A new look at social cognition in groups

Discusses socially shared cognition based upon R. B. Zajonc and P. K. Adelmann's (1987) concept of group meaning. Zajonc and Adelmann identified 5 levels of meaning: cultural, dyadic, interactional, individual, and unconscious. Three types of research in the evolution of social cognition are discussed: social cognition, contextualized social cognition, and socially shared cognition. Type I research, social cognition, examines how the individual perceiver processes social information (e.g., the study of person memory, scripts, and schemata in which an S reads a description of persons and is given a recall test to infer mental structures or processing. Type II, contextualized social cognition, examines how the individual perceiver, embedded in a particular social context, cognizes about social actors and situations. Type III, socially shared cognition research, examines how the social context in which the individual interacts with others produces cognition (the social interaction constitutes cognition).