Social cognition

The processes through which people represent other individuals, relationships and groups. Social cognition includes social attribution, emotion recognition and theory of mind, which need not rely on identical mechanisms.

The distinction between what a person does without explicit instruction and what they can do when a relevant strategy is prompted. Differences can reflect attention, motivation, familiarity or control rather than absolute absence of capacity.

Exchange of information, intentions and affect through interaction. Communication success depends on both participants, their shared conventions and the environment.

A proposal associated with Damian Milton that mutual understanding can be difficult across different experiential perspectives. It treats interaction as reciprocal rather than assigning every failure to one participant.

Recognizing or interpreting an observed action, its goal or its significance. Identifying a grasp, inferring a hidden object interaction, judging physical effort and attributing a false belief are different tasks.

Anticipating what an agent will do next using observed movement, context and prior experience. Successful prediction need not require attributing a conscious intention.

Representing the difference between one's own state and another person's state. Affective sharing without this distinction is insufficient to establish empathy as defined here.

Understanding or sharing another person's state while maintaining a self-other distinction. Affective empathy, cognitive empathy, compassion and personal distress should be separated when operationalizing the construct: neural evidence for one component does not automatically explain the others.

A self-focused aversive response to witnessing another's suffering. Personal distress and concern for the other may have different behavioral consequences, even when both accompany an empathic situation.

Concern for another's suffering with an orientation toward helping. Compassion should not be inferred merely from unpleasant arousal or from regional brain activation.

Understanding another person's emotional state or perspective. Cognitive empathy can recruit theory of mind without necessarily producing affective empathy or compassion.

An affective response that shares aspects of another person's state while preserving awareness that the state belongs to the other. This is distinct from simply becoming distressed and from understanding a state without sharing it.

Responses to another person’s pain. Shared affect, inference about the person, self-directed distress and motivation to help require separate measures.

A belief or expectation about characteristics of members of a social group. Its application to a person can ignore relevant individuating information; a stereotype is not identical to an evaluative attitude or discriminatory action.

An account of how observers explain conduct or events by assigning causal importance to personal and situational factors. The diagnosticity of behavior depends on the alternatives available in the actual situation.

Behavior $B$ is evidence for a disposition $D$, given a situation $S$, to the extent that its conditional likelihood ratio $P(B\mid D,S)/P(B\mid \neg D,S)$ differs from one. By Bayes' theorem this ratio multiplies the prior odds to give the posterior odds. If a constraint forces the same behavior regardless of the disposition, the ratio is one and the behavior leaves those odds unchanged. This does not exclude diagnostic information in other features, such as wording or voluntary choices. The argument identifies the assumptions needed to call a dispositional attribution biased.

Revising an initial impression to incorporate additional information about why conduct occurred. A cognitive-load manipulation can test the processing requirements of correction, but a final judgment alone does not establish a mandatory sequence of mental stages.

Underweighting situational determinants relative to personal determinants when explaining behavior. Correspondence bias concerns the more specific inference of a corresponding disposition from observed conduct. Neither term establishes that a particular inference is mistaken without a justified comparison.

A tendency to infer personal characteristics corresponding to observed conduct more strongly than is warranted after relevant situational constraints are considered. Establishing correspondence bias requires a justified benchmark for what the behavior reveals under those constraints. It is not a claim that every dispositional attribution is an error.

An explanation of conduct in terms of circumstances, constraints or incentives. Situational and dispositional contributions can interact rather than constituting mutually exclusive explanations.

An explanation of conduct in terms of a relatively enduring characteristic of the actor, such as an attitude or tendency. A dispositional attribution can be accurate; correspondence bias concerns excessive inference from conduct whose circumstances make it weak evidence.

An inference about the causes of another person's conduct or a social event. Social attribution can assign different weights to dispositional and situational explanations; its accuracy depends on available evidence and justified causal assumptions.

Forming impressions and interpretations of other people from behavior, appearance and context. Observing a movement is different from establishing its intention, cause or emotional meaning.

Inferring an emotional state from cues such as facial expression, voice, behavior and context. Accuracy depends on a justified criterion for the state and on the response alternatives supplied by the task.

Identifying fear from available information, such as facial expressions. Performance depends on which diagnostic features are sampled as well as on how they are interpreted, and need not measure the observer's own subjective fear.^[ref]

A procedure in which an observer selects an emotion interpretation from specified alternatives. Above-chance performance supports discrimination among those alternatives under that task; it does not establish that the same categories would be produced spontaneously without prompting.

The degree to which a person, feature or category captures attention or is readily available for interpretation in a social setting. Salience helps explain what enters a social attribution, but does not by itself determine its causal validity.