Social cognition: the Western approach

People have different abilities. With this it is difficult to argue. Most differences in skills and abilities are difficult to detect. However, the lack of talent in the sphere, which studies social cognition, can be seen immediately. If the knowledge and skills in the field of interaction in society are insufficient for a person, he is perceived as ill-mannered, strange, unadapted.

What is social cognition? This is a special sphere of knowledge that deals with the study of the laws by which people as a whole tend to work with information about society. First, it deals with the knowledge of how people decrypt and encrypt data about social ties. A person who does not know how to do this will try to join the company, which by the provisions of the bodies shows that it is closed. As a result, the members of the company feel uncomfortable, but the person who violates the unwritten rules can not even feel it right away.

Secondly, social cognition is interested in how people organize information about the society in their minds. A person usually learns information about rules and exceptions and, based on knowledge of general principles, can make decisions in non-standard social situations. That's exactly the process of making these decisions and is the subject of research. The specificity of social cognition is that the process of working with such information is not always easy to follow. Because you have to take a lot in the form of hypotheses.

Thirdly, social cognition is engaged in the study of the process of human search for social information. For example, one will ask a relative, the second will search for information on the Internet, and the third will simply fill in the library with a card for the book on etiquette. And these differences are also interesting to scientists engaged in the scientific discipline under discussion.

Fourthly, researchers are very interested in how a person manages the information he has received. After all, you can know a lot - and still make a mistake after a mistake, gaining ill-wishers and attracting a lot of criticism.

Recently, particularly serious links have been formed between this discipline and neuropsychology. That is, the complexity of a person in dealing with their own kind is considered in connection with the research of the features of the brain's functioning of the subject. They found that problems with frontal lobes of the brain almost automatically mean difficulties in social adaptation of a person. He becomes incapable of making sound judgments about the connections between people, and the interactions themselves are hampered.

People with certain mental illnesses are also incapable or incapable of working with information about society. Their vision of the world sometimes becomes so changed that it is not easy to interact with them conditionally healthy.

Of particular interest to modern researchers are the questions of how mental illnesses are associated with cognitive processes involved in shaping perceptions of life in society. Or these processes, on the contrary, are affected by bad skills and knowledge. One of the signs that allow us to predict bad social adaptation is the inability to recognize faces. But we need to clarify that this symptom is diagnosed only for adults, in children the inability to recognize the face can be associated with the late maturation of the corresponding zones of the brain. Scientists argue how much this inability can be congenital.

Children with Williams syndrome or exhibiting signs of autism are unable to recognize the faces of their relatives, while normal children learn to do this before reaching the age of one year.

Social knowledge is a young field of knowledge, more developed in the West. Perhaps, it is you, the reader, who will be among the first domestic stars in this science?