Chapter 33: The social context of cognition
Eliot R. Smith and Frederica R. Conrey
Department of Psychology
Indiana University, Bloomington
esmith4@indiana.edu
Version of 11/3/2005
For Handbook of Situated Cognition
Cognition almost invariably occurs in the context of other people: the web of face-to-face
encounters, personal relationships, and social group memberships that make us who we are. Not
only do these social entities very frequently constitute the content of our thoughts and feelings,
but they fundamentally shape the processes underlying our cognition and behavior as well. To
detail some of the evidence for this broad claim, this chapter describes the interface of situated
cognition with social psychology. We make the case that these two fields focus on many of the
same empirical and conceptual issues, although sometimes taking different perspectives.
Following a brief section that introduces the field of social psychology, the main body of the
chapter is organized under four broad principles that we believe capture major areas of overlap
and common interest between situated cognition and social psychology.
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What is social psychology?
Social psychology is a discrete area of theory and research that represents one of the halfdozen or so main subdisciplines of psychology (e.g., cognitive, clinical, personality,
developmental, social, biological). As such, it has its own scientific journals, conferences,
textbooks, traditions, and distinctive foci of interest. The conceptual focus of social psychology
is the study of human behavior in its social context, or to put it slightly less concisely, the study
of how people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions are influenced by the actual or implied presence
of other people. Some specific areas of research interest that fall within this definition include:
•
Social perception: How people perceive other individuals, interpret their behaviors,
and infer their intentions; the role of social group memberships and group
stereotypes in this process; how people perceive themselves and the influence of the
self-concept on thoughts, emotions, and social behavior.
•
Social influence: How people’s opinions and behavior are influenced by persuasive
messages from others or by conformity processes; how social groups form norms
that in turn regulate group members’ behaviors.
•
Social relationships: How people form close relationships (friendships, romantic
attachments) and how relationships affect thoughts, feelings, and behavior; how
people cooperate with others in groups that interact to make decisions or perform
concrete tasks; when and how people help others or aggress against them.
Social psychology has been greatly influenced by its disciplinary neighbor, cognitive
psychology, both in its methodological preference for controlled laboratory experiments as the
most highly valued research method, and in the focus of most common theories (Jones, 1998).
Social psychological theories for the most part (albeit with important exceptions) are theories
2
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about mental processes that underlie the types of social phenomena outlined above, such as
person perception, social influence, and relationship formation. Of course, mental processes
relevant to social psychology include not only narrowly cognitive processes such as language
comprehension, causal ascription, and problem solving, but also the emotional and motivational
processes that loom large when people interact either in friendly or conflictual ways.
With these characteristic interests and approaches, social psychology frequently finds itself
pulled in two opposing directions. On the one hand, social psychological theories have
frequently been formulated as abstract, disembodied stories about autonomous mental processes,
expressed as “boxologies” with little or no concern for adaptiveness in, or even interfaces with,
real social environments. This is the very approach whose shortcomings, whether realistically
portrayed or caricatured and exaggerated, are so frequently the starting point for rationales and
justifications of the situated cognition approach. As an example, consider social psychological
research on the effects of stereotypes on person perception. Theorists had long assumed that
perception of members of social groups (e.g., women, Asians) inevitably led to activation of
mental representations of generally shared and well-learned stereotypes associated with those
groups, just as perception of words naming common concepts automatically leads to activation
of those concepts. The activation and application of a stereotype is considered an autonomous
cognitive process involving the access and modification of mental representations, taking place
within a perceiver who functions as an uninvolved information-processor, never actually
behaving in the world but simply reporting his or her judgments and opinions. This caricature
represents an almost completely non-situated picture of human cognition.
