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.