Social cognition (1)

Professor Christian Keysers explains that social cognition is a widely used term to describe how people relate to each other.

So social cognition is a term is used quite broadly in the field to describe any kind of mental operation where the object of the operation is not just some inanimate object, but another human being. So for instance if I tried to understand whether my wife is happy or sad, that would be social cognition; if I’m trying to understand when I’m giving a talk whether I’m having a good impact on the audience, that would be social cognition. But also simply sitting at home and thinking what kind of research direction would be fascinating for the people in the future would be social cognition. So really a lot of the functions that make humans so successful, namely the capacity to cooperate with other people and to compete with other people, are intimately linked with social cognition.