On the other hand, other forces pull social psychology in exactly the opposite direction,
toward consideration of the situated nature of cognition and behavior. The very definition of
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social psychology states that its ultimate concern is with effects of the social situation or context
on cognition and behavior. This focus has kept the field from going too far down the road of
focusing on autonomous inner processes. The tendency to boxologize the mind has been
tempered by a constant focus on the ways in which personal relationships, group memberships,
and our self-perceptions constrain and facilitate our cognition. In its emphasis on flexible
processing in a social context, social psychology parallels the situated cognition approach in its
focus on cognition as the underpinning of adaptive behavior, and its acknowledgement that
thought is produced by the interaction between the organism and its environment. Social
psychology already embraces many of the central tenets of the situated cognition approach, so
research in social psychology can inform the study of situated cognition more broadly. In the
domain of stereotyping, for instance, recent research has demonstrated, in contrast to the earlier
picture of autonomous and automatic processes, that stereotype activation depends on the
perceiver’s active goals and motives. When perceivers have specific reasons to want to know in
depth about the other person (Fiske & Neuberg, 1987), or when they are motivated to think well
or ill of that person (Sinclair & Kunda, 1999), activated stereotypes can be profoundly altered or
suppressed. Person perception can thus be viewed as socially adaptive (e.g., Gilbert, 1998) and
as a product of the motivational context. Stereotyping and other processes unfold in ways that
facilitate ongoing social interaction, relationship maintenance, and the accomplishment of the
perceiver’s social goals in a given social context, rather than in fixed and invariant style. This
line of research demonstrates the movement in social psychology toward a model of human
social cognition as both situated and adaptive, and suggests ways in which research on social
cognition might inform our understanding of situated cognition more broadly.
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As a way of organizing our description of theory and research within social psychology that
pertains to situated cognition, we adopt four major principles advanced by Smith and Semin
(2004). These are intended to capture four interrelated and partially overlapping themes that are
common to social psychology and situated cognition. The principles are: (a) Cognition is for the
adaptive regulation of action, and mental representations are action-oriented. (b) Cognition is
embodied, both constrained and facilitated by our sensori-motor abilities as well as our brains.
(c) Cognition and action are situated in the sense of being contingent on specific aspects of the
agent’s social environment. (d) Cognition is distributed across brains and the environment and
across social agents (e.g., when information is discussed and evaluated in groups). With regard
to each of these themes, we briefly review and integrate relevant social psychological research.
Cognition is action-oriented
Situated cognition offers the key insight that cognition is for adaptive action, Our minds
evolved for the on-line control of behavior under the demands of survival rather than for
detached puzzle-solving or abstract cogitation. This principle implies the existence of close
connections between cognition, motivation, and action, connections that have been core topics of
study in social psychology. We offer three examples.
1. Motivation shapes cognition. Cognition is generally not neutral and detached, but is
biased by the individual’s motives and goals. Consider a person’s understanding of the meaning
of traits (such as reliable, honest, or intelligent), which are basic components of our impressions
of other people as well as ourselves. Research shows that our definitions of such traits are not
objective and invariant, but are shaped in self-serving ways by our own perceived standings on
those traits (Dunning & Cohen, 1992). As a second example, consider a person who is a member
of two social groups that are stereotyped in opposite ways, such as an African-American (poor,
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unintelligent) and physician (affluent, intelligent). If such an individual delivers praise to a
social perceiver, research shows that features of the positive stereotype are automatically
activated, whereas the delivery of criticism triggers activation of the negative stereotype (Sinclair
& Kunda, 1999). In other words, the motivation to believe praise and disparage criticism tunes
and constrains stereotype activation. A third example: Crowe and Higgins (1997) demonstrated
that people in a promotion focus, those pursuing achievement, commit more errors of
commission than do people in a prevention focus, those pursuing security and responsibility.
That is, promotion-focused people are more willing to commit errors of commission in pursuit of
hits, while prevention-focused people are more willing to commit errors of omission. Finally, the
fundamental human need to belong shapes our social cognition. People experiencing a
heightened need to belong, as after a social rejection, tune their attention and cognition to
process social information in the environment more carefully and thoroughly (Pickett, Gardner,
& Knowles, 2004). These and numerous other examples of biases in cognition caused by the
perceiver’s motivational concerns effectively illustrate how social cognition serves the needs of
adaptive action (Gollwitzer & Bargh, 1996; Sorrentino & Higgins, 1986; Higgins & Sorrentino,
1990; Brewer & Harasty, 1996; Brewer, 1991).
