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 half-

dozen 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
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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 action-

oriented, 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., self-

esteem), 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.,
 Social psych/sit cognition 3/22/06 version 20

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.

 Social psych/sit cognition 3/22/06 version 21

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