cognition and learning

Increasing of skills and knowledge and even knowledge of the society cannot be possible without social interactions. That is the basis of the social cognitive theory as it brings together attitudinal and cognitive effects. The major forms of continuous learning are via the environment, the web, media houses and social communications. The intensity of the effect this new knowledge would have on people is dependent on their individual mindsets. Social communication (as earlier stated) is a major way of increasing knowledge and deriving meaning from these. In this handbook, we have given a thorough breakdown of social cognition and the workings of social communication in its various forms. This topic is very useful for schools, service establishments, research institutes, the government, professional training schools, industries and firms among others. Even the military could benefit from this as it has employees who daily apply their cognitive abilities for various uses such as research.

Increasing of skills and knowledge and even knowledge of the society cannot be possible without social interactions. It is normal for humans to create a database of knowledge with details about themselves, their friends, accomplices and preferred social relationships. Social psychology only considers two forms of knowledge as relevant and these are attitudes and schemas (Kihlstrom & Cantor, 2010). As soon as these two knowledge bases are formed, humans are swift to classify situations and other people and do not actually consider if they are beneficial or not, worth pursuing or not and even whether they safe or not. Due to this, we cannot truly discuss the topic of social interaction and behaviour without considering the effect of these two knowledge bases. The difference in the way we read meaning to occurrences around us is based on our social cognition. Thus, it is common for different meanings to be derived by different people from similar occurrences, a pleasant phenomenon but one which is also the root cause of strife and anger. Social scientists have taken it upon themselves to identify the factors guiding human interpretation of events and surroundings and also, the reasons they attach to the actions of others.

Figure 1. Two functions of social interaction (adopted from Kreijns, Kirschner & Jochems, 2003)

The intensity of social communication among individuals is dependent on several factors. Some of these are their social companions, their social skills, the situations that draw their attention, the general social landscape, their wealth of knowledge about themselves, their mode of classifying occurrences and lastly the laid down guidelines which governs the different sectors of social relationships. Socialization is a physical act however the basic systems by which a person gets adequate familiarization of the social landscape and how he should relate with it are more mental and this is shown in Figure 1. These systems do not truly define a person's character in a situation similar to that of the conventional personality beliefs. Thus, cognition is perhaps the most important tool in discerning how an individual would initially react to an event and later respond to it (Kihlstrom & Cantor, 2010). It is also important in becoming familiar with character traits of people as well as their common mindsets.

Cognitive development has a major driving force which is social communication. Educational studies have proved that scholars who work in groups are able to solve harder and more mental-demanding problems when compared to those who prefer to study by themselves (Clements & Nastasi, 1992). Whenever people carry out an act called reciprocal sense-making, they apply the tool of discussion in trying to find solutions, create processes or make sense of a situation. For students to apply this, they have to merge their ideas, efforts and actions together with others as doing differently i.e. Working alone will obstruct this social process causing it to become less productive and it leads to a much less cognitive development. These claims have been backed by several studies where experiments with students arranged into groups and made to work together gave much better learning experience, mental development and problem-solving abilities when compared to students made to work singly and individually try to win a prize (Clements & Nastasi, 1992; Mackie & Hamilton, 2014).

Figure 2. Social interactions and their potential.