2. Time pressure shapes cognition. Because cognition is for adaptive action, real-world
pressures such as time constraints often impinge on cognitive processes. Social psychology has
a strong tradition of dual process models which specify how and when we use heuristics and
biases to achieve cognitive goals with a minimum of effort, and how and when we employ more
effortful processing (see Smith & DeCoster, 2000 for a review). Carrying on a conversation, for
example, is an instance of social cognition under time pressure – the pragmatic demands of the
situation may limit one’s ability to ponder as deeply as might be desired. It is important to
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recognize that, although heuristic processing has sometimes been portrayed as sloppy or
intrinsically error-prone, it is more fruitfully viewed as adaptive: yielding good-enough results
that satisfy pragmatic constraints of real-life, action-demanding situations (Gigerenzer et al.,
1999).
3. Mental representations are action-oriented. The situated cognition approach suggests
that not only cognitive processing styles but also mental representations should be actionoriented, tuned to the effective and efficient control of action. Social psychological research has
supported this hypothesis as well. The “attitude,” a mental representation specifying a
perceiver’s positive or negative evaluation of an object or concept, has been considered perhaps
the most characteristic and central construct of the field (Allport, 1954). Examples of attitudes
include antipathy toward specific social groups (i.e., prejudice), liking for oneself (i.e., selfesteem), and liking or disliking for consumer products, social policies, or abstract ideas (such as
tax cuts or abortion rights). Attitudes are fundamentally action-oriented representations: Their
main function is to tell the perceiver how to relate to or interact with the object – whether to
approach or avoid it, praise or blame it, cherish or damage it. Research shows that when people
encounter objects toward which they have strong attitudes, the attitude is automatically activated
to color the perception of the object and influence judgments and actions (Fazio et al., 1986).
Our impressions of other people are also action-oriented representations, containing
information about how we behave toward or interact with those others (Carlston, 1994; Baldwin,
1992; Holmes, 2000). In fact, different people with whom the perceiver has the same type of
relationship tend to be confused with each other in memory – to a greater extent even than
different people who share important social characteristics such as age or race – indicating that
mental representations of people are structured by the types of actions they call for rather than by
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their abstract traits or category memberships (Fiske & Haslam, 1996).
In summary, social psychologists have enthusiastically endorsed the notion that cognition is
oriented toward adaptive action (Fiske, 1992), and much research has spelled out concrete
implications of this principle in such areas as motivated biases in cognition, effects of time
pressure on cognitive processes, and the action-oriented nature of attitudes and other mental
representations.
Cognition is embodied
An emphasis on action as the goal of cognitive activity suggests the importance of the
body – the vehicle of all action – as a constraint on cognition. Thus, a second major theme of
situated cognition is that bodily states and sensori-motor representations play an important role
in all cognition. This issue has been explored in at least two domains within social psychology.
1. Sensori-motor aspects of mental representations. Attitudes, mental representations
involving evaluations of objects, have close connections to sensori-motor systems related to
approach and avoidance. For instance, muscle movements involving approach and avoidance
have been shown to influence evaluative judgments of novel objects (e.g., Cacioppo, Priester, &
Berntson, 1993). Muscle movements associated with pulling an object closer lead to more
positive judgments, while those associated with pushing away lead to negative judgments. Other
studies (Neumann & Strack, 2000) present words on a computer screen over a background of a
rotating spiral pattern. Rotation in one direction gives an appearance that one is moving toward
the screen, while rotation in the other direction generates the appearance of moving away. When
the screen appears to be moving closer, people can classify positive words more quickly, and
when the screen appears to be moving further away, negative words receive faster responses.
These and similar findings suggest that attitudes or evaluations are not just "in the head" but
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involve the perceiver's whole body, being linked to movement toward or away from objects in a
real physical sense.
Going beyond attitudes, Schubert (2004) showed that making a fist influences people’s
automatic processing of words related to the concept of power, suggesting that even such a
highly abstract concept involves motoric elements in its representation. Recent research by
Livingston and Brewer (2002) as well as by Blair et al. (2002) shows that stereotyping is not
purely a matter of the application of abstract knowledge about the characteristics of various
social groups, but has strong perceptual elements as well. Stereotypes applied to a given person
are affected by that person’s continuously varying perceptual attributes (such as skin tone and
facial features) as well as by his or her discrete category membership.
