Situated social cognition

ABSTRACT—Social cognition refers to the mental repre-sentations and processes that underlie social judgments and behavior—for example, the application of stereotypes to members of social groups. Theories of social cognition have generally assumed that mental representations are abstract and stable and that they are activated and applied by relatively automatic, context-independent processes. Recent evidence is inconsistent with these expectations, however. Social-cognitive processes have been shown to be adaptive to the perceiver’s current social goals, commu-nicative contexts, and bodily states. Although these find-ings can often be given ad hoc explanations within current conceptual frameworks, they invite a fuller integration with the broad intellectual movement emphasizing situated cognition. Such an approach has already been influentia