A Relational Approach to Cognition: Shared Experience and Relationship Affirmation in Social Cognition

Social psychology is poised to realize the synthesis envisioned in the “The Sovereignty of Social Cognition” by the late Thomas Ostrom (1984), who defined social cognition as “the struggle to understand the interdependence between cognition and social behavior.” In so doing, Ostrom broke from contemporary definitions of social cognition, which in the 1960s and 1970s was defined as the study of cognition about social objects and since the early 1980s has been defined as the study of the cognitive bases of social perception and behavior (cf. Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Heider, 1958; Kelley, 1967). Although Ostrom celebrated the identification of cognitive foundations of social behavior, he lamented the lack of research on social foundations of cognition. However, it can no longer be said that the social bases of cognition have been ignored. Indeed the recent decade has witnessed a blossoming interest in how social relationships affect even very basic information processing (e.g., Baldwin & Sinclair, 1996; Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Higgins, 1992; Jost & Banaji, 1994; Leary, 1995; Markus & Kitayama 1991; Schwarz, 1994; Steele & Aronson, 1995; Tice, 1992).