Finally, in a broad theoretical paper, Niedenthal et al. (2005) apply Barsalou’s (1999) model
of perceptual symbol systems, sensori-motor based representations, to various types of
representations studied in social psychology including attitudes, social judgment, and emotions.
The Perceptual Symbol Systems model proposes that knowledge is represented by perceptual
“simulators:” mechanisms in the mind that simulate multiple variations on the perceptual
experience associated with a cognitive object. For instance, the system stores information about
the perceptual experience of a cat’s purr, the feeling of its fur, the appearance of its movements,
etc., and can reproduce the core aspects of these experiences in the mind to afford categorization,
imagination, planning, etc. Barrett (2005) offers a more detailed and specific account of how
embodied conceptual knowledge combines with affective states to produce the experience of
emotion, also applying Barsalou’s model.
2. Perception-behavior links.
William James (1890) was among the first in psychology to
study the “ideomotor” or perception-behavior link. Recent work in diverse areas of psychology
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and neuroscience, at both the neural (Rizzolatti & Arbib, 1998) and behavioral (Dimberg et al.,
2000) levels, confirms that motor processes are integral to perception. Within social psychology,
research suggests that subtle activation of a concept such as “polite” through reading words.
related to that concept actually influences people’s overt behavior, making them act more polite.
In a similar way, exposure to the concept of the elderly causes people to walk more slowly – that
is, to behave in a way that is consistent with stereotypes about that social group (Bargh, Chen &
Burrows, 1996). People naturally tend to imitate the expressive or incidental behaviors of other
people when they interact with them, and this type of imitation generally leads to increased
liking (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999). All these effects show that action-oriented representations of
behaviors are recruited as we perceive other people. In other words, we use our bodies in the
process of social perception.
Cognition is situated
Cognition has sometimes been understood as implemented by abstract, amodal
informational processes that proceed within an organism, isolated from the larger context except
for a narrow set of defined “inputs” and “outputs.” The situated cognition approach, of course,
rejects this picture of autonomous, context-free inner processes in favor of a view of an
organism as involved in intensive moment-to-moment interaction with its environment. As we
discussed above, the physical body plays an important role in constraining and affording social
cognition, but other aspects of the immediate physical and psychological environment are also
important. Again, social psychology, by definition, is concerned with the influence of the
situation on cognition. However, a view of cognition as infinitely flexible and responsive to the
situation lacks predictive power, unless we can identify those features of the environment that
are most important in determining the course of cognition. Social psychology’s perspective
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suggests that many of the most important features of the cognitive context are not physical but
social. The immediate, interactive conversational context, our relationships with other
individuals, and our broader memberships in social groups represent three levels of interpersonal
context in which cognition and action are situated.
1. Communicative context. Because social interaction is so complex and so fundamental to
our experience, the immediate context, whether we are physically alone or with others, is often a
communicative context. As a result, some of the most pervasive and most impactful factors that
shape our cognition are norms of communication. Extremely subtle situational cues, if they
signal communicative relevance of different contents, have been found to influence behavior and
cognition. In social psychology, one well-replicated finding is that people explain others’
behavior in terms of the actors’ inner personality characteristics, wants, or beliefs rather than in
terms of the demands of social situations (Gilbert, 1998). This tendency has been viewed as
automatic, fundamental, linked to the properties of abstract mental processes (Ross, 1977). Yet
in one experiment, participants asked to provide causal explanations for a social event on a
questionnaire headed “Institute for Personality Research" provided more personal and fewer
situational explanations than did participants asked to explain the same phenomena for the
“Institute for Social Research" (Norenzayan & Schwarz, 1999). These participants provided
explanations that were relevant in the specific social context: a communication with a particular
type of researcher. The cooperative norms of communication (Grice, 1975) require a constantly
evolving representation of the goals of the self and of the other people in the interaction. A
smooth completion of the interaction relies on the participants' ability to attend to the context,
and to select and provide situationally appropriate contributions.
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2. Relational context. Beyond general communicative norms, our relationships with
specific individuals have important implications for how we process social information.
