2.3. Social Cognition

What we should remember:

⮚ The Agora model is a Bildungsmodel. It categorises the buildings in our world, teaching us there are only eight types of buildings. These buildings come back in any place at any time and give us a perfect starting point to develop our young people into all-around, engaged and committed citizens. ⮚ The eight buildings are called spheres. There are four living spheres (public, private, political and privatised) and four training spheres (art, sport, religion and philosophy). ⮚ The Agora model and the eight different spheres give us a starting point from which we can look at the roles we (can) play in life and the places where we train ourselves to adapt and become successful within those roles. ⮚ Young people in our target group often have bad experiences within the spheres they ought to engage in successfully (especially concerning work or privatised spheres, and school or philosophical spheres). ⮚ Within these two spheres, this project looks for tools, methods, and examples of best practices from cultural and physical training programmes that we can then apply and adapt to motivate and engage young people from a different perspective.

2.3. Social Cognition What Is Social Cognition?

Social cognition focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in our social interactions(Cherry, 2020). The way we think about others plays a major role in how we think, feel, and interact with the world around us. It involves: ● The processes involved in perceiving other people and how we come to know about the people in the world around us. ● The study of the mental processes that are involved in perceiving, remembering, thinking about, and attending to the other people in our social world. ● The reasons we attend to certain information about the social world, how this information is stored in memory, and how it is then used to interact with other people.

Development

Social cognition develops in childhood and adolescence. As children grow, they become more aware not only of their own feelings, thoughts, and motives but also of the emotions and mental states of others. Children become more adept at understanding how others feel, learning how to respond in social situations, engaging in prosocial behaviours, and taking the perspective of others. While there are many different theories that look at how social cognition develops, one of the most popular focuses on the work of the psychologist Jean Piaget(1952; 1959). According to Piaget, a child's cognitive development goes through a series of stages. During the earliest stages of development, children are very egocentric. They see the world from their own perspective and struggle to think about how other 10

people may view the world (Piaget, 2015). As children grow older, children become increasingly adept at perspective-taking and have an increased ability to think about how and why people act the way they do in social situations. More recently, research has provided evidence that children develop the ability to think about the perspectives of other people at an earlier age than Piaget previously believed. Even young pre-schoolers exhibit some ability to think about how other people might view a situation. One of the most important developments in the early emergence of social cognition is the growth of a theory of mind. A theory of mind refers to a person's ability to understand and think about the mental states of other people. It is the emergence of a theory of mind that is critical to being able to consider the thoughts, motives, desires, needs, feelings, and experiences that other people may have. Being able to think about how these mental states can influence how people act is critical to forming social impressions and explaining how and why people do the things thatthey do.

Cultural differences

Social psychologists have also found that there are often important cultural differences in social cognition. When looking at a social situation, any two people may have wildly different interpretations. Each person brings a unique background of experiences, knowledge, social influences, feelings, and cultural variations. Some researchers have found that there are also collective, cultural influences that can affect how people interpret social situations. The same social behaviour in one cultural setting may have a very different meaning and interpretation if it was to take place or be observed in another culture. As people interpret behaviour, extract meaning from the interaction, and then act based upon their beliefs about the situation, they are then further reinforcing and reproducing the cultural norms that influence their social cognitions.

Important questions to consider in our contact with others

● How do we develop attitudes? What role do these attitudes play in our social lives? ● How do we interpret other people's feelings and emotions? How do we figure out what they are thinking or feeling? What cues or indicators do we use to make these assumptions? ● How is self-concept formed and how does it influence our relationshipswith others? ● What influence do our thoughts have on our feelings? ● What mental processes influence ourperception;how do we form impressions of other people?

11