The traditional way to study thinking in humans is to investigate cognitive processes in single individuals. The positions
laid out in this chapter, by contrast, regard social interaction as the default context within which cognition occurs. The
chapter introduces and discusses the theoretical background as well as relevant empirical findings of three approaches that
aim at exploring how cognition emerges through and is shaped by social context: 1) Distributed and embodied cognition approaches
stress how cognition is inherent in entire socio-technical systems and arises in close interactions between individuals and
the environment. 2) Evolutionary and cultural frameworks highlight the role of social interaction in the phylo- and ontogenetic
development of higher cognitive functions. 3) Ideomotor approaches postulate close perception-action links and emphasize the
contribution of these links for the understanding of other individuals’ actions and intentions, implying that perception and
action are social by nature. Taken together, the research reviewed in this chapter suggests that respecting the social nature
of human cognition will foster a better understanding of individual thinking.
Human cognition is typically studied by focusing on cognitive and brain processes within single minds. For instance, aspects
of memory are studied by asking individuals to learn and retrieve lists of words, and processes of action planning and control
are studied by asking participants to perform reaction time tasks. In this chapter, we consider what can be gained by “socializing
cognition”; taking into account the social context in which cognition occurs, considering the role of evolutionary and cultural
forces, and exploring the functionality of perception-action links.
The approaches we are going to describe have in common that they regard social interaction as a sort of default situation
in which cognition occurs. The focus is not on the individual’s processing of social information, which constitutes a core
theme in social cognition research (Smith and Mackie 2001). Rather, the motivation behind these approaches is to explore how
cognition emerges through social context and is shaped by it, be it phylogenetically, ontogenetically, or in ongoing interactions.
Two relatively recent theoretical advances have fuelled cognitive scientists’ renewed interest in the mind’s connection to
its social surroundings. On the one hand, a growing trend towards embodiment emphasizes the role of close interactions between
individuals and the environment (Clark 1997). Although there are different notions of embodiment (Wilson 2002), the central claim is that cognition cannot be understood without taking into account the constraints arising when we act
in the world in real time. Cognition, according to this approach, needs to be understood in terms of how it contributes to
situation-appropriate behavior (Clark 1999). Moreover, not only does the mind serve the body, but also do body and environment serve the mind, for example in the representation
and performance of abstract mental tasks (Wilson 2002). In this view, perception, cognition, and action are no longer considered distinct and disconnected, but rather closely
interlinked processes that mutually involve each other. This brings about a new point of view: Individual cognition is grounded
in the constant interaction of the individual with its environment as well as with other individuals.
Furthermore, evidence in favor of a common system for planning and performing one’s own actions and perceiving others’ actions
(Prinz 1997) has given new impetus to social views on cognition. Activation in the same brain areas when we plan and perform
an action as well as when we observe another’s action provides evidence for a direct, nonverbal link between people that may
support action understanding (Rizolatti and Craighero 2004). The discovery of such perception-action links provides a powerful
basis for the investigation of how we understand and anticipate other individuals’ actions. Although there is a danger in
overestimating what can be achieved through this basic matching principle, it is clear that functionally equivalent representations
for self and other provide a crucial platform for integrating the actions of self and other during social interaction. Furthermore,
close perception-action links in macaques, as supported by the discovery of mirror neurons that fire during performance and
observation of object-directed actions, raise new questions about the evolutionary roots of our cognitive system.
In the following sections, we will discuss three kinds of approaches that argue for socializing cognition either by distributing
cognitive processes across individuals and the environment, by focusing on evolution and culture as shaping forces, or by
exploring the functionality of common representations in perception and action.