Social Cognition

Successful communication requires much more than sending and receiving linguistic and nonlinguistic cues. Individuals must also have at least rudimentary knowledge about how people express and interpret intention. Communication researchers who study social cognition investigate how such knowledge is developed and organized and also how it influences human behavior. Although communication scholars have long recognized that cognitive processes play a key role in creating and responding to messages, not much research focused directly on social cognition until the late 1970s, when scholars began to adopt theories used by social psychologists to study how people make sense of others. Initial interest in social cognition was primarily among researchers studying interpersonal communication, but over time social cognition perspectives have been used to study persuasion, small-group decision making, organizational socialization, mass media effects, computer-mediated communication, and cross-cultural communication. Although most social cognition theories remain derivative of those developed by social psychologists, some communication researchers have developed their own perspectives, and perspectives from other fields and disciplines have been imported. The critical mass of social cognition scholars is sufficient enough that they organized a Communication and Social Cognition division within the National Communication Association.