Abstract
Day-to-day life presents us with numerous new experiences and exposure to different people, with social functioning being a major portion of one's living days. The theory of mind, a mental map of an individual in automating behaviour, is a process and product of one's social cognitions. There are evident changes across generations in terms of these cognitions and social processing, hence showing need for understanding the theory of mind of different generations, breaking it down into its component parts. The present study was conducted to understand the components of the theory of mind in relation to social functioning. Sixty-three participants across three different generations, Generation X, Millennials, and Generation Z, were subjected to focused group discussions and the collected data analysed using a grounded theory approach. The analysis identified five components of the theory of mind applicable to all generations: social perception, social judgment, people perception, people preference, and social categorisation.
TopSocial Cognition
Social cognition is a method of interpreting information about people in social contexts, and maintaining a behavior appropriate to the interpretation. The process of cognition completely relies on this perception and the way individuals perceive the related cues. The processing of social information involves reasoning about others thoughts, emotions and intentions through conscious and controlled mechanisms. People also acquire knowledge about social-oriented concepts and consequences of a behavior, the sensation of which are perceived and decisions made correspondingly (Frith & Blakemore, 2006).
Understanding and predicting behaviour of others certainly involves attribution and inferring their feelings, intentions and beliefs from observable cues conveyed through human action, motion and facial expressions (Schaafsma et al., 2015). The acquisition of social cognition can also occur through social interactions, which are primarily influenced by our expectations of other individuals, the roles they play in particular situations, the norms that govern their behavior, and the likely outcomes and actions in the scenario. One’s prior experiences and knowledge about individuals, customs, and comparable events serve as the foundation for these expectations. Individuals always do not perceive the objective reality, but instead make sense of the mental representations of the objects and people they encounter (Carlston, 2013; Fiske and Taylor, 2013). This occurs because people are not always capable of processing all information that is available to them.
Person Perception
Person Perception refers to the what and how of our relationship with others, in terms of the factors that impress us about an individual. It is a form of mental process which determines the intentions and behaviours of others. Also called ‘People perception’, it relates to the way we tend to perceive other people by our own conclusions about them. It is a kind of a biased stereotype based on our judgments about the other person, purely subjective and varied by a number of different confounding variables such as the situation, personality, observation and past experiences.
A person's perception has its social implications according to the context, leading to an array of other processes of social cognition (Bartholow & Dickter, 2011). Individuals frequently create fast judgments about other people based on scanty information. Our perceptions of others are often shaped by the roles and societal conventions that we hold on to. In addition, physical cues might also be quite significant. We usually pay more attention to the most obvious details rather than taking note of background information. For example, if a lady is wearing a professional suit, one would conclude that she works in a formal workplace, such as a bank or law company.
More specifically, Jones (1990) described how people come to understand what makes a particular person-including ourselves behave in particular ways. People seem innately driven to make such determinations. When we perceive a person, we draw conclusions about him or her, often rapidly and automatically, and rarely thoughtfully and carefully. These perceptions and judgments we have made of them will determine the future predictions we make of them and it would also influence how our further perceptions of them would be, shaded by our conclusion of the person.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Social Cognition: The cognitive processes employed in estimating others and judging them based on the values and morals one holds as an individual.
Theory of Mind: A set pattern developed as a product of multiple factors inclusive of individual and environmental determinants, which will continuously evolve and will determine the social functioning of the individual.
Social Judgment: People's judgement of an individual, followed by an accommodation or assimilation to previous knowledge, based on information obtained about the person, which will further the perception about the person.
Social Perception: The sensation, organisation, and processing of information about the person being observed in a social context.
Social Categorisation: The different categorisations of individuals formed by the perceiver, for their ease of managing relationships and their social needs. It is done based on features that the perceiver deems fit or unfit for a person of a particular caliber using which the individual further defines the role the person would play in their life.