The social life of cognition

•Social psychology has a long history of examining cognitive phenomena.•Social cognition relies on unique concepts and unique processes.•Communication influences language acquisition, categorization, learning, and memory.•Future research on social cognition should integrate computational analyses.

We begin by illustrating that long before the cognitive revolution, social psychology focused on topics pertaining to what is now known as social cognition: people’s subjective interpretations of social situations and the concepts and cognitive processes underlying these interpretations. We then examine two questions: whether social cognition entails characteristic concepts and cognitive processes, and how social processes might themselves shape and constrain cognition. We suggest that social cognition relies heavily on generic cognition but also on unique concepts (e.g., agent, intentionality) and unique processes (e.g., projection, imitation, joint attention). We further suggest that social processes play a prominent role in the development and unfolding of several generic cognitive processes, including learning, attention, and memory. Finally, we comment on the prospects of a recently developing approach to the study of social cognition (social neuroscience) and two potential future directions (computational social cognition and social–cognitive robotics).