistic theories for social phenomena, including the effects of individual differences and their sociohistorical dependencies, is not only possible but necessary to eliminate the boundaries between cognitive and social accounts of human behavior.

An event-coding account of attitudes

“…Hence, tackling this empirical challenge will require considerable ethical sensitivity and experimental sophistication. Nevertheless, the present findings support the idea that non-social cognitive theory can account for the mechanisms underlying social behavior (Kim & Hommel, 2019 ). We believe that using a mechanistically elaborate and transparent theory to account for social phenomena stimulates theorizing and exploiting experimental paradigms across domains and sub-disciplinary borders.…”

“…This arguably accounts for substantial portions of the current "replication crisis" that has hit the field of social cognition particularly hard (e.g., Cairo et al, 2020). Kim and Hommel (2019) have suggested reviving the original ambition of the socialcognition approach to make use of both cognitive methods and cognitive theorizing (see also Amodio, 2019), and argued that the Theory of Event Coding (TEC: Hommel, Müsseler, Aschersleben, & Prinz, 2001) might be particularly suitable as a framework and theoretical toolbox for systematically developing cognitive theories of social phenomena. First attempts have successfully used TEC to account for some aspects of social behavior, like conformity (Kim & Hommel, 2015), trust (Hommel & Colzato, 2015), and self-other integration (Colzato et al, 2013), and the aim of the present study was to see whether TEC might also help to understand how human attitudes, opinions, and preferences are acquired and cognitively represented.…”

Embodied self-other overlap in romantic love: a review and integrative perspective

“…Second, by considering another (though limited) body of literature on the cognitive consequences of romantic love, we propose to apply a recent extension of TEC, the metacontrol state model (MSM; Hommel, 2015Hommel, , 2019, to explain how potential positive effects of self-other overlap may promote a mode of cognitive processing that in return would favor integration of self-other representations. Our objective is thus to offer an integrative view of the causes and consequences of self-other bodily overlap in romantic love (Figure 1) and to describe the cognitive mechanisms that are involved at a level that is more mechanistic than previous accounts (Kim & Hommel, 2019).…”

Beyond speaking: neurocognitive perspectives on language production in social interaction

“…In order to develop a theoretical account of language production in social interaction it is necessary to integrate our understanding of language production with our understanding of how people understand others' intentions and mental state and how multiple actors coordinate their behaviour and mental states in social interactions more generally. Indeed, in recent years these formerly separate research areas have grown together as cognitive psychologists are becoming increasingly interested in social settings; and social psychologists are becoming increasingly interested in cognitive accounts for social behaviour [177].…”