Social Cognition

Social cognition, the process whereby individual and collective actors make sense of their world, is broad in its theoretical reach. Initially concerned with individual cognition, emphasizing how people create and use knowledge structures to navigate their social context, social cognition has widened to the macro level, and the shared, distributed and collective understandings that are both mental models and cultural tools of sensemaking . Thus, social cognition describes not only the social embeddedness of cognition but the social nature of cognition. We review the ways in which the relationship between the social and the cognitive has been theorized.