This chapter has described four basic themes of the socially situated cognition approach, which we have argued are equally basic to social psychology's unique conceptual focus as a field. To a large extent, social psychology recognizes that cognition-including the formation of attitudes, stereotypes, person impressions, and other inner representations-is essentially for action. Our field has recognized the importance of embodiment, the role of bodily states (such as emotion and motivation) in cognition and the reciprocal influences between bodily movements and judgments (as when putting on a facial expression resembling a smile causes people to judge that cartoons are especially funny). The situated nature of cognition is also a major theme of social psychology; Asch, Sherif, Milgram, and other researchers intuitively grasped the power of social situations to control action, generating behavior that would not have been predicted from an abstracted (nonsituated) inventory of their participants' beliefs, values, and attitudes. Finally, the distributed nature of cognition, and the importance of shared reality when people interact in dyads, groups, or larger cultural communities, is also a significant area of ongoing social psychological investigation. However, despite its general compatibility with social psychological theories and perspectives, the SSC perspective calls for some shifts of conceptual focus and of research methodology for our field. Social psychology has not yet fully appreciated the implications of the shift from computation to biology as a metaphor and framework for understanding cognition (Barsalou, 1999a, p. 77; Caporael, 1997; Fiske, 1992). Psychologists implicitly adopt a computational perspective when they try to explain social behavior (or any other kind) solely on the basis of the agent's inner representations, processes, beliefs, and goals, through the conceptual lens of information processing. As an alternative, the biological perspective carries the insight that cognition is for action, and that embodiment and the situated nature of adaptive action are crucial constraints. We have noted ways that the four themes of action-orientation, embodiment, situatedness, and distributed cognition-suggest further areas for conceptual and empirical exploration, areas that are intrinsically social psychological in terms of the definition of our field but that we have barely begun to explore. These explorations are important, for as we have implied, the field of social psychology can almost be defined as the study of socially situated cognition. Or, in other words, the socially situated cognition perspective selects social psychology as the central standpoint from which the entire body of the cognitive sciences makes conceptual sense. Most if not all of human cognition is social, for we are intrinsically interdependent agents, who rely on other people, use tools such as language, and make use of cognitive abilities shaped through evolution in social contexts (Caporael, 1997). As Clancey (1997a, p. 366) stated, the "overarching content of thought is not scientific models [descriptions, symbolic representations of states of the world], but coordination of an identity" in a social context. Although social psychologists have already investigated much of this territory, we have done so without an overall map. The socially situated cognition perspective can put these seemingly disparate areas of study into conceptual relationship to each other. The approach will also help researchers in adjoining areas-cognitive scientists, cognitive and developmental psychologists, and the like-understand why social psychology is important, even central to the analysis of all human behavior. © 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
