Social cognition is a topic within psychology that 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 social interactions.

More technically, social cognition refers to how people deal with conspecifics (members of the same species) or even across species (such as pet) information, include four stages: encoding, storage, retrieval, and processing. In the area of social psychology, social cognition refers to a specific approach in which these processes are studied according to the methods of cognitive psychology and information processing theory. According to this view, social cognition is a level of analysis that aims to understand social psychological phenomena by investigating the cognitive processes that underlie them. The major concerns of the approach are the processes involved in the perception, judgment, and memory of social stimuli; the effects of social and affective factors on information processing; and the behavioral and interpersonal consequences of cognitive processes. This level of analysis may be applied to any content area within social psychology, including research on intrapersonal, interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup processes.

The term social cognition has been used in multiple areas in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, most often to refer to various social abilities disrupted in autism, schizophrenia and psychopathy. In cognitive neuroscience the biological basis of social cognition is investigated. Developmental psychologists study the development of social cognition abilities.

Social cognition came to prominence with the rise of cognitive psychology in the late 1960s and early 1970s and is now the dominant model and approach in mainstream social psychology. Common to social cognition theories is the idea that information is represented in the brain as "cognitive elements" such as schemas, attributions, or stereotypes. A focus on how these cognitive elements are processed is often employed. Social cognition therefore applies and extends many themes, theories, and paradigms from cognitive psychology that can be identified in reasoning (representativeness heuristic, base rate fallacy and confirmation bias), attention (automaticity and priming) and memory (schemas, primacy and recency). It is likely that social psychology has always had a more cognitive than general psychology approach, as it traditionally discussed internal mental states such as beliefs and desires when mainstream psychology was dominated by behaviorism.

It has been suggested that other disciplines in social psychology such as social identity theory and social representations may be seeking to explain largely the same phenomena as social cognition, and that these different disciplines might be merged into a "coherent integrated whole". A parallel paradigm has arisen in the study of action, termed motor cognition, which is concerned with understanding the representation of action and the associated process.

According to the received view in cognitive sciences, the development of the human ability to process, store, and apply information about others begins in social learning at the onset of life. Very young organisms cognize social situations in social interaction with their caregivers when knowledge is developing yet limited. The essential question in studying Social cognition is how this ability appears and what neurophysiological processes underlie it in organisms in the sensorimotor stage of development with only simple reflexes which do not maintain bilateral communication. Professor Michael Tomasello introduced the psychological construct of shared intentionality to explain cognition beginning in the earlier developmental stage through unaware collaboration in mother-child dyads. Other researchers developed the notion, by observing this collaborative interaction from different perspectives, e.g., psychophysiology, and neurobiology.

Currently, only one hypothesis attempts to explain neurophysiological processes occurring during shared intentionality in all its integral complexity, from the level of interpersonal dynamics to interaction at the neuronal level. By establishing the neurophysiological hypothesis of shared intentionality, Latvian Prof. Igor Val Danilov expanded the use of the term shared intentionality to include consideration of the interaction between an embryo and her mother. From this perspective, abilities to process, store, and apply information about others develop from the prenatal period. This insight continues the reflections of great thinkers (e.g., Kant) and leading child development theorists (beginning from Montessori and Vygotsky) about the beginning of cognition in interactions with the environment. Based on experimental data from research on child behavior in the prenatal period, and advances in inter-brain neuroscience research, this neurophysiological hypothesis introduced the notion of non-local neuronal coupling of the mother and fetus neuronal networks. The notion of non-local neuronal coupling filled a gap in knowledge – both in the Core Knowledge Theory and the group of positions in Externalism – about the beginning of cognition, the gap that the binding problem has also shown. This insight also shed light on neurophysiological processes that underlie the human ability to process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations beginning from the reflexes stage of development, when even aware goal-directed behavior is questioned. While exactly due to the ability of shared intentionality, very young babies express social behavior. This ability manifests in recognizing and selectively responding to social stimuli. From this perspective, Social cognition contributes to cognitive development of newborns and even embryos when communication is still impossible. A development of the human ability to process, store, and apply information about others begins in the prenatal period.

One theory of social cognition is social schema theory, although it is not the basis of all social cognition studies (for example, see attribution theory). Social schema theory builds on and uses terminology from schema theory in cognitive psychology, which describes how ideas or "concepts" are represented in the mind and how they are categorized. According to this view, when we see or think of a concept a mental representation or schema is "activated" bringing to mind other information which is linked to the original concept by association. This activation often happens unconsciously. As a result of activating such schemas, judgements are formed which go beyond the information actually available, since many of the associations the schema evokes extend outside the given information. This may influence social cognition and behaviour regardless of whether these judgements are accurate or not. For example, if an individual is introduced as a teacher, then a "teacher schema" may be activated. Subsequently, we might associate this person with wisdom or authority, or past experiences of teachers that we remember and consider important.