Social cognitive perspective

Starting in the 1930s, Kurt Lewin proposed a social cognitive perspective through which personal attention to and interpretation of events drives social behavior. Through Lewin’s view, individual behavior is a function of the individual in the environment, as represented by the formula, B=ƒ(P, E) (1951). For example, individual traits interact with the environment to influence behavior at work, making job behavior a consequence of the person and the situation. Here lies a vital differentiation from the social-cognitive perspective. The sociocultural, evolutionary, and social learning perspectives assume an objective reality. The social-cognitive view sees reality as an individual construct, a dynamic interaction between inner experience and the outside world.

Proposing that individuals create their own reality does not mean that objective reality does not exist. Instead, Lewin emphasized that the individual’s perception of events and the individual’s goals drive individual behavior in social settings. In other words, the groups with which the individual associates influence the individual’s thoughts and actions.

The interaction between inner experience and the outside world means a close connection between social psychology and cognitive psychology (Kenrick, Neuberg, & Cialdini, 2007). Emphasizing the “socially structured mind” (Turner & Penelope, 1997, p. 355), this approach explores the connection between society and cognition, paying particular attention to how individuals select, interpret, and remember events. A problem here is that people have limited capacity to process social information, so they base social decisions on superficial detail that can lead to bad actions. Another problem is that people have difficulty being objective about social information and tend to process only the information that portrays them positively (Kenrick, Neuberg, & Cialdini, 2007).

Researchers typically use quantitative research in controlled environments to test a theory-based hypothesis using statistical techniques. The laboratory is the primary place for conducting social cognitive research. However, researchers in this area also conduct field research using surveys, questionnaires, case studies, and observation. Because the psychological processes that create an individual’s reality occur within that individual, the individual is the primary analysis unit.

Still, social cognitive researchers study how the social context influences individual psychology by exploring the group relationships and social structures that interact with the individual to influence psychological processes. Researchers in this field focus on the interactions between people to determine how the context affects individual behavior; how society structures the individual mind.