Research on close relationships, for instance, reveals the somewhat unsurprising result that we
tend to idealize our close others. People’s perceptions of their partners’ attributes are closer to
the attributes they believe would be ideal than to their partners’ actual attributes as indicated by
the partner’s own self-reports. This bias is socially adaptive: the more we idealize our partners—
the more inaccurate we are in perceiving their characteristics—the more satisfied we are with
our relationships (Murray, Holmes, & Griffin, 1996). We defend our relationships not only by
thinking of our partners as better than they are but by thinking of our alternatives as worse than
they are. For example, students in committed heterosexual relationships rate opposite sex targets
as less attractive than do their single counterparts (Simpson, Gangestad, & Lerma, 1990).
Personal relationships regulate cognitive and behavioral processes in other ways as well.
Just as owners come to resemble their dogs (Roy & Christenfeld, 2004), we come to resemble
our partners psychologically. People tend to choose romantic partners and friends who are
already similar to themselves (Luo & Klohnen, 2005), and they also tend to grow closer to their
significant others in their attitudes (Davis & Rusbult, 2001). We are also much more likely to be
persuaded by people we like than by people we dislike (Cialdini, 1993).
While they have been intensively studied, romantic relationships are not the only
relationships that influence cognition. In fact, all the people we interact with affect us in some
way. Romantic relationships are generally positive and lasting, but more immediate and less
positive relationships, such as power relationships, also influence cognition. White women
assigned the role of superior in a group interaction with Black women exhibit more racial bias
than do White women assigned to the subordinate role (Richeson & Ambady, 2003). Positions in
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the power hierarchy with respect to other individuals affect not only how we think of them but
also how we act toward them. These findings illustrate how cognition and action are influenced
not only by the physical context in which we perform them but also by the specific individuals
with whom we perform them.
3. Group context. The point that our place in the social context is fundamental to our
cognition is further emphasized by the extensive literature on effects of social group
memberships. The social context is made up not only of our relationships with specific others but
also the groups we identify with (Turner et al., 1987), termed “social identities”. Social groups
establish norms, or standards for correct and appropriate beliefs, opinions, and behaviors. For
example, it may be appropriate to talk about one’s salary woes among a group of friends but not
with co-workers. Other norms dictate that men and women ought to differ in their interest in
sports or their emotional expressiveness. Such norms influence our behavior all the time,
whether other members of the groups are physically present or not. When a social identity is
activated by situational reminders of membership or by our own intentional thought, we tend to
conform to that group’s norms. For example, Baldwin, Carrell, and Lopez (1990) studied
Roman Catholic college students and found that their attitudes and behaviors reported when a
photo of the Pope was visible on the wall were more consistent with their religious norms,
compared to those of similar students who reported them when no photo was present. Our
important group memberships, potentially activated by subtle situational cues, regulate our social
attitudes and behavior.
Social identities serve as much more than guides to our own appropriate behavior,
however. Because an identity is a group membership that we share with some people but not
others, it divides the world into ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and shapes how we think about and behave
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toward other people. People on the ‘us’ side of the line, fellow group members, become better
liked (Mullen, Brown, & Smith, 1992). We make positive attributions for their behaviors
(Pettigrew, 1979), and we treat them better—more fairly and altruistically (Turner, et al, 1987).
Furthermore, just as we tend to think like our significant relationship partners, we tend to think
like members of our in-groups. We are more easily persuaded by in-group than by out-group
members (Mackie, Worth, & Asuncion, 1990), and we share emotions (Smith, 1993) and
attitudes (Norton, Monin, Cooper, & Hogg, 2003) with members of the in-group. We also
assume that they are similar to us (Robbins & Krueger, 2005).
People on the ‘them’ side, out-group members, are seen as homogenous (Judd & Park,
1988), and as quite different from ‘us’ (Robbins & Krueger, 2005). They are also seen as
competitors rather than cooperators, and are likely to become the targets of discrimination
(Brewer, 1979). Both being a member of an in-group (Tesser, 1988), and discriminating against
an outgroup can make us feel better about ourselves (Rubin & Hewstone, 1998). Thus, any
activated social identity is an aspect of the social situation that can have profound consequences
for how we think and behave, and how we treat the people we interact with. Importantly, other
group members need not be physically present for our in-group identities to form an important,
perhaps a fundamental, part of the social context in which our cognition and behavior are
situated.
