社會認知是心理學各分支的一個分支，它關注的是人們如何處理、存儲和應用關于他人和社會情境的信息。它關注的是認知過程在社會互動中的作用更嚴格地說，社會認知指的是人們如何處理同種(同種成員)甚至跨物種(如寵物)的信息，包括四個階段:編碼、存儲、檢索和處理。在社會心理學領域，社會認知是指運用認知心理學方法和信息加工理論對這些過程進行研究的一種具體方法。根據這一觀點，社會認知是一個層次的分析，目的是通過調查社會心理現象背后的認知過程來了解社會心理現象。該方法的主要關注點是涉及社會刺激的感知、判斷和記憶的過程;社會和情感因素對信息加工的影響以及認知過程對行為和人際關系的影響。這種層次的分析可以應用于社會心理學的任何內容領域，包括對個人內部、人際關系、團隊內部和群體間過程的研究。“社會認知”一詞已在心理學和認知神經科學的多個領域得到應用，最常指自閉癥、[3]型精神分裂癥和其他疾病中被破壞的各種社會能力。認知神經科學研究了社會認知的生物學基礎。發展心理學家研究社會認知能力的發展

Social cognition is a sub-topic of various branches of 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.[1]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.[2] 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,[3] schizophrenia[4] and other disorders.[5] In cognitive neuroscience the biological basis of social cognition is investigated.[6][7][8] Developmental psychologists study the development of social cognition abilities.[9]