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Social Information Processing

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Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences
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Synonyms

Social perception

Definition

Social information processing refers to the sequence of mental mechanisms that occur as humans extract social information (i.e., emotional expressions on faces) from the environment using a series of cognitive systems (e.g., attention, memory). Such systems convert or modify the incoming social information in systematic ways in order to facilitate interpretation and understanding of the social world.

Introduction

What is the process humans use to perceive, interpret, and predict others’ thoughts, intentions, and actions? As humans, we encounter a plethora of social stimuli in our environments every day and utilize a series of highly adaptive systems (i.e., attention, perception, memory) to make sense of the incoming information. Together, these systems systematically alter the information in order to make it interpretable. Ultimately, the aim of using these systems and, more generally, of social information processing is to allow us to make...

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Correspondence to Carlos O. Garrido .

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Garrido, C.O. (2018). Social Information Processing. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1835-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1835-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

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