Cognition is situated; sometimes this is taken to mean that it is almost infinitely flexible
and responsive to the physical and psychological context. This flexibility sometimes makes it
difficult to predict exactly how the infinitely variable context will change how we think and
behave. A social psychological perspective identifies precisely which features of the
environment are particularly important (those that are relevant to immediate conversational
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contexts, ongoing interpersonal relationships, or social group memberships) and allows
understanding of how those features shape cognition and action.
Cognition is distributed
Our final theme is that cognition is distributed: not contained within minds, but implemented
by systems that link minds with aspects of the physical and social environment. In other words,
cognition is often enabled by information-processing loops that pass through the outside world as
well as the mind, via perceptual and motor processes. One familiar illustration of distributed
cognition is the fact that most of us would have great difficulty multiplying two 3-digit numbers
in our heads, but do it with ease given a pencil and paper. As we manipulate symbols, these
external resources become part of an overall cognitive system, functioning as memory storage,
offering cues for what digits to process next, and so on.
Treatments of distributed cognition, like this example, have typically focused on how
cognition is enabled and scaffolded by features of the physical environment. For example, Kirsch
(1995) discussed ways in which we utilize space to facilitate cognitive performance, and
Hutchins (1995) focused on how pilots’ perceptual systems and minds interact with the design
and layout of cockpit instruments to track the speed of airplanes. While some work arising from
the situated cognition tradition has examined the way cognition is shared across teams (Hutchins,
1991), group interaction and decision-making has been a central focus of research within social
psychology. And in reality, while cognition can certainly be distributed across objects and the
physical environment, much of our distributed cognition is actually distributed across other
people. Such a distribution occurs whenever people establish and maintain a socially shared
system of meaning. While this idea has taken many forms in social psychology (see Thompson,
& Fine, 1999 for a review), the ideas that people use symbols such as language to facilitate
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interaction and that meanings are dynamically constructed and shared in groups have been
driving forces in the study of group cognition in recent years.
1. Distributed cognition in groups. Modern societies rely on committees such as boards,
juries, and management teams to do a great deal of their important thinking: making decisions,
managing projects, and developing new ideas. This reliance reflects the idea that group
cognition should always be more effective than individual cognition: members of a committee
can correct each others’ errors, recall relevant information that others cannot, and in general
reach more adaptive final decisions. Yet research shows that group performance is frequently
worse than that of an equal number of individuals working independently (Levine & Moreland,
1998). What properties of socially distributed cognition account for this pattern? Might
distributed cognition offer advantages in any situation? In fact, the literature on group
performance has demonstrated that individual minds and interacting groups display many similar
properties.
One broad conclusion is that groups tend to show enhanced versions of the very same
biases that affect individuals (Hinsz, Vollrath, & Tindale, 1997). Individuals tend to ignore base
rate information, over-rely on information about representativeness (Argote, Devadas, and
Melone,1990), and escalate commitment to an action once it has been chosen (Whyte, 1993), but
all of these effects tend to be even stronger in groups than in individuals. Individuals also tend to
demonstrate a confirmation bias in information processing: They particularly like and attend to
information that is consistent with the information or opinions they already have (e.g., Frey,
1986). Similarly, groups have a tendency to attend more to members whose opinions are
consistent with the group’s existing opinion. The impact of each member’s opinion decreases as
a function of the distance between that opinion and the average opinion of the group (Davis,
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1996). Ultimately this process can lead to a destructive uniformity of opinions within the group,
to the disregard of relevant evidence, possibly leading to what has been termed “groupthink”
(Janis, 1997). The difference between group thinking and individual thinking, then, is generally
a matter of degree. Rather than groups being able to correct individual biases, the general
findings suggest that groups exaggerate those biases.
Gigone and Hastie (1997) offer a different perspective that also suggests groups and
individuals can be thought of in fundamentally similar ways. In their model, individuals come to
a group discussion with specific items of evidence or information relevant to a decision, and
function as information integrators, combining the implications of those items to arrive at their
individual opinions. In turn, group discussion of the issue allows the individual opinions to be
integrated into the overall group decision. Gigone and Hastie (1997) do not find that group
discussion adds any extra value or emergent quality to the group decision, besides the simple
integration of individual opinions. Their studies show that the effects of informational items on
the final group decisions are entirely mediated by the opinions of the individual members before
any discussion took place. Like the research on biases discussed above, this research suggests
that there is little qualitative difference between individual and group-based cognition, with both
functioning essentially as simple information integrators.
