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Contextualizing person perception: distributed social cognition.

Eliot R Smith1, Elizabeth C Collins

  • 1Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405-7007, USA. esmith4@indiana.edu

Psychological Review
|April 8, 2009
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Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

This study explores social perception beyond individual cognition, examining how social networks shape impressions. It introduces a model of distributed social cognition across individual, dyadic, and network levels.

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Area of Science:

  • Social Psychology
  • Cognitive Science
  • Computational Social Science

Background:

  • Traditional person perception research focuses on individual cognitive processes.
  • This study emphasizes the social construction and transmission of impressions through social networks.
  • The socially situated cognition perspective highlights the importance of social context.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To propose a theoretical model of distributed social cognition.
  • To integrate individual, dyadic, and social network levels in person perception.
  • To explore how social networks influence and are influenced by impression formation.

Main Methods:

  • Development of a theoretical model of distributed social cognition.
  • Examination of three levels: individual perceiver, dyad, and social network.
  • Multiagent simulation to model a subset of these social perception processes.

Main Results:

  • Perceivers actively elicit and interpret information in interactions.
  • Information is obtained from third-party sources within social networks.
  • Simulation results support the proposed model of social information flow.

Conclusions:

  • Distributed social cognition offers a framework for understanding person perception.
  • The model has implications for correcting biases in social perception.
  • Understanding social networks is crucial for the nature of mental representations of persons.