Interactions with other people is one of the activities for us in our daily life.
For such interactions to be successfully happens, we must able to predict and understand the action of others in terms of minds. Thus, social cognition is the cognitive processes in our social interactions, i.e; how we define ourselves and how we think about people. Social cognition is associated with the integrity of interrelated brain systems for accurate perception and interpretation of the behaviors of others and the effective emotional and behavioral response to those behaviors (Holdnack, 2013).We want to reiterate what we stated earlier: The two major sources of construals we have emphasized here—the need to maintain a positive view of ourselves (the self-esteem approach) and the need to view the world accurately (the social cognition approach)—are the most important of our social motives, but they are certainly not the only motives influencing people’s thoughts and behaviors. Still another significant motive is the need for control.
Research has shown that people need to feel they exert some control over their environment (Langer, 1975; Taylor, 1989; Thompson, 1981). When people experience a loss of control, such that they believe they have little or no influence over whether good or bad things happen to them, there are a number of important consequences; we will discuss these further along in this book.
