The human capacities that can assist an individual to maintain and enhance his or her life include the person’s feelings, interaction, and thought processes. In the light of the need to compare and contrast the relationship between cognition and behavior as applied to social psychology, it is essential to define the two terms. According to Hayes (2013), social cognition relates to the social activities of individuals that enable them to understand their behavior and the behavior of others. Conversely, social behavior focuses on the interaction among individuals. Human interactions would allow individuals to cooperate and gain outcomes that they can otherwise not obtain on their own (Weiner, 2013). The interactions occur when individuals exchange goods, services, including other benefits with others.
Cognition and behavior are branches of psychology that attempt to explain the behavior of individuals. The fundamental presumption of cognitive psychology is that people can be able to process and organize information in their minds (Gentner & Goldin-Meadow, 2003). For this reason, the cognition of an individual is not concerned with other people’s visible behavior. Instead, cognition focuses on the thought processes behind people’s behavior, which is an indication that cognition, as applicable to social psychology tries to understand concepts such as decision-making as well as memory. On the contrary, behavior in social psychology is concerned with observable behavior. The primary assumption is that individuals learn by associating themselves with certain events and the attached consequences, meaning that a person is likely to act based on the desirability of the associated consequences (Hayes, 2013). In this regard, individuals behave according to their self-concern, but other external concerns also temper their behavior.
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Professionals interested in researching people’s cognitive processes are likely to use cognition and behavior to conduct their experiments. In this case, the researchers are likely to explore both views, in spite of their stark differences, to come up with a common ground that can assist in advancing studies and possible treatments of the mind. The cognition and behavioral perspectives provide researchers with different views regarding the manner in which human behavior could be understood (Weiner, 2013). For instance, humanist psychologists might embrace a holistic approach that factors in the differences exhibited in cognition and behavior to stress on the desire of self-actualization. The reason for embracing the different ideas might be a derivative of the significant contributions made from the views on cognition and behavior as applied to social psychology.
The comparison between cognition and behavior in social psychology could be used to determine the behavior and thoughts of individuals in a given social situation. Even though the capacities of the theories are discussed separately, they can work together for the production of human behavior since the thought processes on the individuals and their outward behavior can be used together to assist in the creation of successful social interactions. Cognition and behavior can assist social psychologists to understand and predict the social behavior of individuals. Since studies on the social behavior of individuals go beyond merely observing the manner in which they behave, understanding their social cognition is fundamental (Chirkov, 2015). The understanding can be obtained through the implementation of a systematic scientific approach since understanding social behavior is a consideration that should be based on the collection as well as the systematic analysis of observable data.
References
Chirkov, V. (2015). Fundamentals of Research on Culture and Psychology: Theory and Methods. Routledge.
Gentner, D., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2003). Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought . Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press.
Hayes, N. (2013). Principles of Social Psychology. Psychology Press.
Weiner, I. B. (2013). Handbook of psychology . Hoboken: J. Wiley.
