Social psychology has a unique position among the sciences. It is placed. Socially Situated Cognition as a Bridge

CHAPTER 21 Socially Situated Cognition as a Bridge Eliot R. Smith Indiana University, Bloomington, USA Gün R. Semin Free University Amsterdam, the N...
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21 Socially Situated Cognition as a Bridge Eliot R. Smith Indiana University, Bloomington, USA

Gün R. Semin Free University Amsterdam, the Netherlands

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ocial psychology has a unique position among the sciences. It is placed at the intersection of the psychological (the universe of mental processes inside the head) and the social (the external universe of interpersonal interactions and group ties). In principle, this position gives us as a field an unusual perspective, because our research practices and conceptual models have to take both of these levels into account. Obviously, though, this is a statement of an ideal that is not always attained in practice. Over the last few decades, social psychology has been pervasively influenced by the social cognition perspective, so that cognitive (psychological, inside the head) models have been dominant in virtually every area. Although extensive lines of research focus on interpersonal and group interaction, even these phenomena are generally explained in terms of the interactants’ inner mental representations and processes. This meta-theoretical approach has a long history in social psychology, going back into the early and middle parts of the 20th century, as far as the gestalt perspective (e.g., Lewin; Festinger; Heider). More recently, since the “cognitive revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s, our field has shared many assumptions with our neighboring discipline, cognitive psychology, including a number of basic postulates that define what could be called the cognitive/ computational perspective (Newell, Simon, & Shaw, 1972; Vera & Simon, 1993). These include, for example: 145

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1. Information processing is abstract, involving computation, defined as the manipulation of textlike symbols. 2. For understanding cognition, central information-processing mechanisms are fundamental, whereas bodies and perceptual or motor systems are mostly irrelevant. 3. Most aspects of social behavior are to be explained by the content and structure of the inner representations (schemas, prototypes, exemplars, etc.) that people construct and on which they draw to perform social judgments and behaviors.

CRITIQUES OF TRADITIONAL ASSUMPTIONS Although these assumptions have been key to rapid conceptual and empirical progress over the last few decades, today they and indeed the basic foundations of the cognitive/computational perspective are coming under question. Two broad trends, although they share little in common conceptually, both endorse this critique. One is a set of views in the social sciences that fall under a “social constructionist” umbrella (Gergen, 1999), including the sociocultural school with its emphasis on the sociohistorical and cultural embeddedness of cognition (e.g., Cole, 1996; Vygotski, 1962/1986; Wertsch, 1994), conversation analysis (Hilton & Slugoski, 2001), discourse analysis (Potter & Wetherell, 1987), and microsociology (Mehan & Wood, 1975). Workers following these approaches have been concerned with the situated features of social interaction, particularly the negotiated emergence of meaning in specific social contexts. They have often been less concerned with wedding these ideas with psychological-level process models. That is, they have remained largely focused on propositional (surface) knowledge and with uncovering “rules” that describe how social reality is constructed. The second movement offering a critique of standard cognitive/computational assumptions has emerged in several areas of the cognitive sciences (including cognitive psychology but also cognitive anthropology, philosophy, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and computer science). This “situated cognition” approach has roots that go back to William James’s motor theory of perception, and Dewey and Mead’s pragmatism. Some of the threads in the newly emerging critique include: 1. Some artificial intelligence researchers, dissatisfied with the limited progress being made by traditional approaches, turned away from high-level cognition (e.g., playing chess) to the perceptual-motor capabilities of lower animals such as insects as inspiration for their work (e.g., Brooks, 1986/1999). This behavior-based robotics approach emphasizes the power of simple inner mechanisms in interaction with real-world environments to generate adaptive behavior, in the absence of sophisticated inner representations of the environment (“world models”). One theme of

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this work is that “the world is its own best model” (Brooks, 1991), so that active perception can substitute for extensive inner representation building. 2. Studies of autonomous agents (physical robots as opposed to agents simulated in computers) have led to an increased understanding of the importance of embodiment for cognition (Wilson, 2002). 3. Developmental psychologists (e.g., Thelen & Smith, 1994) have modeled aspects of infant development in terms of dynamic systems, using concepts such as attractors in state space, and (again) deemphasizing the role of mental representations. 4. Situated cognition researchers study the information-processing loops that connect agent to their environment in immediate interaction, rather than dealing with detached “offline” cognition (e.g., Kirsh & Maglio, 1995). 5. Linguists, particularly Lakoff and Johnson (1999), have extensively explored how metaphors based on bodily actions and spatial relations underlie our understanding even of abstract concepts. Like the social constructionist viewpoints, this intellectual movement emphasizes the situated nature of cognition: its thorough dependence, indeed inseparability from the cultural and situational context, and its inherent entanglement with perception and action. Unlike social constructionism, this movement retains a focus on building process models. Overt behavior is explained not simply by displaying “cultural rules” that govern the behavior, but by constructing models of the interacting internal (psychological) and external (social, contextual) processes that jointly determine the behavior. Still, there is a fundamental departure from the traditional cognitive/computational approach. Most threads in the emerging situated-cognition viewpoint reject the traditional notion of cognition as abstract symbolic computation. Some even argue that we should dispense altogether with such traditionally central concepts as “representation.” Others deny only that representations are necessarily symbolic and textlike in nature, as portrayed by the traditional approach, rather than their very existence (Clark, 1997).

