Cognition in a social context: A new approach to emergent phenomena
Type
Article
Abstract
The formation of collective memories, emotions and beliefs is a fundamental characteristic of human communities. These emergent outcomes are thought to occur due to a dynamical system of communicative interactions among individuals. But despite recent psychological research on collective phenomena, no programmatic framework to explore the processes involved in their formation exists. Here, we propose a social-interactionist approach that bridges cognitive and social psychology to illuminate how micro-level cognitive phenomena give rise to large-scale social outcomes. It involves first establishing the boundary conditions of cognitive phenomena, then investigating how cognition is influenced by the social context in which it is manifested, and finally studying how dyadic-level influences propagate in social networks. This approach has the potential to (1) illuminate the large-scale consequences of well- established cognitive phenomena, (2) lead to interdisciplinary dialogues between psychology and the other social sciences and (3) be more relevant for public policy than existing approaches.
Publication Status
In Press
Journal
Current Directions in Psychological Science