2. Distributed memory in groups. Despite the fact that cognition distributed across groups
is not necessarily better or more accurate than individual cognition, there is no denying that we
do distribute our cognition across other people all the time. Rather than remembering things for
ourselves, many of us store information about who knows information or has skills that we might
need. In effect, we keep much of our memory in other people’s heads. Wegner (1986) called this
phenomenon ‘transactive memory’. Transactive memory has been demonstrated to have
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important consequences for group performance. For example, training groups together so that
they form a robust transactive memory system tends to lead to better group performance,
compared to training group members separately and then bringing them together (Moreland &
Myakovsky, 2000). Transactive memory thus represents one potential mechanism by which
groups might be able to attain better performance than a similar number of isolated individuals, if
its benefits outweigh the increased processing biases characteristic of group cognition.
Our understanding of group-level cognition obviously owes much to our knowledge of
individual-level cognition. But the reverse is equally true: Distributed cognition, or cognition in
groups, has important implications for individual-level cognition. In humans, conscious thought
shares important features with group discussion. First, it is mediated and structured by language
and therefore is influenced by the socially shared meaning inherent in our linguistic structures.
Second, intra-personal thinking, like conversation, is temporally constrained; just as only one
person in a group can express an idea at once, we can only explicitly think one thing at a time.
Finally and most importantly, it has been argued that individual-level thought follows
developmentally from interpersonal communication, which is prior and primary (Vygotsky,
1962/1986). Socially distributed cognition precedes conscious reasoning, so thinking (holding
conversations with ourselves) owes much to our ability to have conversations with other people.
From this perspective, it is less insightful to say that group cognition is like individual cognition
than it is to observe that individual thinking is a lot like thinking in groups. Extending our
understanding of how distributed cognition operates between people should inform our
understanding of individual thought.
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Conclusion
As we hope this chapter has made clear, the topics studied by social psychologists overlap to
a considerable degree with those that have interested researchers in the situated cognition
perspective. The four themes that organized the discussion in this chapter reflect major points of
convergence and agreement between these two areas. The two areas also share historical roots.
The fundamental ideas of the situated cognition movement go back in various forms to Dewey,
Mead, and particularly William James and Frederick Bartlett. These same individuals are
considered as important forebears of social psychology, precisely because of the similar concerns
of that field with the social situation and its effects on cognition and behavior.
Nevertheless, despite this convergence of interests, it is striking how little interchange there
has been between these two areas to date. For example, Edwin Hutchins (a cognitive
anthropologist) insightfully described distributed cognition in a navigation team (1995), but
totally without citations to highly relevant work from social psychology on group processes,
team performance, or transactive memory. Many similar examples exist of researchers from
cognitive science, anthropology, or other disciplinary areas investigating topics such as those
discussed in this chapter, evidently without realizing that extensive, highly applicable bodies of
theory and empirical findings exist within social psychology. On the other side of the fence,
social psychologists often continue to develop and apply abstract, disembodied, non-situated
information processing models, with little evident awareness of the powerful critiques of such
models that have been offered within the situated cognition movement.
A few instances of productive interchange between these fields are beginning to emerge.
Semin and Smith (2002) and Smith and Semin (2004) offered descriptions of the overlapping
interests of the fields, and as noted above specific models deriving from situated cognition (e.g.,
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Barsalou’s model of “simulators” as mental representations) are currently being applied within
social psychology (Niedenthal et al., 2005; Barrett, 2006). Increased interchange of this sort
seems highly desirable in view of the two fields’ similar substantive and conceptual concerns.
Social psychology may offer one insight above all others to readers interested in situated
cognition. That is its emphasis on the social context of behavior – the fact that human behavior
in general takes place in, and is adapted to, a rich and complex network of group memberships,
personal relationships, social motives, and the socially constituted self. This view represents a
valuable supplement to the typical focus on behavior as situated in the physical environment
(e.g., Kirsh, 1995). Finally and more concretely, the bodies of empirical and theoretical work in
social psychology reviewed in this chapter may be helpful in enriching researchers’ thinking
about the nature of situated cognition in general.
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