CONGENIALITY OF CRITIQUES TO SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY All of these new lines of thinking have immediate and direct relevance to the core concerns of social psychology. As Smith and Semin (2005) argued, four basic principles of the situated approach are also key principles of social psychology. First, cognition is for action; the purpose of cognition is to guide adaptive action, so it must be understood in relation to action. Social psychologists including Fiske (1992) have strongly endorsed this principle, as we have studied interfaces of cognition and motivation, the ways pragmatic demands (e.g., to make judgments quickly and with little mental effort) shape judgment processes, and the functional role of mental representations such as attitudes in guiding action. These issues link closely to current movements in cognitive

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science such as behavior-based robotics (Brooks, 1986/1999), whose main message is that action is inextricably intertwined with cognition (e.g., actions are often part of the perceptual process), rather than occurring as a separate stage after an extensive inner planning process. Second, cognition is embodied, drawing on our physical bodies and especially our sensorimotor capabilities. Social psychologists study the ways attitudes are linked to bodily actions (e.g., Neumann & Strack, 2000) and how emotions are linked to bodily movements and expressions, as well as the ways affect and cognition are intertwined. The importance of embodiment is also recognized in recent advances in cognitive science, such as Barsalou’s perceptual symbol systems model (1999), in which cognition rests on sensory-motor representations rather than abstract, amodal inner symbols. Third, cognition is situated, occurring in the context of real-world environments and implemented through perception–action loops, as cognitive scientists have forcefully argued (Clancey, 1997; Clark, 1997; Kirsh & Maglio, 1994). Social psychologists make the important point that the relevant environment in which cognition takes place is often social rather than merely physical. That is, cognition occurs in the environment of interpersonal interaction and group discussion, making it reasonable to speak of socially situated cognition (Semin, 2000). Fourth, cognition is distributed spatially and temporally, across tools, people, and groups (Hutchins, 1995). Social psychologists have studied the ways cognition draws on other people and socially defined and constituted knowledge and rules for its content and process There are increasingly articulated social psychological analyses of what it means for cognition to be social, distributed, and shared (Caporael, 1997; Levine, Resnick, & Higgins, 1993; Schwarz, 2000) and what group cognition may entail (e.g., Kerr, Niedermeier, & Kaplan, 2000; Tindale & Kameda, 2000; see, for a general review, Thompson & Fine, 1999). For instance, work on transactive memory systems (Wegner, 1995) shows how memory becomes progressively specialized, socially shared, indexed, and complementary in interdependent groups. Other social psychological research examining how distributed knowledge is utilized has been conducted with decision-making groups (Gigone & Hastie, 1997).

CONCLUSIONS Social psychology and cognitive psychology already have regular interchanges. Probably the majority of the influence has flowed from cognitive to social, in the form of theoretical conceptions of the nature of mental representations and processes (e.g., schemas, exemplars, automatic/controlled processes) and research methods (e.g., process dissociation procedures, response-time measurement). Cognitive psychologists have also begun to recognize the importance of motivation, affect, and social influence in the areas they study, a sign, perhaps, of increasing influence flowing from social to cognitive psychology. However, as cognitive science more generally begins to

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question the cognitive/computational approach, despite the important ways in which social psychology already recognizes and contributes to these four themes, our field has been almost entirely absent from the interdisciplinary mix making these new points. We therefore have much to gain by forming bridges with those in our neighbor disciplines—beyond cognitive psychology—who are working on these themes. And those disciplines will gain as well. Traffic across the bridges will move both ways; social psychology has a wealth of theoretical and conceptual contributions to make to the situated cognition intellectual movement. This will be especially true as the validity of the idea that cognition is socially situated gains increasing recognition.

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Potter, J., & Wetherell, M. (1987). Discourse and social psychology: Beyond attitudes and behavior. London: Sage. Schwarz, N. (2000). Social judgment and attitudes: Warmer, more social, and less conscious. European Journal of Social Psychology, 30, 149–176. Semin, G. R. (2000). Agenda 2000: Communication: Language as an implementational device for cognition. European Journal of Social Psychology, 30, 595–612. Smith, E. R., & Semin, G. R. (2004). The foundations of socially situated action: Socially situated cognition. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 36, 53–117. Thelen, E., & Smith, L. (1994). A dynamic systems approach to the development of cognition and action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thompson, L., & Fine, G. A. (1999). Socially shared cognition, affect, and behavior: A review and integration. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3, 278–302. Tindale, R. S., & Kameda, T. (2000). “Social sharedness” as a unifying theme for information processing in groups. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 3, 123–140. Vera, A., & Simon, H. A. (1993). Situated action: A symbolic interpretation. Cognitive Science, 17, 7–48. Vygotski, L. S. (1986). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Original work published 1962) Wertsch, J. V. (1994). The primacy of mediated action in sociocultural studies. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 4, 202–208. Wegner, D. M. (1995). A computer network model of human transactive memory. Social Cognition, 13, 319–339. Wilson, M. (2002). Six views of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 9, 625–636.

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